Swift launches single from new album
Angry lyrics of new hit set tongues wagging
POP superstar Taylor Swift is back with a new dance-club beat – and a stone-cold warning that she is out for vengeance against an undisclosed person who crossed her.
The 27-year-old yesterday released Look What You Made Me Do, the first single from her latest album Reputation, which comes out on November 10.
Other than a duet with Zayn Malik for the thriller Fifty Shades Darker, the song marks Swift’s first new music since her 2014 album 1989 – one of the top-selling works of the past decade.
Look What You Made Me Do picks up much where the Grammy-winning 1989 left off with Swift, who had her start strumming her own country songs, heading definitively in a pop direction.
The latest track goes beyond the bubble-gum melodies of 1989 to reach into house music, with Swift sounding like a club DJ as she repeatedly states sternly over the beat, “Oo, look what you made me do”.
One thing that she was apparently made to do was accept the fast-growing format of streaming. Swift made waves in the music industry by refusing to stream 1989 as she accused leading platform Spotify of short-changing artists.
She ended her boycott in July and her new track appeared on major platforms including Spotify.
Look What You Made Me Do opens with unadulterated anger against an unnamed villain.
“The role you made me play, the fool / No, I don’t like you / I don’t like your perfect crime,” she sings.
Her fans immediately speculated online as to the target of Swift’s ire – if the song, like much of her previous work, is indeed autobiographical.
One likely candidate is rapper Kanye West. He outraged Swift with a song last year in which he boasted that he might be able to get her into bed because “I made that bitch famous” – an apparent reference to how he interrupted her acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
Swift – the fourth most followed person on Twitter and fifth on Instagram – reinforced the idea of a fresh start by wiping clean her social media accounts in recent days, instead posting images of snakes showing their fangs. — AFP