Apotheosis in Taylor Swift’s “Reputation”

That’s right, we’re changing tracks a little on this one. Switching sides like a record changer and all that jazz.

I cannot understate how hard it is to find good, landscape photos for an article like this.

The fact is, I have been quite busy and I haven’t been in a movie theatre since Nope. I think Nope was actually the last two movies I saw in a theatre which is kind of sad. And that’s not for lack of good movies! By all accounts, Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Woman King, Barbarian, and Three Thousand Years of Longing have all been really good, and Elvis is definitely something I need to sit down for eventually. And I still haven’t made time for RRR, which is the movie of the year it seems. But I suppose I haven’t felt in any particular rush to catch any of them, and certainly haven’t felt like dragging anyone else to them. Moreover, I recently started working full time and that means my days are a lot busier and my evenings keep filling up with other things. I never really thought I would hit the 31 horror movie numbers I did last year but I kind of wanted to make an attempt; I have watched exactly zero new horror movies this year (Update: I watched two! Which is still not a lot). I made a list and everything! Wanted to go through some of Sam Raimi or Scott Derrickson’s movies, maybe the Scream sequels… nothing. But I have been doing a bunch of other things. Still reading, still watching television – and there was some good television this season. And listening to a lot of music! So much music. And, especially as we approached the release of Midnights, a lot of Taylor Swift.

So, in typical Swift fashion, I’ve decided to make it everyone else’s problem.

Fully embracing the vigilante shtick.

See, Living Queen of Pop Taylor Alison Swift can often be a contentious subject and there’s nothing I enjoy exploring more than an object of contention. And there’s probably no Swift album more contentious than Reptation, her 2017 release that shook more than a few feathers. Despite the eagerness of some to bury the Reputation era in the past, it’s clear in Midnights that the album still resonates with her. In fact, the more I’ve thought about it over the past few years, Reputation may be the most pivotal album that Taylor has released. Not her best, but certainly her most pivotal. There’s a pun there but you won’t get it until I finish this. For those of you with literally no interest in the subject, I urge you to stick around because maybe you’ll come around on some of this. For those of you already in the know… strap in.

Now, Taylor has had an insane couple of years. Truly, no one was more productive during the pandemic than her. Since the start of 2020, she has released five albums – three new releases, and two re-recorded albums with enough fresh material that they may as well qualify as new releases as well. Naturally, a lot of new people have joined the fanbase in that time, or have re-evaluated her, or perhaps fell back into her train after being disappointed with her previous albums. But with Midnights showcasing a pretty clear reinvention of her style, a few have expressed the idea that Taylor has “regressed,” with one particular Twitter thread lamenting that she lost her lyricism. This view, first of all, feels fairly ignorant of all of the amazing things Swift does lyrically in Midnights, but also seems rooted in a stance that ignores Taylor’s past and how she has evolved as an artist. And, again, at the heart of all of this sits Reputation, Swift’s boldest and most ostentatious album. Her first album, Taylor Swift, may be a little quaint and isn’t up to the polish of her later stuff, but I can’t imagine anyone hates it. People hate Reputation. So, naturally, here I am rushing to defend it.

I can't help but feel like this was *the* image everyone everyone associated with Swift when I was in high school.

For my own part, I had little to no interest in Taylor Swift when Reputation was released. While I’m sure I had heard “Love Story” and the like, I probably first became conscious of Taylor Swift as a pop sensation around the release of Red with tracks like “22” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” and it was decidedly Not For Me. Largely because I was more than a little pretentious, and anything “popular” was deemed “bad.” I had a whole complex about these things. It only worsened with the release of 1989 when tracks like “Shake It Off,” and “Blank Space” flooded the radio. At the time I recall being Very Original and thinking, “wow, sounds like all she can sing about is either ‘you’re terrible and I want you,’ or ‘I’m terrible and you should want me,’ maybe she’s the problem here.” Anyways, catch me now rooting for the anti-hero. And yes, I know “Blank Space” is supposed to be “satire” but it’s bad satire! It doesn’t work! The song is a bop but it doesn’t read as satirical to any of the audience she’s targeting. I was in that audience and thought she just felt self-obsessed, and so I stayed my distance while one of the biggest pop records of our time continued to release hit after hit. A year or so later, spending long night shifts at work while “Out of the Woods” and “Wildest Dreams” cycled on the stations, I changed my tune, but only slightly. While I wasn’t yet into her lyrics, I had to admit, Taylor Swift had her finger on the pulse of popularity. She knew how to make a catchy single, and how to hit big with the broad appeal. I still kind of thought the likes of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” were a little obnoxious, but I had respect for her craft.

I stayed there for a few years. I remember the release of “Look What You Made Me Do,” and understood that she was making some kind of statement, but didn’t really know or particularly care to know what she was targeting. I did know it was a pretty weird song, but I thought the phone call bit was funny! After that, Taylor more or less dropped off the map. I remember seeing Reputation appear in stores and thinking the cover art looked cool, and that the idea of an album about her “reputation” seemed interesting, but I never pursued that. Until the summer of 2019, and someone casually had on a few tracks from the album, and I thought, “wait, this is good?” Around the same time, Carly Rae Jepsen’s Dedicated released, and I recall being a little underwhelmed by it after how revolutionary her previous release, Emotion, had been (for those not in the know, do yourselves a favour and listen to the bass-y 80’s synth production of Emotion and absolve yourself of the notion that Carly was ever just a one-hit wonder). I would eventually come around on Dedicated, but in my disappointment, a friend suggested that if I was looking for some good synth-pop I should maybe turn to Taylor Swift’s Lover. I didn’t even know she’d put out another album after Reputation, it felt like Rep had just come out.

It's January 2020 and I am in an emotional state. I am trying to get some research done in a Starbucks a short drive from my university, and looking for good study music. What the heck, I think. I’ll put on Lover. And everything (has) changed.

I'm not going to talk a whole lot about her first two albums here, but only because I don't think there's a lot to say, sorry!

But before we get into how gorgeous Lover is, let’s step back and track Swift’s own journey. I’m sure even those who have the most casual engagement in Swift’s work are aware that her career has been a varied one. She rocketed into stardom at only 17 with “Tim McGraw,” and followed it up with “Love Story” on Fearless, which pushed her from a country darling into a pop sensation. As a country artist, Taylor developed a skill for storytelling and intimate lyrics, utilizing her songs almost as confessionals. Her third album, Speak Now, sharpened this talent into a perfected art form as she committed to writing the entire album on her own. The result is an album full of private diary-esque thoughts released into a form of universal experience. Swift’s entire appeal is in her specificity; her songwriting is always grounded in images and experiences so concrete that we feel them, and find a connection to them in our own experiences. The visual of a red scarf, left at an ex’s sister’s house never to be returned, is so particular and yet evokes this slew of commonly-held emotions from fraught relationships. And so when she released Red, dubbed at the time “the sad break-up album,” she struck upon ever wider-spread acclaim. “All Too Well” is possibly the Taylor Swift song; immediately precise yet effortlessly relatable, a whirlwind journey through sudden love and devastating heartbreak. Red also marked her first real steps into pop music as she collaborated with Max Martin who had previously produced hits like Brittney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” and the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” and, more recently, “Can’t Feel My Face” and “Blinding Lights” for The Weekend. Where Speak Now had dipped its toes into concert rock with hits like “Haunted,” Red spreads into a wide variety of genres, representing the sporadic messiness of a breakup. It was a smash hit, and suddenly Taylor was dominating all of the music charts. In 1989, Swift continued her trend of teaming up with skilled producers to recruit Jack Antanoff shortly after the wild success of his band fun.’s Some Nights. Between Swift, Antanoff, and Martin, 1989 took the industry by storm, essentially functioning as a full album of top radio singles. Taylor had fully transitioned into pop, dazzled in 1980’s synths and catchy instant hits, and became the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammy’s twice.

Speak Now is deeply underrated, and she needs to make an entire album in the style of "Haunted"

With the meteoric rise to fame, however, comes a brutal face-to-face with the cold reality of stardom. Especially as a young female artist, Swift was harassed by media obsessing over her relationship life and her supposed “purity,” painting her as the good, nice home-grown country girl. In classic fashion, when she wasn’t being perceived as a naïve innocent, she was painted as a party-going “slut” who needed to settle down with a man. Songs like “Blank Space” featured her trying to wryly embrace the identities the tabloids labelled her with, while others like “Shake it Off” saw her trying to retain her glitzy and clean image, simply ignoring the “haters” and enjoying the moment. Speak Now staple “Dear John” exposes the questionable relationship then-32-year-old John Mayer had with her when she was 19, calling out his abusive, grooming behaviour and the lack of protection she had. While Mayer would spend the next few years attacking her image and deriding the track as “cheap songwriting,” the most infamous crystallization of her war with the media came a few years earlier in 2009.

I don't have space for it here, but Swift has a whole interview where she talks about the reason she's changed her brand so often, and linking it to this expectation for women to "perform" and "always be different." Just feels relevant.

At the MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West, former hip-hop star and current antisemite, sabotaged Swift’s acceptance speech for Fearless to put himself in the spotlight. In a single move, he set her against Beyonce, perpetuating the misogynistic narrative of pitting women against each other, while also setting himself in the center of the scene. Taylor was stunned but tried to put on a good face, and in the following years received an apology from West and tried to shore up whatever friendship they had. After the release of 1989, however, Kanye changed his tune again, and in 2016 debuted “Famous,” in which he wrote “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous.” A sharp feud exploded between him, his then-wife Kim Kardashian, and Swift. Meanwhile, the tabloids doubled down, lambasting her relationships with Calvin Harris and Tom Hiddleston, and continuing to gossip about her growing feuds. The success of 1989 drew more attention her way, with many accusing her of selling out by moving fully from country into commercial pop. On Twitter, #TaylorIsOverParty trended constantly. With mounting pressure, Swift escaped from social media and the public scene, fleeing back into her music.

Enter Reptation.

Reputation has such a specific energy and I definitely do not begrudge anyone for writing it off on that alone, but it's worth it.

While 1989 was characterized by its blend of modern and 80’s pop, Reputation immediately leans into a hip-hop soundscape with “…Ready For It?”, a bold, in-your-face track with huge bass hits, trap beats, and a record scratch mixed to sound like a leopard’s roar. For the chorus, however, she leans back into dreamy synths and echo-y vocals. “Let the games begin – are you ready for it?” The next three tracks of the album follow suit – “End Game” features rap verses by Future and Ed Sheeran while she sings of her “big reputation” and “big enemies,” before stating that “I bury hatchets, but I keep maps of where I put 'em / Reputation precedes me, they told you I'm crazy / I swear I don't love the drama, it loves me.” Through the opening of the album, she returns to the trick she tried in “Blank Space” by fully taking on the labels and accusations of the tabloids. Reputation starts with her becoming the mask, fully absorbing herself into this persona of someone with no cares to give and little self-preservation. “I Did Something Bad” and “Don’t Blame Me” continue this motion, with her making bold claims and taking names. “They say I did something bad / then why’s it feel so good?” “Don’t blame, Love made me crazy / if it doesn’t, you ain’t doing it right.” Reputation is not contentious without reason; the opening four tracks practically read as villain songs as Taylor embraces the “woman scorned” tropes and paints a picture of someone pushed to aggression by heartache and the thirst for vengeance. “They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one / So light me up.” These songs don’t just mark a radical departure from her past work stylistically but also in terms of content; here, Swift fully breaks away from her “good girl” image and embraces all the rumours by exposing her own sexual intimacy. “Carve your name into my bedpost,” she writes in a later track, “Dress” “’cause I don’t want you like a best friend / Only bought this dress for you to take it off.” Swift goes to lengths to prove that she’s no longer the country teenager she started her career as. She’s a mature woman who refuses to be shamed.

But to what end? In her first single and the sixth song on the record, “Look What You Made Me Do,” Swift insists that “the old Taylor […] is dead,” and in the music video murders images of her representing all her past albums. One would be led to think that in the fury of the tabloid gossip and friends becoming enemies, Swift has stepped into full vengeance mode and decided to go to war. That’s certainly where Reputation starts – but, importantly, that’s not where it ends. “This ain’t for the best,” admits Swift to a new lover in “Delicate,” “my reputation’s never been worse so / you must like me for me.” “Delicate” is a quieter song, a stark contrast from the four that proceed it. There is a quiet intimacy to it as Swift reveals her insecurities. “Is it cool that I said all that? / Is it chill that you’re in my head? / ‘Cause I know that it’s delicate…” After this bombastic opening filled with show-stopping persona, suddenly there is a sense that we are peaking into the real artist. After song 7, “So It Goes…” the instrumentation of the entire album begins to change (Note that So It Goes… and the first track, …Ready For It? both feature ellipses, marking transition points in the album). Slowly, we swap out the bombastic hip-hop styling for spacious synths, just like the contrast created in “…Ready for It?”’s verses and chorus. Far from the self-aggrandizing lyrics in Reputation’s opening, the next few songs detail a new relationship and newfound love and safety. In “Gorgeous” she laments that “you make me so happy it turns back to sad,” and “King of My Heart” asks, “is this the end to all the endings?” Slowly, over this process, the instrumentation strips back, layer by layer, until we end with “New Year’s Day,” a quiet, simple ballad, featuring just her voice and a piano.

I can't stress how different the beginning and end of this album are.

I’m not always in love with Reputation and I’m certainly not always in the mood to listen to it from beginning to end, but it stands out to me because of the sheer weight of the story that Swift is telling. In a period of betrayal and media gossip, she paints a bad-girl persona that allowed her to take control of the narrative and prove that she could be whoever she wanted to be. It’s a jarring switch in her personality that simultaneously proves how versatile she is while also giving her the means to portray herself as more "adult." Then, as the album progresses, the mask comes off and the caricature she created dissipates, but the mature intimacy she creates remains with newfound genuineness. Reputation is a story of death and rebirth. The old Taylor is dead – but so is this fake Taylor who killed her, replaced with someone with renewed honesty to herself and her audience. I recently read Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” and while being honest I wasn’t in love with it, the famous Hero’s Journey he outlines is a useful metaphor here. In the act of taking on this persona and then shedding it, Swift passes into the world of the unknown and undergoes a transformation, an apotheosis, becoming her highest and truest self. As she returns from the unknown she is able to abandon that persona and return to the world self-fulfilled. It’s worth noting Joe Alwyn, Swift’s then-recent and still-current boyfriend has a place in all this – but far be it from me to suggest the entire movement of an album like Reputation is centered around a man. Rather, it’s about finding safety and security in the people who mutually love you when the rest of the world is out to bring you down. It’s about putting up your guard and then being able to let it all down, to be your full and authentic self. There is a sense that before Reputation, Swift was performing a role, and after all the theatrics of the first half of the album, she is now finally able to be genuine.

After the moody red and blacks of Reputation, I love how soft the palette of Lover is - blues and purple-pink skies.

This apotheosis is vital because it paves the way for the past five years of her career. I’m not convinced you get folklore or the re-releases without this self-revelation. Take Lover, her 2019 follow-up to Reputation. It opens exactly where Reputation leaves off, continuing to take steps away from all the anxiety present at the start of that album. “Something happened one magical night,” she sings in Lover’s opening track, “I forgot that you existed / And I thought that it would kill me, but it didn't.” The stress of Reputation is totally forgotten – and there is an anti-climactic nature to the production of this first song that mirrors the sonic direction Reputation took. You expect the music to build, but it always pulls back before the chorus, echoing the soundscapes of “Call It What You Want” or “New Year’s Day.” The next song on the album, “Cruel Summer,” continues to develop the themes of delicate fear in the new relationship that formed the back end of Reputation, where she expresses, “Said, ‘I'm fine,’ but it wasn't true / I don't wanna keep secrets just to keep you.” But “Cruel Summer” flows into the title track, “Lover,” and thus into the rest of the album, which is filled from song to song with odes to life and love. “I want to be defined by the things that I love,” Taylor Swift says in a spoken word portion at the end of the album, “Not the things I hate, not the things I'm afraid of or the things that haunt me in the middle of the night - I just think that… you are what you love.” The thing I adore about Lover, my personal favourite of Swift’s albums, is this strength in vulnerability that it carries. It’s the total flip side of Reputation, after all this turmoil you have an album that is fully at peace and self-confidence. It’s an album that chooses to look at life in all of its beauty. And that bliss doesn’t exist in naivety, as an early Swift album might, there is an awareness of darkness in Lover. “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” after all, has Swift testing if she can still exercise her skill of writing break-up songs even while she’s in a content relationship – and she succeeds. Rather, Lover comes from a state of maturity where you can acknowledge the darkness of life while continuing to view it in its beauty. And you can only get there once you have the centered confidence that Swift develops through Reputation. In this period of time, Swift also dismantled the political anonymity that had granted her so much security, finally using her platform to talk about the issues that had been building up within her. In “The Man” she decries the patriarchy in the industry, she briefly touches on discrimination in “You Need to Calm Down,” and outside of her music took a stand against Trump and all that he represented.

There's a soothing melancholy embedded in Folklore from someone who has lived in that pain and grown beyond it.

The effects of Reputation’s apotheosis continue to ripple through her career. In folklore and evermore Swift continued to experiment, this time moving away from the various pop aesthetics she’d established from 1989 to Lover and moving into a sort of alternative folk sound, developed with not just Antanoff but also with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner of The National. Moreover, Swift, having proven with “Death by a Thousand Cuts” that she can fully explore the art of fiction while still keeping her sense of intimacy, now writes two fully fictional albums. Folklore is probably her best work, an album that reunites the art of storytelling she learned through her country work with a mature folk song that befits how her sound and voice have developed. Her lyricism is probably at its most refined in these albums, with these tight, rich verses that many have described as feeling like novels. She paints sixteen different stories with arcs and narrative, such as “The Last Great American Dynasty” where she tells the real-life story of Rebekah Harkness who was blamed for “ruining” her husband’s dour legacy, only to reveal at the end of the song that Harkness’ house is now owned by her, Taylor Swift, thereby tying their narratives together. Evermore strikes me as less refined than folklore, but continues this tapestry of bittersweet, comfortingly melancholic stories. There is a real sense in these albums that Swift is able to fully play with her writing without fear of media repercussions.

Hot take, maybe, but I think the expanded stuff in Red (TV) improves on the original album in almost every way.

At the same time, Swift has been taking back ownership of her past work. After she left her previous label, Big Red Machine, to start recording music on her own, the label’s owner, Scooter Braun, made tyrannical moves to own all of her previous songs. He refused to let her play any songs from those albums at a concert and then attempted to sell the masters of the songs for his own profit. Never outdone, Swift has in the past few years been rerecording her previous albums one-by-one, while also publishing new songs that were written for those albums and had been locked in the vaults. Some of these rerecordings have even broken the boundaries of what would have been considered commercially viable, such as releasing a 10-minute version of “All Too Well” that is, miraculously, better (or at least as good) as the original. In this whole process, she has bit-by-bit won back her public appeal and mainstream audience.

Taylor diving into modern indie alternative synth aesthetics like she's always owned them is a wild play, how does she excel at everything she tries?

This all culminates with the release of Midnights a few weeks ago, an album that returns back to her pop style and that is drawn from thirteen sleepless nights over the course of her career. Much like her rereleases, Midnights came with an additional seven songs that had initially been cut from the record, unconstrained by any precepts of what makes a “good” or “tight” album. Altogether, Midnights feels like a project born by the rerecordings and the process of going back to her old work and old emotions. It’s an album written by an adult woman reflecting on the anxieties of her youth that she was never fully allowed to process or publish. Never is this more clear than in the bonus song, “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” a song that returns to her abusive relationship with John Mayer and the absolute devastation that it left on her psyche. “Now that I'm grown,” she reflects in the chorus, “I'm scared of ghosts / Memories feel like weapons.” In her bridge she introduces a refrain which she then repeats at the song’s end until it feels like a scream from her inner being, “God rest my soul, I miss who I used to be / The tomb won't close /Stained glass windows in my mind /I regret you all the time.” There is, again, a strong in the sheer vulnerability she shows through this album, a fortitude born of hard-won self-sufficiency. After years of snide accusations that maybe she should stop blaming her exes for her issues, in “Anti-Hero” she declares, “It's me, hi / I'm the problem, it's me […] I'll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror / It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.” Throughout the album she comes face-to-face with all her anxieties in a way that feels revelatory. It’s perhaps worth noting that the production of Midnights feels like a fusion of much of what she’s been doing over the past few years – it has the low, moody synths from the back half of Reputation, covered with the dreamy pop sensations of Lover and the marketable vibes of 1989 paired with the complex and soul-baring lyrics of folklore and evermore. There are a lot of ways that Midnights feels like a culmination of everything she’s been doing, and especially of the self-confidence she developed through Reputation. After all, she has been breaking every record with this album, completely blotting out the Billboard Top 10. I acknowledge that it’s weird to root for a rich successful celebrity, but it does feel nice that she has fully taken back the spotlight after how much the world despised her in 2016. And I don’t she could have done any of it – the folk albums, the rereleases, or the success of Midnights, without Reputation and all of its contentious elements.

She's come a long way.

Was this article too long? Probably. But, I’ve been thinking about Reputation as an under-appreciated structural highlight in Taylor’s career for A While and the release of Midnights felt like an appropriate time to talk about it. Don’t mind the fact that it took me two weeks to actually finish writing… I’ve been busy, okay? And it’s about to get busier – Wakanda Forever? Glass Onion? Del Toro’s Pinocchio? The Fabelmans, possibly Spielberg’s last movie? And that’s all without mentioning a Certain Someone absolutely tanking Twitter, so who knows what the audience here will be in a month? It’s all an adventure! I’ll see you whatever way it turns out.