Taylor in love (with the trends)
Newest offering from pop superstar is too polished and up-to-the-minute to be very distinctive, especially after its overblown press coverage
Reputation K (out of 4) By Taylor Swift (Big Machine/Universal) Remember, everyone: it’s just a pop album.
It’s a good one, as Taylor Swift albums generally tend to be. But, at the end of the day, Reputation is still just a pop album. We’re not standing at a turning point in music history here, folks, we’re merely witnessing a talented, charismatic and endlessly shrewd entertainer at the peak of her powers (re-)consolidating her hold on the present, with all of the shiniest and most expensive contemporary means at her disposal.
You can forgive the music industry and complicit entertainment media for blowing Reputation up like it’s the most important record to come along since Thriller or
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, of course. There’s a meagre handful of pop stars left who command the sort of feverish public attention that Taylor Swift does while also still actually selling records in the numbers that Taylor Swift sells records.
The music industry needs Reputation to be important because Reputation actually is important to the stubborn perpetuation of an old-school star-making model that’s reduced further to tatters with each passing year.
That’s why you won’t see this thing on streaming services for at least a week; they need to sell some copies of Reputation to prove to themselves that they can still sell something.
I digress, however. Reputation is actually every bit the appealing — if similarly, unnecessarily padded out — high-tech confection its 2014 predecessor,
1989, was.
Working with ubiquitous Swedish hitmakers-for-hire Max Martin and Shellback (and various underlings) and Lorde/St. Vincent producer Jack Antonoff, Swift has strayed even further from her increasingly distant pop-country beginnings into a gleamingly futuristic synth-pop realm informed by the tingly highs and screwed-down, fuzzed-out lows of what the kids call “EDM,” as well as the oozing rhythm tracks and halfspoken/half-sung vocal play common to the murky middle ground between hip hop and R&B.
Barbed lead single “Look What You Made Me Do,” as it turns out, was a bit of a red herring, as Reputation isn’t the wholesale takedown of Swift’s critics and perceived enemies it’s been rumoured to be.
For all the “let the games begin” bluster of opener “. . . Ready for it?” and the pointedly pissy lyrical content of the Lorde-checkin’ Kanye West diss track “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” (“Therein lies the issue/ Friends don’t try to trick you/ Get you on the phone/ And mind-twist you”), the bulk of the album is actually devoted to the sort of swooning, diary-detailed love songs with which Tay-Tay was first identified.
They’re dressed up in robotic armour, and there’s a bit more sex in the mix on tracks like “Dress” (“I bought this dress so you could take it off”) than there was amidst the chaste girlishness of, say, “Mine” back in the day, but these songs have more of a recognizable tether to past offerings than you might think.
“So It Goes” is one big, crystalline whoosh of new-romance ecstasy (“Get caught up in the moment/ Lipstick on your face”). “Gorgeous” is state-of-the-art electro-ping-pong bubble gum that finds Swift ga-ga over a boy so beautiful she can’t look him in the face and then sulking off home alone to her cats at the end when her advances go ignored. “Dancing with Our Hands Tied” might glide along on an almost drum-‘n’-bass rhythm track, but the “I’d kiss you when the lights went out/ Swaying as the room burned down” is classic Swift.
Meanwhile, “Delicate,” a sinewy dance cut that provides this album’s goose-pimply equivalent to “New Romantics,” rather sweetly asserts “My reputation’s never been worse/ So you must like me for me.” And on it goes, through the giddy Bonnie and Clyde fantasies of “Getaway Car” to the self-explanatory (if somewhat overblown) “King of my Heart.”
Reputation isn’t Taylor Swift hatin’ on the haters, after all, Reputation is the sound of Taylor Swift in love.
The only real complaint — other than a 15-track running time that starts to feel redundant about 10 tracks in — is the same one made when Swift threw herself completely into 21st-century pop for 1989: Reputation isn’t blazing a trail of its own, but following the same path that every other A-list pop star follows these days. It’s impossible for everyone to work with Max Martin and not start sounding the same, after all.
Swift is a decent lyricist and has a knack for boffo choruses, but it would be nice to see her stake her own musical ground rather than chasing production trends. She doesn’t need the bells and whistles.
Perhaps the loveliest track on Reputation is the album closer “New Year’s Day,” a simple ballad sung over naught but muffled piano and a sprinkle of acoustic guitar wherein Swift assesses the morning-after damage (“There’s glitter on the floor after the party/ Girls carrying their shoes down in the lobby”) with her lover and declares, rather poetically, “I want your midnights/ But I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day.”
It’s as rom-com weepy as Reputation gets and all it requires to get over is Swift’s voice, a couple of unobtrusive instruments and a beautifully drawn vignette. It might not hurt to simplify further down the road.