Taylor Swift - Reputation (2017)

One of my friends called Reputation “fun trash,” and I’m beginning to agree with him. Taylor Swift’s sequel to her 80s-laden synthpop tribute 1989 – an album I thought was incredibly solid and more substantial than her previous work – has all the components of today’s latest trashy pop music. It has celebrity feuds, horrible break-ups, dubstep hooks fused with R&B rhythms – it’s all here.

And I’m feeling somewhat…disappointed.

Granted, being someone who loved the music of 1989 and its trendy nature makes it pretty plain that I don’t care for just any pop music. My favorite pop album of the year was Lorde’s Melodrama, a beautiful synthpop record with some indie flair that subverted the lyrical trends of most pop music by showing what happens after the party ends. Besides the musical quality of the record, what I loved most was that Lorde retained who she was – an outsider wanting to offer a slight critique of what the industry pushes as its product.

Taylor Swift, meanwhile, eschews almost any sense of her former self, as we see in the lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” when Swift declares her old self dead. That’s a sharp shift, and it comes so incredibly soon after her reach back to her roots in 1989 that it makes Reputation almost uncomfortable. She obviously is trying to put on that “bad girl” persona that so many female pop stars have donned, making a darker, more mature record instead of singing about a Romeo and Juliet love story.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, but the problem comes when I see Swift doing more moping here than any of her previous records. Instead of the fun, rambunctious, playful girl in the music video for “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” or even the slightly rebellious character in “Shake It Off,” we get a narrator that is citing everybody else as being at fault for what is happening to her. It comes off as immature to me, and for an album that is supposed to be a darker, more mature chapter of Swift’s career, that is not a good thing at all.

There are still some highlights towards the end of the record, which is where I feel the music gets more innovative. “King of My Heart” has a bit of an indie pop flair, “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” is a cutting rebuttal of a former lover that has more of Swift’s trademark witty writing, and “Call It What You Want” is the one cut that goes for that hyped-up maturity and actually does a really of going to that darker place. Ultimately, though, these late-album highlights aren’t enough to save Reputation: for all of Swift’s talk about this being her big mature turn, it really just makes her seem even more childish than before. I might still have some decent enjoyment with this record in the long run because of its decent production, but as of right now its more trash than fun.

My rating: 2/5

My favorite tracks: “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” “Call It What You Want,” “King of My Heart”