Reputation (album)
Reputation is the sixth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was released on November 10, 2017, through Big Machine Records. She conceived the album during a hiatus in 2016–2017, amidst the controversies that blemished her once-wholesome "America's Sweetheart" image.
Swift employed an autobiographical songwriting approach on Reputation, which references her romantic relationships and celebrity disputes. Its songs form a linear narrative of a narrator seeking vengeance against wrongdoers but ultimately finding solace in a blossoming love. Produced by Swift, Jack Antonoff, Max Martin, and Shellback, Reputation is primarily an electropop and synth-pop album that incorporates R&B, trap-pop, and EDM, with elements of hip-hop and progressive R&B. The songs feature maximalist, electronic arrangements, characterized by abrupt dynamic shifts, insistent programmed drum machines, pulsating synthesizers and bass, and manipulated vocals.
Before Reputation release, Swift cleared out her website and social media accounts, which generated widespread media attention. The lead single "Look What You Made Me Do" peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the single "Delicate" topped US airplay charts, and the Reputation Stadium Tour marked Swift's first all-stadium concert tour. 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 has been certified seven-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. It topped charts and has received platinum certifications in Australia, Austria, Belgium, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
A divisive album upon release, Reputation was praised by critics for its intimate songwriting about love but criticized for its production and references to fame and celebrity, which were viewed as harsh and derivative. Some media publications deemed the album disappointing in the context of Swift's celebrity, the entertainment industry, and the political landscape of the time. Retrospective reviews have opined that the initial reception was affected by the negative press and reevaluated Reputation as a work of Swift's artistic experimentation and evolution. Reputation was nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, and it was listed on Slant Magazine list of the best albums of the 2010s decade.
Background
The American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift transformed her artistic identity from country music to pop music with her fifth studio album, the synth-pop record 1989. Released in October 2014, 1989 attained a commercial success that turned Swift into a pop icon—it spent a full year in the top 10 of the United States Billboard 200 chart, and five singles peaked in the top 10 of the United States Billboard Hot 100 chart and received heavy rotation on radio for over a year and a half.Swift's heightened fame was accompanied by increasing media scrutiny and controversies in 2015–2016 that blemished her "America's Sweetheart" image. Critics accused her feminist identity and "squad" of female celebrity friends including fashion models, actresses, and singers, as being elitist; her romantic relationships with Calvin Harris and Tom Hiddleston as publicity stunts; and her political neutrality as an alignment with the alt-right movement. Her 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, was the culmination point. Swift said she never consented to the lyric, but Kardashian released a phone recording in which Swift consented to another portion of the song.
Although the phone call was later revealed to have been purposely edited after the transcript leaked in 2020, the incident turned Swift's media image into that of a fake and calculating woman. Swift became a subject of an "IsOverParty" hashtag on Twitter, where her detractors denounced her as a "snake". Her publicity was so negative that her victory in a sexual assault trial had minimal impact in improving her image, despite it being part of a wider, ongoing public debate about sexual misconduct in the entertainment industry. Swift withdrew from social media and press interviews despite a large following and went into a hiatus in 2016–2017, believing that "people might need a break from ".
Recording and conception
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. 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. 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". 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. 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.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". She executive produced the album and co-wrote all of its 15 tracks. 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. Ali Payami, Oscar Görres, 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". The track "End Game" features songwriting credits and guest appearances from the English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran and the American rapper Future.
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. 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. 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.
Musical styles
Primarily an electropop and synth-pop album, Reputation incorporates R&B, trap-pop, and EDM. It features a heavy, maximalist electronic production with EDM instrumentation and rhythms. The melodies are characterized by abrupt dynamic shifts, propulsive bass notes, pulsating synthesizers, and insistent programmed drum machines. Pitchfork's Jamieson Cox described the instrumentation as "hair-raising bass drops, vacuum-cleaner synths , stuttering trap percussion, cyborg backing choirs". Swift's voice is heavily manipulated, either distorted or multitracked. Critics found Reputation sonically heavier, louder, and darker than its predecessor 1989 bright synth-pop, with Neil McCormick from The Daily Telegraph deeming it "a big, brash, all-guns-blazing blast of weaponised pop". Swift associated Reputation sound with imagery of "nighttime cityscape... old warehouse buildings that had been deserted and factory spaces".The album's first half, made up of mostly tracks produced by Martin and Shellback, is comparatively heavier in sound. The first four tracks—"...Ready for It?", "End Game", "I Did Something Bad", "Don't Blame Me"—are particularly aggressive. "...Ready for It?" has an industrial production backed by a thumping bassline, "End Game" features sputtering trap beats, "I Did Something Bad" is punctuated by a dubstep drop, and "Don't Blame Me" has a gothic, gospel-oriented soundscape drenched in synthesizers, dubstep beats, and vocal harmonization. "Look What You Made Me Do" uses modular synthesizers, drums, and guitars in the second pre-chorus; it incorporates an interpolation of "I'm Too Sexy" by the English band Right Said Fred. The power ballad "So It Goes..." has an atmospheric trap-pop production. "King of My Heart" features surging keyboard instruments in the pre-chorus and thumping drums in the post-chorus, and "Dancing with Our Hands Tied" is instrumented with propelling beats and an EDM refrain.
The second half, mostly driven by Antonoff's 1980s-synth-pop production characterized by pulsing synthesizers and upbeat refrains, brings forth a softer, more emotional sound. Jon Caramanica of The New York Times described the change of tone: "in the beginning, is indignant and barbed, but by the end she's practically cooing." "Dress" features a sultry production with stuttering beats, syncopated phrasings, swirling synthesizers, and a refrain containing falsetto vocals. "Getaway Car" and "Call It What You Want" are two atmospheric synth-pop tracks. The latter, produced with an Akai MPC and strings simulated by a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, incorporates a subdued, trap-R&B production. The closing track, the piano ballad "New Year's Day", is the album's only acoustic song; it was recorded on an acoustic piano in "scratch takes" that do not filter unwanted sounds from the outer environment.
Influences of many urban genres, most prominently hip-hop, trap, R&B, and progressive R&B, and other subgenres including grime, tropical house, and Miami bass, coalesce on Reputation. According to Caramanica, its sound is "soft-core pop-R&B" and the musical influences are rooted in black music but Swift " them enough to where can credibly attempt them". Specifically, the drum patterns embrace trap influences and push Swift's vocals toward hip-hop-and-R&B-oriented cadences, showcased through a half-spoken, half-sung delivery. Cox found this influence to strip her vocals off their expressiveness and give them a conversational quality. Other urban influences are on such tracks as "Delicate", which incorporate a Caribbean-inflected sound and tropical house beats; "Gorgeous", which features hip-hop-trademark 808 drums and rhythms; and "Dress", an R&B slow jam. On tracks such as "Delicate", "Getaway Car", "King of My Heart", her vocals are processed with a vocoder, which NPR's Ann Powers attributed to the influence of rappers and R&B artists.