“Delicate” is built around a muted pulse and a murmured question: “Is it cool that I said all that? Is it chill that you’re in my head? ’Cause I know that it’s delicate.” She stretches out the titular compliment on “ Gorgeous,” making it a fluttering prayer and letting the rest of the line tumble out in its wake. These particular skills may have been hiding in plain sight-listen to the decade-old “ Our Song” and focus on the way she places syllables while rattling off “Our song is a slammin’ screen door!”-but they’ve never been highlighted the way they are here. Her best performances throughout Reputation are defined by cadence and rhythm, not melody: she’s cool, conversational, detached. Her interest in hip-hop and R&B is most apparent in her voice, an instrument that’s been stripped of its signature expressiveness. Songs like opener “.Ready for It?” and “Don’t Blame Me” are glittering monsters held together by Swift’s presence at their center. Her vision of pop, one she realizes with the help of Max Martin and Shellback, and man-of-the-moment Jack Antonoff, is surprisingly maximal: hair-raising bass drops, vacuum-cleaner synths right out of a Flume single, stuttering trap percussion, cyborg backing choirs. Say goodbye to maple lattes and hello to whiskey on ice, to wine spilling in the bathtub, to Old Fashioneds mixed with a heavy hand. (This is a trip that began the second the bass dropped on her 2012 song “ I Knew You Were Trouble.”) She’s largely abandoned effervescence, wonderment, and narrative.
TAYLOR SWIFT REPUTATION ABUM FULL
Reputation, her sixth album, isn’t a tuneless vengeance tour-it’s an aggressive, lascivious display of craftsmanship, one that makes 1989 sound like a pit stop on the way to Swift’s full embrace of modern pop. It turns out “Look What You Made Me Do” was closer to a red herring than a sign of things to come, a relief given how it neglected most of Swift’s generational gifts. Chart watchers rejoiced when an ascendant Cardi B bumped her from the top slot Taylor sent flowers. And to top it all off, she released “ Look What You Made Me Do,” a petty snarl of a lead single that jumped to No.
She induced the Streisand effect by taking legal action over a barely-read blog post that drew connections between her work and neo-Nazism, a decision that shone a new spotlight on her steadfast apoliticism in an overheated political climate. She stepped into back-and-forths with Nicki Minaj and her eternal nemesis Kanye West, when silence would have seemed optimal.
The Swift that stands before us in 2017 is beleaguered and defensive, a figure fighting back from public relations problems she largely could’ve avoided.
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