Review Summary: How much do you care about bad reputation?
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Taylor Swift's sixth studio album Reputation was supposed to be a triumph, a record that confirmed her legacy as pop's reigning icon, while serving truculent “Look What You Made Me Do” as lead single for her expected comeback that proved her crossover status was every bit as potent as that of her arch-rival Katy Perry. Instead, Reputation prescribed to be a tameless force of nature – the modern music counterpart of Hurricane Katrina.
I don't think there's a single artist out there who's purposely putting out something inferior. The point is, everyone gives it their best shot each time they make an album. Reputation is no different in that respect – you just have to dig a little deeper to find the intent. It may not have the surface-level, virtuosic flourishes we've come to expect, but it does have something else.
Sure, electronic music is based on subtly augmented repetition. But where’s the rise and the dusk here? “Look What You Made Me Do” trips over a lethargical back-beat with repeated phrases like “i don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me”, never stepping out of its simple groove. Track is replete with wiry, frightening guitar strings shaded by unbroken quotidian drones, and panned glitches and flickers that push the piece into icky meters. This is cavitation blotting out the form, a sheet of tentative and trite elements smothered in common sound. Likewise, “…Ready for It?” is constrained-in-the- electricity traffic, playing Pendulum’s wreck mark without the swagger. “But if he's a ghost then I can be a phantom / Holdin' him for ransom”. Imagine that repeated crime reports to a prepubescent guitar stroke and you get unintenional laughter.
“King of My Heart“ is summery late '80's garish discoteque anthem, which could come straight out of a overdramatic heartbreak moment in a underwhelming click flick. Predictable – and predictably tedious – Ed Sheeran/Future collaboration “End Game” met least convincing artist's direction on Reputation: slothful, swirling, based on clichéd hard-draving hook with just enough beats to make it seem fresh.
Ultimately, the record runs too long, losing steam halfway through, as it turns to a series of starving moments like “Delicate” or a elusively pursuit of uncomfortably confidence tracks “Don't Blame Me” or when she claimes that she can't move to another state of private life by herself on empowerment “So It Goes...”. The hardest thing about another busy tune, Jepsen's styled “Gorgeous”, is listening to it all the way through. You may think it's the artistic challenge that makes Swift team up with Max Martin, respectively, or do you think it's just blind commercial ambition? It's precisely the thinking that makes pop seem so calculated today. Whatever, the overwrought party banger is all but unlistenable.
Oddly enough though, Swift conclusively wanted to save her weakest songs for the end, fading with the translucent tandem “This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things” and “New Year's Day”. Both are big drops to the emptiness sonically, to tell of sagging loves and the impossibility of human connection. Not content to rely on repetition for affect any longer, Swift blures her voice to steamy compositions, something that seems impossibly difficult for potential listeners. A midnight-oil slick, cut on utterly bland beats and distressed synths, she invokes the heaving drudgery of love in the cold that those she apes mastered so long ago.
Fittingly, 1989 was one of 2014’s most polarizing pop releases, warmed by glowing reviews, but lampooned elsewhere for its disruptive mainstream direction. It was a hit. Now, here we are, three years later. I’d like to say the follow-up, Reputation, won’t receive the same treat of public acclaim, but all the benchmarks are there. Obscure basslines, ice-bleary synth washes, and sunless-fused guitar lines again serve as her new trademarks, and Swift has yet to shed her reliance on preset tuneless-lines to offset the lumpen beats. She may seem a bit more comfortable with message of the songs, but actually almost every piece of lyrics have waned with emotional pettiness and entire vacantness. The implication is obvious, right?
