Look What You Made Me Do: A Song Review

Chelsea Monteiro
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

Some things only come around every couple years. The Olympics, for example, or a good modern episode of The Simpsons. Something else you rarely get? A pop song that’s so bad, so inept in every way, that it demands review. Joining the ranks of songs like “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line and “Marvin Gaye” by Charlie Puth, we have Taylor Swift’s newest single “Look What You Made Me Do,” an absolute train wreck of a song that also serves as an absolutely brutal self-inflicted third degree burn.

Looking back, 1989 really was a better album than I gave it credit for. Serving as a culmination of her morph from country to country-pop to synth pop, she managed to expertly combine a songwriter’s touch to great pop hooks, which while giving us awful songs like “Bad Blood,” also gave us songs like “Blank Space” and “Style,” some of the best pop songs of the last five years. Most notably, the album marked Swift erasing half of her “country songwriter” history, removing the country almost entirely from her music, even if before it was mostly just some mandolin in the background. “Look What You Made Me Do” feels like the next logical step, seeing as how it seems like she’s removed the songwriter part as well.

Christ, where to begin. How about the chorus, which feels like someone told the producer what a chorus is, and he proceeded to make the opposite. Taking a sample from “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred, it stops the song dead in its tracks, instead of bringing it to the next level like a pop chorus should. The rest of the song is just as disjointed, with a simple main verse going into a pre-chorus with a straight up ugly vocal melody, along with a bridge that sounds like if Peaches decided to remove her wit and charm. The song as a whole is just unappealing from a musical standpoint. I saw a lot of comparisons from this song and “Swish Swish” by Katy Perry, in terms of pop princesses aiming for more of an electroclash sound, but that song at least had a flow to it, instead of throwing random sonic elements together. Also, there’s no line in this song as good as Nicki Minaj’s “offset/Offset” couplet. And speaking of lyrics…

There’s no getting around this being Swift’s pettiest song. And she’s been writing songs since she was a teenage girl. The song’s pretty clearly about Kanye West and that line from “Famous,” the one where Taylor was caught on tape lying about not being briefed about the lyric. The entire song sounds like a high school sophomore trying to sound tough, with lyrics about “having your name in red underlined” and being “the actress starring in your bad dreams.” And that’s without going into the middle eight being so absolutely awful it turns into second-hand embarrassment. Taylor Swift is 27. She is the same age as Adele, and she still has the same mentality as a fifteen year old writing a call-out Tumblr post about her friends.

There’s a lot more I could go into surrounding the song and Taylor herself. I could talk about her consistency with self-victimization. I could talk about her scamming teenage girls out of money through her ticket distribution strategy. I could talk about her using a line regularly used by abusers as her chorus. I could talk about her releasing this song on the anniversary of the death of Kanye’s mother, which is tasteless even if it wasn’t intended. But that’s not what matters in this review. What matters is that the song is abysmal, an absolute wreck of bad music and worse lyrics. It only makes me more anticipated for Reputation, since I can only hope it’s as terrible throughout as this song.

Score: 1/10

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