I want complete transparency as I write this: I am no music critic. This entire piece is subjective and conjecture and any and all synonyms and words that are in the vein of “Hogwash” and “drivel” and as a writer I am all things under the umbrella of “hack” and “complete/utter horseshit”. I play in a ska band unironically for goddsakes. I’m not in any position to judge music in any facet.
That being said “tab” doesn’t indent like I want it to so everything is going to be formatted in this bullshit “Left aligned” nonsense that looks like a second grader with “notepad” wrote it. All of that withstanding, that assessment isn’t exactly wrong. I’ve also been drinking a little bit. So there’s that.
So, here we go, a bullshit review of Taylor Swift all of her radio hits from her newest album, “Reputation”.
Just right out of the gate: I hate it.
I do. I really do.
You can ask a good deal of any of my friends and an equal amount of any of my ex-girlfriends they’ll all tell you:
I like Taylor Swift. I do. There. I said it.
Unironically, I might add. But here’s the deal with “Reputation” as I’ve heard it thus far: She’s doing this “identity crisis” thing and with whatever phase she’s in, it’s just not working for her. Let me explain why.
Miss Swift started out as a country star. A legit country star. And she was good. She had the persona, the look, and most importantly: The voice. Her early hits all included all of the stereotypical country harmonies and vocalizations and that is, (again) in my opinion, one of her strong suits: She knows the genre and she knows how to play into it. Given her writing style(one that is very similar to mine; “Oh, I have an ex-significant other LET’S TALK SOME SHIT WHY DON’T WE BECAUSE IT’S EASY) she has plenty of material and, if the rumors that I’ve heard where she writes her own music are true, has well, plenty more material). Like, really, one of my favorite songs by her is “Mean” which is about a critic who said something mean about her. Which, yea, whatever, write a diss-track about someone who said something not nice about you. I’ve done it and I’m pretty sure anyone with anything out on the internet and a composition instrument has done because, you know, YouTube’s a thing, has done it. But it was catchy, and it was cute, and it was optimistic, and you know what god dammit, it was fun and relatable. Because fuck it, who hasn’t had someone talk shit about them? It’s fucking GREAT.
So that was country Taylor. Country Taylor has a lot of hits and for good reason. They’re…well, they’re pretty good. She has a lot of pop hits as well. So let’s talk about those. Or at least one in particular.
The song in question, at least for this example, is something I consider a lyrical masterpiece by Miss Swift if she actually wrote it.
To give you some context, I had an ex-girlfriend that, much like me, listened to pop music on the radio because, well, fuck it, you know? So we would bullshit back and forth on whatever was on the radio because it was a fuckin’ thing to do. At this time, only one other song came out from “1985” and that was “Shake it Off” which, at the time, I felt made a case for one of Taylor’s strongest songs because it was topical, personal, and for me, was a blatant step out of Taylor’s typical “Good girl, I play country music” persona that I knew at the time. Her album “Red” was like a placeholder between her “phases” because it had content that were very much “meant for radio” like “I Knew You Were Trouble” a track that I have deemed “Swift-step” which was an obvious rip from the nation’s discovery of dubstep at the time, “We Are Never Getting Back Together” which was a fun track that had Swift blending her country roots with her newfound “popstar” persona with the major-key finger-picked guitar at the beginning of the track but right before that riff ends plays…almost backwards which is a very poppy-type trick that you can do in the studio because fuck it, why not? So if anything, that track is the tipping point of Miss Swift embracing her newfound “This is who I am now” as being popqueen of 20-whatever(I wanted to say pop queen of 2017 for the rhyme but couldn’t in good faith couldn’t).
Flashforward to 2014 and “Shake it Off” comes out and I’m fucking in love with this song. It’s fun, it’s personal, it’s topical(at the time she’d been under scrutiny for having too many boyfriends or whatever. Who gives a shit) and it included a bari sax and goddammit I love me a good bari sax in whatever setting I can get it in. But it was FUN and I loved it.
So we get to “Blank Space” and quite frankly, it’s wonderful. It was one of Miss Swift’s forays into a kind of “hip hop” feel that didn’t exactly feel foreign or forced, it was groovy without trying too hard, and lyrically about as perfect and all-encompassing as you can get without pandering. “Find out what you want, be that girl for a month, wait the worst is yet to come”, “So it’s gonna be forever, or it’s gonna go down in flames”, “Darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream”, “Oh my god look at that face, you look like my next mistake; love’s a game, wanna play” are some of my favorites and when you break them down, are just too relevant for anyone that’s dated in their 20’s. It’s beautiful and just…masterful songwriting, in particular, to her demographic which is why it was probably such a hit. Of all of the Taylor Swift song’s that has ever come out, lyrically, this one is leaps and bounds my favorite. Stylistically, not my favorite, but as a whole, good lord this is one of them.
So, you’ve read this far. What the fuck is my point?
My point is, because this whole thing does have a point is: “Reputation” is a bunch of fuckin’ try-hard bullshit that reeks of falsehoods, poserisms, and record labels pushing a product that their product cannot be.
Taylor Swift, despite being 20-fuckin’-whatever, can be extremely vindictive and spiteful and coarse and mean and crude and many other adjectives that can be used to describe a “woman scorned”. The thing about Swift that I admire, or at least I used to, is that all of her songs had this kind of “honest” quality about them. That she wrote them(to some extent), she recorded them with actual studio musicians(up until a certain point), and that when she performed them live she…I don’t know she…meant it I guess. Everything about her persona: Yes, she was pretty and blonde and the width of my wrist around and had blue eyes and was a sweetheart, you know, all of the things that traditionally make a popstar, and she was all of these things, but there was a part of her that you knew, behind all of the glitz and glamour and hairspray, and cat eyeliner, and Target endorsements was a person. And this person felt things and wrote those things down and sang them into a microphone and those things were things that you felt and maybe in doing so she relived all of those things all over again so every time she sang those words into a microphone maybe, just maybe, she felt those things all over again. And maybe the fact that every time she sang these words into a microphone and had to relive all of these things over and over again made them all the more genuine; that every time she sang them a small part was left of her on every stage between the Save Mart Center and The Grand Ole Opry and…Brazil or…something.
The point of all of this, and here’s a little bit of context about me in general, I love feelings when it comes to artists no matter the medium. To this day, and it’s still one of the things I strive for in my own personal “performance arts”(ska band shit) is the third top-rated comment on this video: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYhffKUGGlQ)
Which is the Blackbird Sessions version of Modern Baseball’s “Fine, Great” which reads,
And that’s where this all comes in: She had this quality in her voice that I loved, this, “I have a story, and it stupid but I need to tell it” quality that you can hear in her early days; days when she was a shithead 15/16 year old in high school that got her heart broken for the first time by some boy that was a fuckin’ dickfuck in the first place because he’s 15/16 and in high school and trying to figure out what in god’s name hormones are and what they do but not knowing how they can affect other people. The thing about early Taylor, and I think it’s the thing that everyone unknowingly loved about her, is that she was a person. She wasn’t this idea, this metaphor, this…this bastardization of what perfection is like Brittney Spears was in the 90’s. She was just a girl with a guitar and a pretty voice and she had some things to say about some dickfuck boy that was 15 and broke her heart. And she sang. And people listened.
And that’s what my problem is with “Reputation”
If I have to say I hate anything about anything in general it’s that I hate when people try to be things that they very much just are not. To my credit I’m pretty good at reading people. Even people I just met the day I met them. And I’m pretty good at picking out what people are and are not.
Taylor Swift is not this deep, “rebellious” hard-ass popstar that she’s being made out to be, at least with the release of her last few videos. She’s a girl that likes her cats, her…apartment or whatever, white walls(probably because of her apartment) and, making music. At least from what I can tell. She’s not the recent version of DC superheroes which are dark and dirty and gritty and have a whole fuck-ton of things to worry about like their parents are dead, the universe that they live in being in danger, being a half-robot in Detroit that has to worry about powering down and street youths stealing her hubcaps or whatever or not getting enough to eat or might fuckin’ die(Batman, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, and The Flash, respectively, probably). So because of this, a lot of her music that’s been coming out has been artificial, over-produced, structurally the equivalent of a thousand Hindenburgs, and, in short, CODSWALLOP.
In lay terms, for the most part her music FUCKIN’ SUCKS HO-LY FUCK.
So here’s the deal: Miss Popkween is Miss Popkween and has a deal with Target to do whatever the fuck she wants because she is, at this point, an unstoppable force to be met with the immovable object known as “American consumerism”. So because Miss Popkween has a deal with one of the largest corporations to ever have to do business in North America and has exclusive rights to her newest album, Popkween is at Target’s beck and call because, of course, they’re paying her by the dumptruck so she does whatever Target, her record label, and their puppets-on-strings tell her to do. They all think Taylor needs a make-over(again). They tell her to write new music(okay). And they say, “You need a new persona(Again? AGAIN). So Taylor Swift becomes this overtly-aggressive, thinly-veiled metaphor loaded, trap-backing-track equipped, “anti-hero” coming after Kanye West with “Look What You Made Me Do” which…fucking sucks dude. As a track, it’s garbage.
“Look What You Made Me Do” has been praised as this track that knows how exactly to administer “Build-up and release”. Which is something I don’t get. Because if I’ve learned anything about either of those two things it’s that one is not one without the other.
The “build up” that they’re referring to is the build up right before the “drop” in the chorus which is FUCKING BULLSHIT BECAUSE EVERYTHING JUST FUCKING DROPS OUT WHEN THE CHORUS HITS.
Holy fuck dude, this is the musical equivalent of blue balls and I FUCKING HAAAATE IIIIIIT.
“Look what you made me do” is the most horseshit fuckin “thrown together” songs I’ve heard since she released “Bad Blood”. And that song I kind of give a pass because there was no way that song was supposed to be released without SOMEONE doing SOMETHING over the top of it. Props to Kendrick Lamar for making it listenable.
Remember when I was talking about things that aren’t “you” awhile back? This is one of them.
“Look What you Made Me Do”(Heretofore referred to as “Look”) is the ultimate in “What the actual fuck are you doing”? Nothing about this song is Taylor. There are parts of it that I believe are Taylor, in particular the prechorus(at least”I’ve got a list of names, and yours in red, underlined” and the part of the bridge that goes “I’ll be the actress staring in your bad dreams”). But everything else, especially when you look at the music video for “Look” seems just so…forced and out of character for even the extras, those extras I mean Taylor Swift playing as herself in other music videos THAT SHE’S BEEN IN.
And, let me include the creme de la cream, “Oh. I’m sorry. The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh! Because she’s dead”!
HOL UP.
THERE’S LIKE A BAZILLIONTY OF YOU IN THIS VIDEO RIGHT NOW AND YOU SAYIN’ THEY ALL DEAD
COOL. Great. WHATEVER. That’s a blog for a different day.
The whole point of this is that “Look” isn’t a great song and here’s why:
Whoever directed the music video very much wanted to be the guy that directed “Thriller”. It has this feeling that it wants to be this really heavy hip-hop track because, in regards to vocals it is very much Taylor and Taylor and drum(machine) and that’s it. So it feels pretty empty sonically and in addition Swift says, “Is it cool? No, I don’t like you” which is a little bit verbatim for Swift not to mention the verbage in “is it cool” is a blatant question and not a metaphor or LITERALLY ANYTHING NOT TRYING TO HIDE THE FACT THAT SHE’S ASKING FOR ANY KIND OF VALIDATION.
All of that being said, the rest of the song is fucking garbage.
Write drunk, edit sober.
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