It's Swift's willingness to portray herself not as a victim, but the villain of her own story that makes Reputation such a fascinatingly thorny glimpse inside the mind of pop's reigning princess.
She's playing for bigger emotional stakes – this is an album full of one-on-one adult love songs.
At their best, these songs have a fizzing, pugilistic energy that recalls Britney Spears’ brilliant, mid-breakdown, screw-you-all 2007 album Blackout. At their least appealing, they’re still decent pop songs, but they feel generic.
Reputation’s hi-tech digital sound pushes Swift further into the realm of plastic pop. It is an ear-bending assault of warping bass synths, head-smacking drum patterns and deliriously treated vocals.
Over the years, she has been portrayed by the outside world: as the girl next door, the geek, the romantic, the marketing genius, the victim, the snake. Add them together and you might just get a complete person. Swift isn’t denying any of those facets of herself. She’s not excusing them. She’s just saying there’s more than one.
While ‘Reputation’ packs heavy artillery that was almost entirely absent from ‘1989’, it’s actually a helluva ride.
It may not quite measure up to the heights of 1989, but whether she’s Old Taylor or New Taylor, there’s enough here to demonstrate why she’s still one of pop’s brightest pop stars.
The pop star’s love life and squabbles take centre stage on a riveting R&B set that carries her even further from her country roots.
Reputation is an oddly bifurcated creation, half obsessed with grim score-settling and celebrity damage, half infatuated with a lover who takes her away from all that.
It’s as 2017 an album as you could imagine: a numbing narrative space that blots out the real world, where facts are tidy and stories are digestible and everything feels good enough to keep you entertained, at least until the next thudding chorus hits.
On Reputation, the Taylor she's chosen to show us is one that's more confident than ever. Her adventurous sound is coupled with lyrics that are drunker and more sexual than ever.
Reputation showcases a grown-up Swift, that's for certain. But she can't yet shake the fabled girl-next-door persona she has always written into her songs, no matter how hard she tries to play the Bad Girl.
The midas pop touch that ran through 1989, on which she struck the perfect balance between her past and present selves, is lacking here; she’s sacrificed some of it for such a wholesale acceptance of current pop trappings. What’s refreshing about Reputation, though, is that she’s no longer holding the mask so tightly to her face.
Gratefully, nothing on Reputation sounds like “LWYMMD.” In fact, after releasing a single that sounds as far away from her 2006 self-titled country-labeled debut as humanly possible, Taylor Swift on Reputation sounds more like herself than she has since 2012’s Red.
Reputation isn’t the failure that seemed possible a month or two ago; it’s full of bulletproof hooks and sticky turns of phrase. But in committing to a more conventional form of superstardom, Swift has deemphasized the skill at the core of her genius.
In many ways, Reputation is a failure. But fucking up until you find something that works is what being 27 is all about. In that respect, Reputation is the only album its creator could have made.
It's difficult not to read Reputation as Swift's first self-consciously "adult" record, one preoccupied with sex, betrayal, and the scars they leave behind. Appropriately, she dresses Reputation in dark, moody sounds, dwelling on drum loops and synthesizers.
Reputation is the boring screaming gesture on behalf of a marketing fleet, an advertisement reaching out expecting your righteous empathy.
Taylor Swift’s newest release Reputation is the hypothetical pop album we once feared. Here she is, an artist on the defense, an expert singer-songwriter struggling to grasp at current trends that may not be beyond her reach, but also don’t suit her particular talents.
Reputation focuses more on the pop star narrative than it does actual pop songs.
Taylor Swift’s Reputation isn’t a complete car wreck, but it is a hapless, facetious and an unconvincing attempt at making a whole generation familiar with a well-mannered pop star suddenly believe she’s got a heart of stone.
With Reputation, Swift seemingly has the idea that bigger, wider, and louder is necessarily better, but the dopamine rush that modern pop music can so reliably produce never arrives.
#1 | / | People |
#5 | / | Associated Press |
#5 | / | The New York Times: Jon Caramanica |
#6 | / | Billboard |
#7 | / | Rolling Stone |
#7 | / | Rolling Stone (Australia) |
#9 | / | Time |
#16 | / | musicOMH |
#17 | / | Slant Magazine |
#19 | / | The Independent |