New Z Reputation

[Vinnie Frevert]

Inspiredby Swift's romantic relationships and tarnished media image caused by celebrity disputes, the songs on Reputation altogether form a linear narrative about a protagonist expressing anger and vengeance against wrongdoers and finding solace in a blossoming love. Produced largely by Swift, Jack Antonoff, Max Martin, and Shellback, Reputation is an electropop and R&B album with elements of urban styles such as hip hop, trap, and EDM. Its densely arranged electronic sound is characterized by programmed drum machines, pulsating synthesizers and bass, and manipulated vocals.

Swift opted out of television and press interviews to promote Reputation. Before the album's release, she cleared out her website and social media accounts, which generated widespread media attention. The lead single "Look What You Made Me Do" topped charts worldwide, the single "Delicate" topped US airplay charts, and the Reputation Stadium Tour became the highest-grossing North American tour of all time. In the United States, Reputation was Swift's fourth consecutive album to sell one million first-week copies, spent four weeks atop the Billboard 200, and was certified triple platinum. The album also topped charts and received multi-platinum certifications in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

When Reputation was first released, music critics generally praised Swift's intimate songwriting about love but were divided by the production and themes of fame and celebrity, which some described as harsh and derivative. Some media publications deemed the album disappointing in the context of Swift's celebrity and the US political landscape. Retrospective reviews opined that the initial reception was affected by the negative press and described the album as a work of artistic experimentation and evolution for Swift. Reputation was nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, and it was listed on Slant Magazine's list of the best albums of the 2010s.

Taylor Swift described her fifth studio album, 1989, as her first "official pop album" that marked her departure from the country music stylings she had been known for.[1] Released on October 27, 2014, the album has a synth-pop production characterized by prominent electronic elements including synthesizers, programmed drums, and processed backing vocals.[2] It sold 14 million copies worldwide,[3] its accompanying world tour was the highest-grossing of 2015,[4] and three of its singles reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100.[5] 1989 propelled Swift toward a pop icon status,[6] with Billboard writing that it bought forth "a kind of cultural omnipresence that's rare for a 2010s album".[5]

Swift's popularity turned her into a media fixation; British GQ wrote that she became "a lightning rod for accelerating cultural anxieties about race, gender and privilege".[7] Her "girl squad" of female celebrity friends including fashion models, actresses, and singers, received backlash for allegedly promoting a false idea of feminism which The Daily Telegraph remarked as "impossibly beautiful women flaunting impossibly perfect lives".[8] Tabloid media publicized her short-lived romantic relationships with the Scottish producer Calvin Harris and the English actor Tom Hiddleston. A feud with the rapper Kanye West and the media personality Kim Kardashian over West's song "Famous", in which he claims he made Swift a success ("I made that bitch famous"), was controversial.[9][10] Although Swift said she never consented to the said lyric, Kardashian released a phone recording between Swift and West, in which the former seemingly consented to another portion of the song.[11] In 2020, the phone recording was proven to be edited to create controversy about Swift when the full transcript was leaked.[12]

During seclusion from public appearances, Swift wrote Reputation as a "defense mechanism" against the rampant media scrutiny targeting her and a means to revamp her state of mind.[19][20] She said in a 2019 Rolling Stone interview that she followed the songwriting for her 2014 single "Blank Space", which satirizes the criticism targeting her for dating "too many people" in her twenties, and wrote Reputation from the perspective of a character that others believed her to be.[21] In a 2023 Time interview, she described the album's creation as "a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure."[22] Although the media gossip was a major inspiration, recurring romantic themes of love and friendship that had been dominant in Swift's songwriting remained intact.[23] She recalled that amidst the "battle raging on" outside, she found solace in quiet moments with her loved ones and began creating a newfound private life on her own terms "for the first time" since starting her career.[11]

Swift produced Reputation with two teams: one with Jack Antonoff and the other with Max Martin and Shellback; she had worked with all three on 1989. By engaging a smaller production group on Reputation than on 1989, she envisioned that the album would be more coherent but still "versatile enough".[24] She executive produced the album and co-wrote all of its 15 tracks.[25][26] Martin and Shellback co-wrote and produced nine, and Antonoff co-wrote and co-produced the remaining six, all of which were co-produced by Swift.[25][27] Ali Payami, Oscar Grres, and Oscar Holter each co-wrote and co-produced a track with Martin and Shellback: "...Ready for It?", "So It Goes...", and "Dancing with Our Hands Tied".[26][27] The track "End Game" features songwriting credits and guest appearances from the English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran and the American rapper Future.[28]

Recording sessions with Antonoff mostly took place at his home studio in Brooklyn, with several trips to Atlanta and California for him to incorporate ideas from other producers.[29][30] He wanted Swift to capture her emotions at a particular time when "you can feel like you can conquer the world, or you can feel like the biggest piece of garbage that ever existed", resulting in a "very intense" record.[30] As Swift wanted to record the album in secrecy, Antonoff kept his studio computer offline to prevent a possible internet leak and deleted the trials once the mixing and mastering finalized.[29]

Reputation is primarily an electropop album.[a] It incorporates a heavy, maximalist electronic production with EDM instrumentation and rhythms.[b] The melodies are characterized by propulsive bass notes,[36] pulsating synthesizers, and loud programmed drum machines.[37][38] Pitchfork's Jamieson Cox described the instrumentation as "hair-raising bass drops, vacuum-cleaner synths [...], stuttering trap percussion, cyborg backing choirs".[34] Swift's voice is heavily manipulated, either distorted or multitracked.[33] Critics found Reputation sonically heavier, louder, and darker than its predecessor 1989's bright synth-pop,[34][39] with Neil McCormick from The Daily Telegraph deeming it "a big, brash, all-guns-blazing blast of weaponised pop".[38] Swift associated Reputation's sound with imagery of "nighttime cityscape ... old warehouse buildings that had been deserted and factory spaces".[11]

The second half, mostly driven by Antonoff's 1980s-synth-pop production characterized by pulsing synthesizers and upbeat refrains,[40][53] brings forth a somewhat softer, more emotional sound.[54] Jon Caramanica of The New York Times described the change of tone; "in the beginning, [Swift] is indignant and barbed, but by the end she's practically cooing."[41] "Dress" features a sultry production with stuttering beats, syncopated phrasings, swirling synthesizers, and a refrain containing falsetto vocals.[50][55] "Getaway Car" and "Call It What You Want" are two atmospheric synth-pop tracks.[56][57] The latter, produced with an Akai MPC and strings simulated by a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer,[58] incorporates a subdued, trap-R&B production.[59][60] The closing track, the piano ballad "New Year's Day", is the album's only acoustic song;[41] it was recorded on an acoustic piano in "scratch takes" that do not filter unwanted sounds from the outer environment.[30]

Influences of many urban genres,[61] most prominently hip hop, trap, and R&B,[47][52] and other subgenres including grime, tropical house, and Miami bass, coalesce on Reputation.[d] According to Caramanica, its sound is "soft-core pop-R&B" and the musical influences are rooted in black music but Swift "[softens] them enough to where [she] can credibly attempt them".[41] Specifically, the drum patterns embrace trap influences and push Swift's vocals toward hip-hop-and-R&B-oriented cadences and delivery.[51][65] For instance, "End Game" features Swift singing with loose, near-rap cadences;[28] Cox found this influence to strip her vocals off their expressiveness and give them a conversational quality.[34] Other urban influences are on such tracks as "Delicate", which incorporate a Caribbean-inflected sound and tropical house beats;[42][61] "Gorgeous", which features hip-hop-trademark 808 drums and rhythms;[66] and "Dress", an R&B slow jam.[55] On tracks such as "Delicate", "Getaway Car", "King of My Heart", her vocals are processed with a vocoder,[50] which NPR's Ann Powers attributed to the influence of rappers and R&B artists.[62]

Swift said that Reputation consists of a linear timeline: it begins with how she felt when she started working on the album and transitions to how she felt by the time she completed it.[24][67] Inspired by the fantasy series Game of Thrones, she split the album into two sides; one contains songs about vengeance and drama, and the other about finding love, friendship, and "something sacred throughout all the battle cries".[68] The series' characters and little hints to foreshadow the story lines, which Swift considered "cryptic", prompted her to finesse her songwriting and include "cryptic" messages through which she hoped to communicate with fans.[68] She identified Game of Thrones influences for certain songs: "I Did Something Bad" was inspired by Sansa and Arya Stark's plot to kill Littlefinger, "Look What You Made Me Do" by Arya Stark's "kill list", and "King of My Heart" by Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo's romance.[68]

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