Swift lives up to her Reputation
Taylor Swift has shed her famously homely image – but why did she do it, and has she gone too far, asks Alice Vincent.
At 27, Taylor Swift is one of the most powerful women in the world. A combination of girl-nextdoor charm, ineffable pop alchemy and steely business sense have seen her acquire 10 Grammys, 18 top 10 singles and a fortune of US$300 million – all since she was just 14. For years she has been America’s most untouchable pop sweetheart.
She has a social media following of 264 million. But Swift, on the brink of releasing her sixth album, Reputation, has returned a changed woman: no longer a national darling, but something darker, dangerous and possibly self-destructive.
The first hint that Swift had undergone a dramatic transformation was the video teaser she released for her comeback single, depicting a writhing snake. In that song, Look
What You Made Me Do, released in September, she announced ‘‘the Old Taylor [is] dead’’, before proclaiming ‘‘I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me’’. This was Swift scrubbing away the wholesome image that made her a millionaire in favour of a brash new sound and a more vengeful persona – the end result of three years in which the world has turned against her.
So what has made Swift break bad? And what does it say about our attitude to wildly successful pop musicians that they are unable to maintain the very identity that made us fall in love with them? Perhaps there is more truth in the title of Swift’s comeback single than we realise. Maybe Swift’s inability to retain the persona we cherished her for says more about us – a public so uneasy with a young woman’s success that we pick her apart – than her.
This isn’t Swift’s first reinvention. She started as a country singer, having uprooted her family to Nashville as a teenager so she could pursue a music career. Back then, her close relationship with her mother was as integral to her homely, innocent image as the fact her family ran a Pennsylvanian Christmas-tree farm. After the release of Red in 2012 (her fourth album), she repeatedly insisted that her future was so banal, she would become a crazy old cat lady.
Yet in 2014, she straightened her ringlets and went pop. 1989, her fifth album, was the biggestselling of the year but ended up as an accessory to what became an even greater phenomenon: Swift herself. Swift blossomed from a teen superstar into a formidable adult, and cemented her status as the perfect female pop icon for our times: sexy but not sexualised; feminist but not divisive; powerful but not threatening.
That same year, Swift wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal criticising streaming services that offered free music, and removed her back catalogue from Spotify. She was embraced for standing up for artists’ rights, for her selfdeprecating humour and for producing hits so solid we drove them to No 1 repeatedly.
But then came the backlash. Her now infamous ‘‘girl squad’’, a group of supermodel, actress and pop-star friends whose glossy hair and beaming smiles filled Swift’s Instagram feed, at first was talked about as a powerful expression of female solidarity, but the perception of it soon soured. Filled as it was with impossibly beautiful women flaunting impossibly perfect lives, it felt less feminist than elitist. When Swift invited her squad on tour, one member, Lena Dunham, creator of Girls, said the experience made her feel ‘‘chubby’’. Swift was starting to look calculating and aloof.
Then came Hiddleswift – her relationship with British actor Tom Hiddleston – in the middle of last year. At the time, Swift was embroiled in an ugly spat with Kim Kardashian over a song by Kanye West in which he had bragged about having made Swift famous. Swift had called him out on the lyric – but Kardashian released a recording of a phone call between West and Swift that suggested the two had spoken about the song.
Swift’s romance with Hiddleston was seen as a Machiavellian PR stunt to distract attention from a damaging row. Her Instagram feed was bombarded by so many snake emoji that the app changed its filter system. Hiddleswift ended two months later.
After that, Swift withdrew from the public eye. Her social media accounts, once a chirruping insight into her aspirational lifestyle, slowed down, then stopped. Before the Reputation campaign, they were cleared, along with every trace of the image she’d been working on since she was 11. That this supposedly attention-seeking star’s retreat from the public eye drew criticism is testament to the almost contradictory expectations placed on a figure like Swift. She had always stayed quiet on politics for fear of exerting undue influence. But her silence ahead of last year’s US election saw her branded as calculating in her neutrality. She could be forgiven for thinking that, whatever she does, she is damned either way.
With her latest iteration, Swift has styled herself as a bad girl warped by the world’s judgment. Aside from those ocean-blue eyes, she is almost unrecognisable from the 1989-era Swift. Even her trademark red cupid’s bow has turned black. She appeared nude in her most recent music video, and the single Gorgeous tells the unedifying story of picking up her new boyfriend while her old one was in a nightclub, unawares.
The album’s monochrome artwork features headlines spelling out her name. As an artist, Swift has always been savvy and self-aware, but here these qualities have congealed into an embittered cynicism.
If the word-of-mouth chatter around Reputation is anything to go by, the album could prove Swift’s most divisive act yet. Her previous albums have had a clear musical identity but the first three singles on Reputation revel in the generic dance-floor beats found scattered across the charts. Her songwriting, once nuanced and emotive, feels consumed by a suffocating narcissism. There is the distinct feeling of a pop campaign in trouble.
On Look What You Made Me Do, her repeated lyrical insistence that just about everyone else is responsible for her actions, only underlines what many have been accusing Swift of for years: she only cares about herself and she refuses to see herself as the problem. Or, as American journalist Mark Harris wrote recently, the song marks ‘‘the first pure, truly emblematic, undeniable piece of pop art of the Trump era’’ for the way it ‘‘finds a new way to commercialise self-exoneration’’.
What has regrettably got lost are Swift’s achievements as a woman of influence. Her decision to take on Spotify displayed real strength. Earlier this year, she received praise for taking to the stand against former DJ David Mueller.
She took Mueller to court for groping her in 2013 and won a symbolic US$1 in damages; this presaged the current sexual harassment earthquake reverberating through public life.
Reputation will, inevitably, top the charts and add to Swift’s millions, but unless it matches the success of 1989, it will be seen as a comparative failure. But if that’s the case, it won’t be entirely Swift’s fault. Pop culture is littered with precociously talented stars who grew up in the public eye before spectacularly imploding. Female pop stars have to tread a tricky line between who they are and what the public wants them to be, between being relatable and aspirational, and the more successful they are, the harder it becomes.
But perhaps no one should be writing off Swift just yet. As she sings on Look What You Made Me
Do: ‘‘Honey, I rise up from the dead, I do it all the time’’. – The Daily Telegraph
❚ Reputation is released on November 10.