WHAT MADE TAYLOR SWIFT BREAK BAD?
Alice Vincent explains how it all turned dark and sour for pop music’s sweetheart.
Her songwriting, once nuanced and emotive, feels consumed by a suffocating narcissism.
At 27, Taylor Swift is one of the most powerful women in the world. But Swift, on the brink of releasing her sixth album, reputation, on Nov. 10, is a changed woman: no longer a national darling, but something darker, dangerous and possibly selfdestructive.
The first hint 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.”
What has made Swift break bad? In 2014, she straightened her country-girl ringlets and went pop. Her fifth album, 1989, was the biggest-selling of the year, but ended up as an accessory to what became an even greater phenomenon: Swift herself. With the record, 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 sexualized; feminist but not divisive; powerful but not threatening.
That same year, Swift wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal criticizing streaming services that offered music for free, and removed her back catalogue from Spotify. She was embraced for standing up for artists’ rights.
But then came the backlash. Her now infamous “girl squad,” a group of supermodel, actress and pop-star friends whose glossy hair filled Swift’s Instagram feed, at first was talked about as a powerful expression of female solidarity, but the perception of it soon soured; 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 Tom Hiddleston — in the summer of 2016. 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 distraction.
Her social media accounts slowed down, then stopped. Before the reputation campaign, they were cleared.
She had always stayed quiet on politics for fear of exerting undue influence. But her silence ahead of last year’s U.S. election saw her branded as calculating in her neutrality. She could be forgiven for thinking that, whatever she does, she is damned either way.
Now, aside from those oceanblue eyes, she is almost unrecognizable. 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, unaware. 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. Where her previous albums have had a clear and unique musical identity, 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.
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 Mark Harris, the American journalist, 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 commercialize self-exoneration.”
What has regrettably got lost in this sorry tale are Swift’s achievements as a woman of influence. Her decision to take on Spotify displayed real strength. Earlier this year, she received praise — but not enough — for taking the stand against former DJ David Mueller.
She took Mueller to court for groping her in 2013 and won a symbolic $1 in damages; this presaged the current sexual harassment earthquake reverberating through public life.