When you get to a certain level of popularity as an artist, your image becomes almost as important as your music. Some artists like Ye and Travis Scott have whole brands around their name, brands that can affect future album rollouts, sales and critical reception. This whole dichotomy can also come to fruition in the music itself. I would argue this is very much the case for pop superstar Taylor Swift’s Reputation. This album was a major attempt by Taylor to reframe her breakup artist image and change up her bright sound. Unfortunately, the production choices, while interesting, mostly range from generally underwhelming to borderline ridiculous. Not to mention, this album retreads lyrical ground to the point of doing little in the way of changing Taylor’s image.
…Ready For It? is actually a fitting overture for this album. You can already tell Taylor is trying to kill her old persona from the beginning. It opens with bassy synths, trap drums, and oddly enough, Taylor rapping, all moving at a relatively quick pace. She has sort of an alternative, attempting to be confident, almost staccato, Ashnikko type flow. The attempt to be a confident, borderline villain on the verse works better here than on most of the rest of the album due the darker and almost industrial edge the synths have. There’s even heavier, more electronic drums that pop up towards the chorus. Even with some interesting choices, one of the major issues that the album has is on display here, the emptiness of the production. Spears or Gaga this is not. I am not sure if this track was trying to be grandiose and failed, or did not try to be grandiose at all. Either way, there is not much going on. The synths never get loud enough to make that much of an impact, and Taylor herself is oddly quiet in the mix. The worst part is the chorus is even worse. Instead of Taylor trying something new, she goes back to the weaker parts of her roots and delivers a bubbly but lifeless chorus. It’s so mellow and so empty, that it sounds like something out of a Walmart ad. The only production to speak of on it are these light, slightly tropical drums that go in one ear and out the other. So sonically it doesn’t really reinvent the wheel, and when it attempts to, it feels empty. Unfortunately the writing does not help the song’s case whatsoever. This song, like many Taylor swift songs before and after it, is a love song. It is about her boyfriend at the time, Joe Alwyn. It is odd to me how she opens an album where she wanted to go for a a darker tone with a song about budding love. In any case what Taylor is saying here is wallpaper and does nothing for her image but perpetuate it.
The writing on …Ready For It? is especially concerning when you realize Taylor actually did have a conceptual plan for this album. Side A was supposed to be dark and vengeful that represented how Taylor’s struggled with fame, Side B was supposed to be lighter, happier and how she felt upon the album’s completion, representing new love even in dark times. I suppose her one verse on End Game is slightly darker and very slightly touches on the themes of her reputation as a heartbreaker. She warns the song’s love interest saying,
“Reputation precedes me, they told you I’m crazy
I swear I don’t love the drama, it loves me”.
Then just goes on gushing about the guy. It adds basically nothing to the context of the album. The guest verses that precede it aren’t much better. Future starts his verse with a faster flow, which is so unlike Future that it feels wrong. Thankfully it goes into a slower flow after but none of it stands out. It just sounds like a very average, for the money Future verse given the lack of dynamics and general lack of interest shown. Lyrically he basically just does what Taylor does and gushes about a potential partner, it’s only mildly interesting since that isn’t as much par for the course for Future minus the croak at the end of it that pierces the ears. Ed Sheeran is the other feature on the track and oddly enough he raps. The verse is cheesy, even for Sheeran. It’s about his future wife, then girlfriend, Cherry Seaborn, which is sweet and it makes his the best verse of the three but it’s still written in a way that makes it somewhat non distinct minus the “Knew her when I was young, reconnected when we were little bit older” lyric, which is still pretty typical but it comes from an honest place. The verse also does slightly delve into Sheeran’s reputation, but so vaguely that it doesn’t enhance the album at all. The beat is basically the same across the whole song and only gets a bit louder in the chorus. It is a weird cacophony of stock trap and bass drums as well as a vague mechanical synth that pops in every few lines. It makes the fairly straightforward verses all the more mind numbing. The whole thing feels like you’re at a club you don’t want to be at as a designated driver. Everyone is having fun but you and you want to leave.
I Did Something Bad starts off a sonic trend that essentially ruins most of the rest of the album. This trend is where the production in the verses will be extremely thin and empty, then the choruses will attempt to sound bombastic and huge by comparison. It’s annoying and almost patronizing with its laziness, when it had the potential to have been more interesting across the board. On the song itself there’s plucky strings and very quiet electro synths over Taylor’s lyricism about, you guessed it, romance. She’s talking this time about how she plays with the hearts of narcissistic men and how she’s such a villain for it. The synths mentioned earlier are what lead into the chorus, pretty naturally to the song’s credit. The chorus itself has a Tones and I bombastic alt pop circus beat with vocals that fit the bill. The lyrics are about as Shakespearean as you’d expect for this album up to this point where Taylor proclaims
“They say I did something bad
Then why’s it feel so good?”.
If that wasn’t bad enough the post chorus is just Taylor making noises. I did not wanna hear so much “Ra-di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di-da-da”. The song doesn’t get better whatsoever and barely adds anything onto subsequent choruses, including the final one. The song is annoying and one of the worst on the album
The first half of the album doesn’t get much better throughout. Don’t Blame Me is another relationship song. It has thin, worbly electro synths that are only so nerfed to make the actually decent chorus look better, as is custom for Reputation. The hook has these Femme Fatale era Britney synths that would be cool if they weren’t smothered by the generic, drum driven arena pop that is the rest of the it. It is also another generic love song, again, par for the course. Delicate is another relationship song, and is extremely generic alt pop. This song is boring and represents much of what I don’t enjoy in modern pop. It has empty production and more generic love lyrics. The pitched “delicate” in the chorus is very annoying. The breathiness of the “isn’t it” on the post chorus is also a bit grating. The whole thing sounds like you’re in a futuristic waiting room, and not in a cool way. I believe Look What You Made Me Do warrants some discussion.. This song is awful. The chorus is repetitive in the worst way, the singing sounds like she’s singing to a toddler, with almost every word being way too over-annunciated. I don’t buy this darker tone or image at all from Taylor. The production is also a mess that’s not chaotic enough to be interesting but not clean enough to be slick. The drums in the chorus are awful. The electro synths that are there aren’t nearly prominent enough to save it. The bridge is profoundly cheesy as well. The line
“I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now ‘Why? Oh, ’cause she’s dead!’ (Oh)”
made me physically wince. It is very odd to me that the studio even green-lit this song.
After the disappointing first half, the second half of the album kicks off with Gorgeous. I already thought the first half was too centered around love, so the idea of a second half actually meant for it wasn’t too enticing. Admittedly, the track does start off strong, with these worbly synths that sound straight out of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips, accompanied by heavy, booking drums. It’s pretty but unfortunately it does nothing else with the sound besides adding trap drums in the choruses and bridge. The track is yet another love song, this one is about putting men on pedestals and the issues in doing so. According to the lyric site Genius, the chorus is “mocking” the very thing I’ve been criticizing this entire review, the overabundance of love songs in her discography. Acknowledging the issue and doing almost nothing about it doesn’t fix the issue.
Speaking of not fixing the issues, the album almost never lets up on that. Take King Of My Heart for example, which continues the trend of boring verses and more produced choruses but I actually like the robotic synths on the prechorus and postchorus. They compliment the tribal post chorus drums well. It unfortunately also barely changes. Most of the variation in this album comes in the bridges and the one here just isn’t good. The more produced sections of the song also repeat the mistake of smothering alt pop in electropop production in a way that clashes more than it works. In the song she talks about falling in love, again. Another repeated mistake on this album is that Taylor thought the chorus on I Did Something Bad was a good idea. I say this because she makes a whole song with a similar beat in the form of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. The verses have these very nothing kick drums and faint synths, that quickly lead into a long and excruciating chorus. It sounds like Tones and I with slightly better vocals with the reverb drowned vocals under some electro synths and the same kick drums from the verses. It never gets better, with a couple of exceptions.
Dancing with our hands tied is a genuinely nice song. It’s refreshing to hear atmospheric and danceable alt pop done well. It’s not great and the chorus is sort of generic with the synth progression and trap drums. The good news the other songs there’s actually additional production in later verses with the additional pianos. The lyrics are yet again more about her relationship with Joe Alwyn. I would argue that’s my only real issue with the song. Not a huge deal though considering it actually sounds nice. Good news is, the album also ends on a high note. New Year’s Day is a genuinely decent piano ballad. It’s simple but it has nice chord progressions on the acoustic guitar and is just really pretty. It sounds like a bit like Regina Spektor, and I love Regina Spektor. The writing here is actually somewhat poetic too with lines like
“I’ll be there if you’re the toast of the town, babe
Or if you strike out and you’re crawling home”
showing her support for her boyfriend, which is sweet. She basically describes the experience they had meeting, hence the name of the song. It is especially nice considering she’s been writing about him in less than interesting ways throughout the album, so this was sweet.
New Year’s Day is an exception to the rule of not only the second half of this album, but the entire album in terms of my enjoyment. This album was rough, given a few factors. Reputation is a mess because it feels like Taylor had an idea of how to deconstruct and even change her own image, but had no interesting direction lyrically or sonically to do so with. It is nice to see Taylor win in her life, but it seems much got lost in translation on how to express the feelings of that success, even if it didn’t ruin her reputation.
3/10
