Under the Influence: Taylor Swift and her ‘reputation’

Through her ever-evolving songwriting, Taylor Swift always manages to get the last word. A feeling strikes a chord, a lover wrongs her, a fellow star ignites a feud, the media portrays her unfavorably; to virtually everything significant in her life, Swift carefully crafts and releases a musical response, regardless of the months or even years that have passed since the heat of that moment. Not only do her words from album Red, “The girl in the dress wrote you a song/You should’ve known,” still ring true, but it is probably most salient on Reputation that her songs are magnifying glasses, attempting to expose and dismantle some listener or another.

Three years ago, when Swift made her transition from country to mainstream pop, it seemed pragmatic to draw from a decade that left a real imprint on the female pop music psyche, with icons like Madonna and songs like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. Grammy-winning 1989, with Swift’s breathy belt and persona of semi-anachronistic ingénue sporting “that red lip classic thing that you like”, was a polished, cohesive album that shared little in common with the rest of mainstream pop. Sonically, the album was surprisingly sparse: Track “Blank Space” relied almost exclusively on 80s synth bass and layered vocals, and tracks “Style” and “Out of the Woods” garnered appeal from simple repeated-note melodies. The clever simplicity and singular genre focus of 1989 now feel, in the wake of Reputation’s release, as dead and gone as the old Taylor, who can’t come to the phone right now.

Similarly, Reputation draws from the recent past, but this influence, meant to propel Swift into the mainstream pop world, instead makes some of her newest music sound unfashionably late to the party. In some cases, Swift is transparent in her allusions: First single off the album “Look What You Made Me Do” interpolates rhythmic elements from Right Said Fred’s 1991 dance-pop hit “I’m Too Sexy” (and to their surprise, the three band members actually received songwriting credit). In other songs, her musical quotes are subtler, most noticeably the opening grinding synth in “…Ready for It?” that ironically sounds like the one in nemesis Kanye West’s 2013 song “I’m In It”. Outside of specific borrowings, Swift and producers Max Martin, Shellback, and Jack Antonoff weave together sounds and tropes from various EDM genres, dubstep and trap to name a few, with R&B/hip-hop-style vocals and percussion. She even lightly raps on the truly bizarre “End Game” alongside Future and Ed Sheeran. Across the album, we hear bars of music that could be on a Flume album, an FKA Twigs song, or a Halsey record.

Pop is about reinvention, and there are numerous pop artists whose careers have been built on the ability to redefine their sound and recreate their persona. In this sense, perhaps Swift is the craftiest of all, ultimately arriving where she has from her 12-string guitar-based country ballads. In fifteen tracks, she completely disassembles herself and redefines what a Taylor Swift song is, on both her own terms and those of today’s pop musicians. She is undeniably versatile: She can transform fragments from other genres and coherently piece them together under her own branding. Needless to say, Reputation’s strong points don’t necessarily utilize the techniques that have traditionally played to her strengths. New attention is paid to the inflection and cadence of her voice, rather than to contours of melody, namely her shuddering falsetto on “Dress” and the delightfully haunting Gospel-style choirs on “Don’t Blame Me”. Rhythmical flow becomes essential, while guitars fade to the background, if present at all. Swift proves herself adept at both creating her own unique sound and refining sounds of everyone else around her.

While Reputation is, in a few ways, impressive, there arises a question of whether Swift has authority to borrow so freely. In this era where, as Forbes points out, R&B/hip-hop now reigns as the most consumed music genre in the U.S., traditionally white mainstream popstars attempt to stay relevant by clumsily trying on black musical culture for size, then discarding it when accused of appropriation (cue Miley Cyrus). Reputation epitomizes an interestingly vulnerable snapshot in time for traditional pop. As typical, Swift attempts to weigh her magnifying glass in on her peers, but her work inadvertently opens an elucidating door in onto herself and the pop genre. As stated already, it is glaringly obvious that her album is speckled with musical styles that have not historically been her own.

While Swift has recurrently sung loudly and proudly about her perceived victimization across various contexts, she has been eerily silent when faced with choruses of backlash accusing her of racial insensitivity. Critics have looked to various music videos, public comments, and interactions with peers. Many have labeled her a “white feminist”, as she repeatedly has failed to acknowledge race-based injustices that nonwhite musicians, especially female ones, experience in the struggle to receive critical acclaim for their art. She does not appear to be intentionally malicious, but missteps in the way she presents herself, and a failure to recognize her own privilege, make her use of traditionally African-American practices controversial. It begs the question of whether Reputation, at its high points, simply makes good use of R&B techniques, or, if its creator is exploiting the musical language of individuals for whom she has failed to show sufficient support.

It also is not only in sound that we perceive change: We behold a new Swift in the content of her lyrics. She voices lines like, “Third floor on the West Side, me and you/Handsome, your mansion with a view” and “Jumping to the pool from the balcony/Everyone swimming in a champagne sea,” with less irony than on the tongue-in-cheek satire “Blank Space”. For the first time, Swift uses profanity, mentions of alcohol are at a record high, and, sadly, much of her poetry is surprisingly generic (see “Gorgeous”) given her obvious talent. Gone is the girl who sits on the bleachers alone and doesn’t get asked to the school dance. In her place is a woman who has become a product of her milieu, now articulating herself through the imagery that mainstream music uses to teach audiences about being a twenty-something-year-old in the 2010s. The diaristic, dense narratives that helped to create Swift’s platinum reputation scarcely make an appearance on this album—except in the vivid and glittering “Getaway Car”, which sounds like a reprise to “Out of the Woods”. Aside from similar brief retreads, the back-of-a-truck love stories and moonlit bucolic scenes are replaced by scenes of spilling red wine in the bathtub and lavish merrymaking of Gatsby-sized proportion.

Reputation is punctuated by two considerably more contemplative tracks: fourth single off the album “Call It What You Want” and “New Years Day”, the LP’s sole ballad. In the former’s lyrics, Swift acknowledges her shortcomings and recognizes what she values most, through well-crafted metaphors that also contain some literal truth. The track’s synth bass and percussion aren’t overcompensating for Swift’s lack of experience in this genre, as they are in “I Did Something Bad”, “So It Goes…”, and “King of My Heart”. Also, interestingly, her first live performance of this song, on Saturday Night Live, included guitar and cello strings, and thus perhaps constructed a bridge between former and current Swift. “New Years Day” contains the kind of poetry for which Swift has been applauded: With only a few imagistic lines, she conjures up an intimate scene between the narrator and a lover, easily conveying the powerful quiet of such a moment.

All in all, Swift unloads on us a voluminous, sparkling monster of an album after months of silence. And while Reputation answers many of the questions we’ve desperately wanted to ask, it sparks even more inquiries on the nature of its significance: Where will Taylor Swift go from here?