‘When they point to the pictures, / Please tell them my name’: Taylor Swift’s Self-Authorship (2006–2018)

NB: This essay was originally written for publication in 2018. I am conscious that the recent release of Lover (2019) complicates my argument in this piece, and will be writing a follow-up, also to be published here.

reputation (2017)

Taylor Swift is an artist who has always been invested in the creation and preservation of her public image. Having decided to become a country musician as a child, fourteen-year-old Swift convinced her parents to move the family from Pennsylvania to Nashville; not content with merely making country music, it was important to Swift to base her operations in the genre’s home city. A decade later, Swift’s transition into pop music on her fifth album 1989 (2014) coincided with her relocation to New York City. What we know of her business and personal decisions, as much as her music, indicates a strong desire to be, or at least seem, both authentic and in control: in every phase of her career, she has identified, worked on, and perfected a new style of music, fashion, and interaction with her audience. Close attention to Swift’s lyrics and music videos reveals consistent attempts to construct and lay claim to a series of identities, from girl-next-door country musician to empowered pop princess to, most recently, serpentine villain. This constant reinvention is both aesthetic (in terms of Swift altering her own appearance) and artistic, enacted in Swift’s work and her personal life; she is the author not only of her songs, but of herself.

The ‘spaces of authenticity, of affective investment’, which are constructed by and within popular music, are perhaps particularly to be found in country music, a genre with a strong narrative tradition (Swiss et al 1998: 280). Swift’s country albums (Taylor Swift (2006); Fearless (2008); Speak Now (2010); and Red (2012)) all participate in musical and lyrical stylings typical of the genre. Many of the songs are acoustic, dominated by Swift’s vocals and guitar, presenting Swift and her music as unpolished, unpretentious, genuine. Although she was accompanied by a band (The Agency) from Taylor Swift onwards, Swift has always presented herself as a solo artist: a singer-songwriter, a musician in her own right, often pictured in the early days with her guitar in hand. Swift is not the front woman of a group, but the star around whom musicians, backing singers, dancers, publicists, co-writers, and producers all revolve. At fourteen, she walked away from a development deal with RCA because she ‘wanted to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented what I was going through’ (Preston 2009). This decision — to leave the largest music label in the world because it wasn’t giving adolescent Swift the option to put out her own music immediately — evinces a strong commitment to self-direction and the appearance of authenticity: Swift has always insisted on writing about her own life, operating on her own terms, and controlling her own narrative.

From her early adolescence to the present, Swift has taken charge of her career — 2010’s Speak Now was solely written by Swift, without the help of co-writers, and she has at least a co-writing credit on every song on every one of her studio albums. It is unsurprising, therefore, that she would be preoccupied with the question of her reputation and reception; by presenting herself as the sole player, the architect of her own rise, she becomes responsible, too, for her own downfall. Swift has only ever operated under her given name, a decision which lends authenticity and authority to her music but also consequently collapses Taylor Swift the musician, Taylor Swift the businesswoman, and Taylor Swift the person into one entity. Swift’s attempts at self-fashioning are bound up with her relationships: the self she constructs in her music relies on the existence of an other, whether that is the subject of the song or an unknown listener at home. Her music itself is one twelve-year-long attempt at making contact, at reaching out to the listener; many of her songs, performances, and music videos are centred around this same search for connection on a smaller scale. This essay will investigate Swift’s construction of self through her oeuvre, particularly her attempts to communicate that self — to reach out to another who can confirm her identity — and concurrent attempts to memorialise, to fix in place, her identity and relationships. I will trace the development of the themes of self-construction and self-preservation throughout Swift’s first five albums, before looking in more depth at the reinvention which takes place on her sixth album reputation (2017).

Constructing the Self

John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, argues that ‘[a woman’s] sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another’, and that in order to ‘acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it’ (46). Swift, in her music, enacts this process — requiring her audience, or the addressee of the song, to appreciate her as herself, to act as a witness to her construction of identity. This process is both metaphorical and literal: Berger’s assertion that women are forced to turn themselves into ‘an object of vision: a sight’ corresponds to Swift’s aesthetic self-presentation (47). Each of Swift’s albums centres around a particular set of visuals — fans refer to ‘the Fearless era’, ‘the Red era’, ‘the 1989 era’ as distinct periods in Swift’s musical and aesthetic development. By paying close attention to her self-presentation and engineering her personal style to correspond to the music she is making at any given time, Swift achieves several simultaneous goals. Primarily, she positions herself as ‘a country artist’, or ‘a pop artist’, a girl-next-door or a global superstar, as appropriate. She demonstrates her meticulous command of detail and control over her reception, paying close attention to the connotations of her outfits or the images she uses in her lyrics and visuals. Her carefully curated aesthetics also serve an archival or memorial function — Swift is obsessed with time, memory, and preservation, and the division of her career into discrete, easily identifiable ‘eras’ corresponds to this concern.

Swift’s album covers, for example, enact the trajectory of her relationship to her audience — the listener, the public, whoever is ‘appreciat[ing] [her] as herself.’ Every cover shows Swift alone, without her band, positioning her as the sole architect of the record. There is, however, a progression from the naïveté — and professed authenticity — evident in the cover of Taylor Swift, which shows a teenaged Swift head-on, unruly curly hair set against a blue-green background and hand-written album title. Fearless and Speak Now function, sonically and thematically, as a pair of albums; both covers show Swift looking over her shoulder, a little more guarded, a little more groomed, a little more professional than on her debut, corresponding to a more sophisticated, complex sound. The Red cover continues this evolution, featuring Swift’s face tilted away from the viewer, the photo partially obscured by the album title. Red marked Swift’s initial steps towards pop music, and brought with it a more mature aesthetic: the ball gowns of Fearless and Speak Now are replaced by button-down shirts and 50s dresses. The cover of 1989 strikes a similar balance between naturalism — the Polaroid featured on the cover was reportedly taken by a friend, not as part of a professional photoshoot — and reticence, as the picture is cut off at the bridge of the nose, showing only Swift’s torso and the lower half of the face. With each of these five albums, Swift announces a ‘new Taylor’, or at least a variation on the old. Her musical development coincides with her aesthetic development; her self-fashioning relies on visuals as much as on her lyrics.

It is not only her own persona which Swift constructs, however. Something that recurs throughout her oeuvre is the construction of the other; the subject is brought into the song, apostrophised, forced to listen to what Swift has to say. The subjects of her songs are often directly addressed — she usually sings to, not about, people — and she sometimes goes so far as to name them (most famously in ‘Dear John’ (Speak Now)). Swift primarily deals in stories of love gone awry, appealing to lovers who have failed her in some way, and uses this apostrophic technique to bring them momentarily into the same sphere as her: for as long as the song lasts, they are together, in a kind of dialogue; she is able to say her piece (in Derrida’s phrase: ‘for as long as we talk to each other, even if to tear each other apart, to curse, to damn each other, the disaster is suspended, you are there.’ (1987: 128)). This is particularly evident in her first single, ‘Tim McGraw’ (Taylor Swift), in which Swift hopes that a high-school boyfriend will remember her when he hears a Tim McGraw song; she goes so far as to write him a letter expressing this wish, engineering the association between herself and the song. Swift’s song itself performs the same function as the letter: both are a reminder of her presence, both are sent out in hope of response. Swift’s desire to connect, like Derrida’s, extends even to contact which is violent in nature: in the music video for ‘Picture to Burn’, the second song on the album, Swift indulges in a fantasy of destroying an ex’s house and belongings in revenge for his behaviour. At the end of the video, he and his new girlfriend arrive home, and as he surveys the wreckage he calls out, ‘Taylor?’ — vitally, she not only wants revenge, she wants to be identified as the architect of the destruction, to have her efforts recognised and acknowledged; to be named.

Significantly, in the songs where love is successful — where the lover proves himself a worthy partner, where Swift’s attempts at connection are borne out — Swift not only speaks to the listener, but is spoken back to. Swift is constantly reaching out, demanding acknowledgement, and satisfaction comes when the object of her desire responds. Both Fearless and Speak Now are interested in courage, in reaching or speaking out when it is difficult to do so, as their respective titles indicate. Swift, in both albums, imagines herself as courageous, adventurous, bold; but she also imagines partners who mirror her. In ‘Love Story’ (Fearless), Swift reimagines herself as a princess and her high-school crush as a prince: the song’s narrative is a reworking of Romeo and Juliet which ends not with a double suicide, but a proposal. Swift’s fear of abandonment is articulated (‘I got tired of waiting / Wondering if you were ever coming around / My faith in you was fading’), and then assuaged by her partner, who not only responds to her anxiety with reassurance but repeats her own words back to her. In the chorus Juliet tells Romeo, ‘it’s a love story, baby just say yes’, and his proposal in the bridge ends with the same line: ‘Marry me, Juliet […] It’s a love story, baby just say yes.’ A similar trajectory is followed in ‘Mine’ (Speak Now): Swift’s repeated questioning of her partner (‘do you remember […]?’) displays her desire for reassurance, making increasingly frantic bids for connection as life becomes ‘hard to take.’ Her fear is unfounded, as the listener answers Swift not with ‘the goodbye’ for which she braces herself but with an answer to the repeated questions in the chorus and, again, by repeating Swift’s own words: ‘Do you remember all the city lights on the water? […] You are the best thing that’s ever been mine. […] You said, “I remember how we felt, sitting by the water […] You are the best thing that’s ever been mine.”’ In both tracks, the imagined response to Swift’s reaching out is not only an affirmation of the lovers’ relationship, but is an echo of her own words; she speaks, and is spoken back to on her own terms. Swift seems to desire above all to be seen and heard — to have the persona she has constructed confirmed back to her by another.

This fantasy of communication, of being heard and understood, is for the most part abandoned with Speak Now. Red is a significant departure from Swift’s early albums, both musically and conceptually: it contains her first ventures into pop, and has a clearer narrative structure, progressing from the beginnings of a relationship, through its flourishing and destruction, to the appearance of a new lover in the final track (‘Begin Again’). This structuring is perhaps an attempt by Swift to create meaning out of her own experiences; the listener may never speak back to her, but there is still a sense of narrative consolation. This consolation, though, is immediately problematised by the deluxe edition of the album, which features another three songs after ‘Begin Again’ — all of which return to the theme of failed attempts at connection. Swift recommits to the narrative of rebirth on 1989 — the album title refers to the year of her birth, as well as the musical era which inspired her new sound (’80s synth-pop). Swift referred to 1989 as her most ‘sonically cohesive’ record to date, emphasising its status as ‘definitively’ a pop album rather than a country-pop hybrid; it is also narratively cohesive, even more so than Red (McKinney 2014). In every album before reputation, Swift hid messages in the lyric booklets, giving sometimes cryptic, sometimes explicit, clues about a song’s subject or inspiration. In yet another divergence from Swiftian tradition, the messages in 1989 are connected, telling a story from first principles (‘We begin our story in New York’) to the very end (‘She lost him but she found herself and somehow that was everything’). As though we can’t be trusted to make the connections for ourselves, in 1989 Swift spells out for us exactly what she wants us to take away from the record: a moral of female empowerment and self-sufficiency (albeit one which is inevitably hollow, relying as it does on confirmation from another). Swift’s reputation, by 2014, was in decline; her attempts on Red and 1989 to dictate a more coherent narrative to her audience reflects a need to present a more coherent self, one which leaves less room for misinterpretation.

Preserving the Self

A corresponding concern to the need to be seen — and recognised — is the need for that recognition to last; to not only be seen, but to be remembered. Not only are Swift’s secret messages an attempt at communication with her listeners; they also correspond to her interest in materiality. Her work evinces a fascination with images and the visual: many of her songs, music videos, and live performances build on a network of signs that have been imbued with a particular Swiftian significance. Cameras and photographs crop up often: in her lyrics; as props or framing devices in videos and live shows; and even literally, within the physical album 1989, which comes complete with five (reproduced) Polaroids of Swift. This preoccupation with photographs corresponds to an obsession with remembrance, and in particular with being remembered in the right way; Swift wants to be recorded, but only on (or in) her own terms. The fact that Swift opted for Polaroid photos specifically during the 1989 era reflects an interest in materiality; opting for something tangible over digital photographs, as though the fact of the Polaroid literally existing in the world offers extra protection against the threat of disappearance. Swift is particularly concerned with time, and the threat of loss inherent in futurity; both her music itself and the material artefacts in which she is interested are part of her attempts to preserve the past, inscribe herself on the present, and defend against the future. Swift wrote for ELLE magazine that,

I love writing songs because I love preserving memories, like putting a picture frame around a feeling you once had. I like to use nostalgia as inspiration when I’m writing songs for the same reason I like to take photographs. (2019)

Sontag argues that, ‘photographs furnish evidence’; they are proof, and in the case of analogue photographs, tangible proof, that things happened and people existed (2014: 5). Sontag goes on to claim that photographs ‘help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure’, paralleling Barthes’ assertion that ‘every photograph is a certificate of presence’ (Sontag 2014: 9; Barthes 1981: 87), a conception of photography which perhaps sheds light on Swift’s need to constantly photograph or otherwise memorialise her life. Her songs, consisting as they do of tableaux and individual details rather than extended narratives, perform the same function; photographs ‘slic[e] out this moment and freez[e] it’, much as songs do; both forms consist of ‘reality […] summed up in an array of casual fragments […] significant details, illuminated in a flash, fixed forever’ (Sontag 2014: 15; 79). For Swift, both photographs and songs function as mementos; the fragments she shores against her ruins.

Beyond the physical photographs Swift has produced, photographs also function as a symbol for remembrance in her music. Just as the Tim McGraw song in ‘Tim McGraw’ prompts her ex-boyfriend to remember her, photographs cause Swift to remember others and them to remember her. In ‘Long Live’ (Speak Now) the focus is almost entirely on photographs, as Swift tries to memorialise her successes and her relationship with her fans, to prevent their abandoning her in the future. The song announces this thematic concern with preservation from the opening line: ‘I said, “Remember this moment.”’ Swift appears to have carried these memories with her into the present, but is anxious to ensure their continued longevity; although she initially promises ‘we will be remembered’, she later gives into her fears and in the bridge envisions a future separation. Once more, photographs have a memorial function: she ‘passed the pictures around’ as proof of past successes, and focuses on the future ‘pictures’ she expects the listener’s children to see — material proof that she existed. Specifically, she entreats the listener, ‘please tell them my name’: not only does she want the children of the future to know that ‘the crowds went wild’ — to be recognised for her art — but also to know her name, as though that holds some kind of key to her identity. It is significant here that Swift has always operated under her given name rather than a stage name; her anxiety about being remembered therefore extends beyond her artistic persona, as she wants to be recognised not only as someone who sent crowds wild but also as an individual.

Swift not only insists on being memorialised on her own terms; she is also interested in memorialising others, and memorialising their relationships — the need to have a witness extends back into the past, as though by proving that she had a relationship with this person, she also proves that she existed at that time. This tendency is obvious throughout her oeuvre, from ‘Tim McGraw’ onwards, but songs like ‘All Too Well’ (Red) display a particular focus on the assertion of remembrance, as Swift loudly and repeatedly affirms that ‘I was there, I remember it all too well.’ A similar process is at play in ‘Out of the Woods’ (1989), in the first verse of which Swift interrupts herself in the middle of describing a memory: ‘We were lying on your couch / I remember / You took a Polaroid of us.’ The present intrudes on the past, Swift insisting that she was not only there in the past but is still here now, remembering — an inherently present activity, but also one which demands the active participation of the rememberer. Swift’s focus on the act of remembering corresponds to her apparent need to be in control: the version of the memory which exists in the present comes from her and centres on her, in both present and past. The appearance of a Polaroid is consistent with this straddling of times: a Polaroid is tangible proof of the past, but its continued existence brings the past into the present. The repeated assertion that ‘I remember’, though, is not sufficient, and in the bridge Swift enjoins her ex to agree with her, to participate in a co-constructed retrospective of the relationship: ‘Remember when you hit the brakes too soon / Twenty stitches in a hospital room […] Remember when you couldn’t take the heat.’ The song makes a lot of use of repetition, creating an echoic and highly anxious atmosphere of interrogation, particularly in the chorus with its dual refrain (‘Are we out of the woods yet? […] Are we in the clear yet?’) At the end of the bridge, after the climactic build-up of repeated questions, the throbbing music falls away and Swift returns to plain, simple statements of fact: ‘When the sun came up, you were looking at me’, she reminds him. Swift clings to the moment described, suspending it within the bridge of the song, repeating ‘you were looking at me’ three times (it is a moment, typically for Swift, of mutual witnessing: ‘When the sun came up, I was looking at you […] When the sun came up, you were looking at me’), before launching back into the chorus as the anxiety takes over again.

‘Wildest Dreams’ (also 1989) displays a similar anxiety about remembrance. As in ‘Tim McGraw’ and ‘Long Live’, Swift looks ahead to the future, assuming that she will be abandoned, but hoping to be remembered nonetheless. Again, she provides the memory ready-made to the listener: ‘Say you’ll remember me / Standing in a nice dress, staring at the sunset, babe / Red lips and rosy cheeks.’ As in her other songs, the memory presented is primarily visual, although, significantly, in ‘Wildest Dreams’ the image described is a tableau — Swift ‘standing’ and ‘staring’ — rather than the dynamic collocations of images in both ‘Tim McGraw’ and ‘Long Live’: in the former she presents a montage of ‘danc[ing] […] all night long / The moon like a spotlight on the lake […] that little black dress […] my head on your chest / And my old faded blue jeans’; in the latter, Swift and her companions ‘danced’, ‘crashed’ through walls, ‘scream[ed]’, ‘[moved] mountains.’ This movement, from complex requests for remembrance (which rely on the other party to contribute to the process) to a simple static image, conveys an increased anxiety, as though Swift has given up on being remembered fully (or on the relationship being remembered fully), and instead settles for a single perfect fragment. At the end of the first verse when the chorus is introduced, she sings, ‘I can see the end, as it begins / My last request is // Say you’ll remember me […]’ — evidently, she is more pessimistic than in previous songs, the fear that ‘fate [will] step in’ having taken over and convinced her that the end is inevitable, even in sight. Swift is also, however, more aggressive in ‘Wildest Dreams’ — while she specifies a static image, the memories themselves are envisioned as dynamic, dogging the lover who had the gall to abandon her: ‘One day when you leave me, I bet these memories / Follow you around.’ ‘Wildest Dreams’ is the crux of Swift’s desire to be remembered: it is the culmination of the development of a paranoid streak, with Swift simultaneously accepting defeat, expecting that she will be betrayed, and predicting a victory, by which she will haunt her lover forever. 1989 as a whole functions as a last-ditch attempt to not only communicate, but to preserve: the album’s message is literally spelled out for us in the liner notes; Swift provides us with static images (‘Pictures in frames / Of kisses on cheeks’ in ‘How You Get the Girl’) as though we cannot be trusted to have any input in the process. She is no longer satisfied with offering up a collage of images which the listener can imbue with vitality; in 1989 she is dictatorial, no longer interested in a process of co-construction or co-preservation with her audience.

Reinventing the Self

If 1989 was an attempt to assuage public opinion, to set the record straight about Swift as a person and artist, it failed. The persona she tried to construct and communicate throughout her first five albums was decried as shallow or false, her work dismissed as petty and point-scoring, anti-feminist, immature. After getting embroiled, again, in celebrity feuding in 2016, Swift retreated from the limelight completely, breaking her decade-long two-year album cycle (1989 came out in 2014, but no new music followed until 2017) and avoiding public appearances until her notorious sexual assault trial in summer 2017. Swift’s testimony during the trial was blunt; although she has often been accused of ‘playing the victim’, in all reports of the trial she was confident and assertive. When asked why a photograph taken of the assault doesn’t show the front of her dress ruffled, she responded, ‘Because my ass is located in the back of my body’, later noting that, ‘I’m told [my testimony] was the most amount of times the word “ass” has ever been said in Colorado federal court’ (Dockterman 2017). This marks a considerable diversion from the kind of decorous language and attitude Swift typically adopted before 2017, and I contend that her testimony anticipates the message of reputation (which followed in autumn 2017): that Swift is not responsible for other people’s misreadings. In reputation, Swift abandons — or claims to abandon — the project of self-communication which dominates her work up to this point. Rather than insisting on a single reading of her work, she pushes us to accept the proliferation of possible meanings, choosing the hopefulness of endless possibilities over the futility of the search for satisfactory narrative consolation. Having tried and failed to reclaim the moral high ground after her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, reputation sees Swift go low; instead of trying to rise above the drama, she explicitly references it, associating herself with snakes as part of reputation’s promotion (the snake, as a motif, is both culturally invested with connotations of deception, and was specifically weaponised against Swift, in its emoji form, by Kardashian and her fans during the feud). The title and cover of reputation obviously indicate a preoccupation with public image: beyond the title itself, the black and white artwork depicts Swift leveling her gaze straight at the viewer; one half of the picture is covered in the name ‘Taylor Swift’ represented as hundreds of newspaper headlines. The artwork announces the album’s relation to Swift’s previous work, both alluding to and subverting the covers of the earlier albums; rather than gazing innocently at the camera, or hiding her face, Swift’s stare on reputation can only be described as haughty, as though she is daring the viewer to challenge her.

In reputation, Swift announces a rebirth. Her new persona opposes everything she previously stood for, choosing confrontation over peacefulness; vengeance over forgiveness; resistance over communication. The first single, ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, is particularly integral to this supposed reincarnation; in the bridge, Swift proclaims that, ‘The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, ’cause she’s dead.’ Not only does Swift explicitly disavow her previous persona, she also rejects an attempt at communication by refusing to ‘come to the phone’; there is no discussion, no effort on behalf of Swift (old or new) to appease the caller. There is, however, no single ‘new Taylor’ who replaces the old — instead, Swift adopts a variety of personae, rhetorical stances, aesthetics, and musical styles throughout reputation. This multiplicity of roles is anticipated earlier in her career: notably in ‘Blank Space’ (1989), which sees Swift satirically inhabit the man-eating persona ascribed to her by the media, and in music videos such as ‘You Belong With Me’ (Fearless), in which Swift plays both the protagonist and the antagonist. This latent interest in duality is fully realised on reputation: the music videos for the first two singles, ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ and ‘…Ready For It?’, both feature Swift playing multiple versions of herself. In the former, dozens of versions of Swift from different stages in her career fight among themselves; in the latter, Swift plays both a prisoner, who is being kept in an electronic cage and seemingly groomed for combat, and her trainer. In both videos, the idea that Swift creates avatars of herself, sending them out into the world and keeping her real identity hidden, is clearly conveyed. The proliferation of doubles in the early stages of reputation implies a multiplicity of selves that Swift, with this album, begins to embrace rather than shy away from, constructing multiple personae to protect her from criticism. Swift pushes the premise of ‘Blank Space’ further — rather than arguing with her critics, defying their allegations about what kind of person she is, she inhabits the persona(e) they ascribe to her. For once, Swift glorifies in the role of the antagonist: ‘I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me / I’ll be the actress starring in your bad dreams.’ She abandons the project of her earlier work, especially 1989, to dictate to her audience; instead, she chooses to explore the opportunities open to her when she stops trying to push her audience to accept definitive readings of her work; an ‘actress’, Swift leans into pretence and performativity. What’s more, the adoption of the villain persona guarantees that Swift continues to feature in the story, even if in a new role — she would rather star in bad dreams than none at all.

The different ‘versions’ of Swift in the ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ music video anticipate Swift’s dissembling about her identity on the rest of reputation; each avatar represents a different facet of Swift’s persona, revealing and obscuring simultaneously. In one scene, Swift lies in a bathtub full of jewels; the walls are covered in mirrors, but the mirror-versions of Swift behave differently to the ostensibly ‘real’ one we see first. In one shot, we see a mirror-Swift clap her hands before the camera shifts focus to the ‘real’ Swift, whose hands are positioned differently, in a way that means she could not have just clapped; another mirror-Swift is visible to one side, looking over her shoulder — again, it is impossible for this to be a reflection of the ‘real’ Swift in the foreground, who is looking straight ahead. The ‘real’ Swift in the tub is herself just one of many versions of Swift who appear throughout the video — she is not a reflection, but beyond that it is impossible to prove that she is any more or less real than any of the others. This multiplicity carries over to other areas: Swift released an animated lyric video for ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ before the full music video; another single, ‘Delicate’, has two music videos (the first, released March 11 2018, is a traditional music video; the second, released March 30 exclusively on Spotify, is one continuous vertical shot of Swift singing). The creation of multiple music videos for the same song points to a proliferation of meaning, each video offering a different interpretation of the track. Rather than imposing a linear narrative on individual songs or the album as a whole, reputation sees Swift embrace multiplicity and ambiguity.

Swift’s negotiation of identity on reputation is lyrical as well as visual. Throughout her career, Swift has tried to maintain her good-girl image, ‘girl’ being the operative word. Until reputation, Swift avoided all but the most chaste sex references in her music and videos and referred to herself as a ‘girl’ often, cultivating an ideal of innocence (often innocence victimised by a male antagonist, as in ‘Dear John’: ‘The girl in the dress cried the whole way home’). However, reputation sees her begin to suggest that one act does not define a person: ‘I’m not a bad girl, but I / Do bad things with you’ (‘So It Goes…’). Addressing her own fear of being persecuted for something she didn’t do, Swift imagines what it would be like to have done ‘bad’ things; ‘I Did Something Bad’, plays with this role, but also with ambiguity. Although the title is definitive, proclaiming that Swift did do ‘something bad’, the song itself is more enigmatic: the line ‘they say I did something bad’ puts the onus again on an outsider, someone who watches and passes judgement on good-girl Swift. To complicate the situation further, Swift does seem to have done the (bad?) thing, and to be unrepentant: ‘But why’s it feel so good? / Most fun I’ve ever had / And I’d do it over and over again if I could.’ In the verses, she implies that she knows exactly what she’s doing (‘so I play ’em like a violin […] I don’t regret it one bit, ’cause he had it coming’). In the bridge she changes tack again, warning that ‘they’re burning all the witches, even if you aren’t one’ — the implication being that she is innocent after all. Finally, she accepts her fate, deserved or not: ‘so light me up.’ Although the song ends on the repeated line ‘it just felt so good’, as though Swift is glorying in her bad decisions, it is followed a few tracks later by the album’s lead single, ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, in which Swift again lays the blame for her actions on others; reputation problematises the good / bad dichotomy that the younger Swift so carefully observed.

What’s more, the ‘old Taylor’ is arguably not dead at all. The ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ music video opens with a zombie Swift crawling out of a grave — dressed, significantly, in the same outfit Swift wears in the ‘Out of the Woods’ music video. ‘Out of the Woods’ was the last video of the 1989 era, so the emergence of the zombie here problematises 1989’s narrative consolation — what Swift attempted to bury in 2014–15 will not stay dead. Rather than putting the past behind her and moving on, reputation sees Swift excavate her past more than ever: the motif of the ouroboros, which appears in the ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ lyric video, is a pertinent metaphor for the way the supposedly ‘new’ Taylor feeds on the old. Fears expressed in Swift’s early work are revisited in reputation — rather than inventing male companions to assuage them, or trying to anticipate and avoid them, Swift addresses her own fears head-on. She tries on the vindictive persona ascribed to her by the media; she subverts her fears of being locked up, especially for something she didn’t do, or left alone without an audience; she accepts that she is always being watched. Instead of letting these fears — all of which are to do with her public image, her reception, her reputation — dominate her life, Swift enacts them, recontextualising them as luxurious or pleasurable, even sexual, experiences.

Imagery of imprisonment recurs throughout the album. In the opening track, ‘…Ready For It?’, Swift imagines a partner as ‘my jailer.’ In ‘So It Goes…’ she is in a ‘gold cage, hostage to my feelings / Back against the wall’ and the ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ music video also sees Swift inside in a golden birdcage, eating lobster — a particularly luxurious kind of imprisonment. As an album, reputation exhibits something of an interest in BDSM, and ‘So It Goes…’ is one of its most explicitly sexual tracks; in this context, Swift’s depiction of herself as a ‘hostage’ feels more like sexual roleplay, her ‘back against the wall’ the precursor to an amorous encounter rather than a death sentence. Swift’s fear of imprisonment is recontextualised as something indulgent or sexually exciting. She similarly subverts her fear of abandonment in ‘…Ready For It?’, which picks up on the same anxieties about the future and memorialising as ‘Wildest Dreams’, and even incorporates similar themes and imagery. In ‘…Ready For It?’ she is more confident: even though she ‘see[s] how this is gon’ go’, she promises her lover, ‘touch me and you’ll never be alone.’ No longer does Swift ask for reassurance that she will be remembered; instead, she assures her lover that he won’t be able to forget her. This changed focus, this recontextualisation and resignification, occurs throughout reputation; whereas a younger Swift chronicled her desire for and fear of losing success, she now disregards fame and material gains in favour of romantic intimacy. In ‘Long Live’, she tried to preserve the moment when ‘a band of thieves in ripped-up jeans got to rule the world’, but by ‘King of My Heart’, the tenth track on reputation, she has ‘change[d] [her] priorities’ and is satisfied to ‘rule the kingdom inside [her] room’ with her new lover by her side. In many of the songs on the album, Swift lines up signifiers of luxury and success before undercutting them, a process of de- and re-signifying which is particularly evident in the reputation World Tour visuals:

There is gold everywhere — on microphones, on the props, in the costumes — and a general atmosphere of ridiculous luxury, which is consistently undercut by Swift’s lyrics. […] she brings out all these signifiers of over-indulgent wealth only to proclaim that ‘The taste of your lips is my idea / Of luxury’ (‘King of My Heart’). (Watkinson 2018)

Later on in the album, she demonstrates similar acceptance of her fear of having her relationships gossiped about (‘Call It What You Want’) and of losing a lover (‘New Year’s Day’). The former song is explicitly addressed to the public; the titular ‘it’ is Swift’s relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. Throughout reputation, Swift invites her critics to do their worst, defying them to say anything about her that she won’t say herself. Her reputation, as the ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ music video makes clear early on, is dead and buried: one of the first shots is of a tombstone inscribed, ‘HERE LIES TAYLOR SWIFT’S REPUTATION’, and — unlike the grave from which zombie Swift emerges — this plot remains undisturbed. Swift rewrites the narrative of selfhood put forth by her earlier work, deconstructing and resurrecting in new forms both her anxieties and the persona(e) that expressed them.

Swift’s focus on memorialising, too, lessens on reputation; although ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, as the lead single, announces a certain preoccupation with the past (‘all I think about is karma’), this is revealed, by the rest of the album’s focus on the present and on Swift’s new relationship, to be tongue-in-cheek. ‘…Ready For It?’ explicitly dismisses Swift’s preoccupation with remembrance, saying of her exes, ‘I forget their names now’ (particularly significant given Swift’s previous observation of the preservative function of names and naming: ‘I’ll write your name’, she threatens in ‘Blank Space’). On reputation, ‘…Ready For It?’ promises, we will encounter a new Swift who inhabits the present tense, not the past; a Swift who is comfortable with uncertainty, who can ‘take [her] time’ waiting for what she wants. By excavating her own archives and dressing up as herself, and then killing herself off, Swift corrupts the sanctity she previously seemed to bestow on the past; it, along with everything else in reputation, becomes something to play with rather than worship.

Conclusion

Swift signed with Big Machine Records in 2005, and put out her self-titled debut with them the following year. Her decision, in 2018, to leave the Nashville-based independent label for Republic Records and Universal Music Group signals the cutting of the last cord tethering Swift to her country roots — the last vestige of the ‘authenticity’ on which Swift built her early brand is gone, replaced by a commitment to the future, to making it new. If there is a new Taylor, her only defining feature is that she cannot be defined; Swift’s move to a new label corresponds to her move away from definition, towards the freedom to adopt different personae, musical styles, and rhetorical stances simultaneously in order to play with received notions of identity and artistry. What perhaps particularly distinguishes her from other musicians working today who display an interest in the construction of artistic personae is Swift’s move toward artificiality as her career has progressed; beginning as a highly authentic, home-grown country musician and developing into a pop star who glories in performativity and artifice. Artists like Lady Gaga and Marina have explored a similar process in their careers: Gaga’s 2016 album Joanne signified almost a reversal of Swift’s trajectory — a move away from artificiality, towards more country-oriented visuals and a stripped-down soft rock sound. Marina created the character of ‘Electra Heart’ for her 2012 concept album Electra Heart, using the framework of the album to explore the character of Heart before killing her off in the music video for the title track (released in 2013, effecting the end of the album’s lifespan as well as the fictional Heart’s). While Marina and Gaga both use stage names and cultivate surreal, or at the very least unconventional, public images, Swift has (until recently) created work which is ostensibly autobiographical and honest rather than conceptual and imaginative.

The seemingly abrupt renegotiation which takes place on reputation is in fact anticipated by Swift’s increasingly frantic attempts at self-construction and self-preservation throughout her first five albums. By reputation, Swift has come to recognise that ‘the self that is the center of all autobiographical narrative is necessarily a fictive structure’ (Eakin 1992: 3). Marking a turning point in Swift’s career, reputation completes the trajectory Baudrillard describes in Simulacra and Simulation: from Swift’s early albums, ‘signs that dissimulate something’ to reputation, which ‘dissimulate[s] that there is nothing’ (6) — reputation is all performance, art which delights in its own artifice (and status as artefact) rather than trying to reduce the gap between representation and meaning. Throughout the album, Swift picks themes from her earlier work and revises them, retreating into ambiguity and unknowability. On the reputation World Tour, Swift performed mash-ups of songs from reputation and her past albums, excavating her own oeuvre and re-working her old songs into something new:

[The songs are] literally being broken down and resurrected as something new — as Swift claims to have recently experienced herself. The first mash-up takes her breakout single, ‘Love Story’ and follows it with ‘You Belong With Me’, another single from the same album (2008’s Fearless) about waiting for a boy to notice you. The two songs work well together because of this shared thematic concern — in the context of reputation, though, they are too earnest and passive for the New Taylor to really get behind; what was once a romantic teenage daydream becomes a tongue-in-cheek performance against a kitsch background of lurid pink and pulsing hearts. (Watkinson 2018)

It is possible to read the latter half of reputation as Swift relinquishing her perpetual project of asserting control. Swift has claimed that reputation follows a linear timeline, beginning with songs from when she started working on the album and ending with those written later on (Cleary 2017); part one of the album is bookended by the ellipses in the titles of ‘…Ready For It?’ (track one) and ‘So It Goes…’ (track seven, halfway to fifteen). While the album begins with production-heavy pop songs about Swift’s reputation and the beginning stages of relationships, the later songs are slower and less upbeat — with the notable exception of ‘This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things’ (track thirteen — famously Swift’s favourite number). The song begins with siren sounds, interrupting the romantic atmosphere of the second half of the album, and focuses on those who have wronged Swift. In the bridge, she toasts her ‘real friends’, her mother, and her partner, and even pretends to toast her enemies, patronisingly explaining that ‘forgiveness is a nice thing to do’, before interrupting herself with a loud cackle and proclaiming ‘I can’t even say it with a straight face’ before launching back into the passive aggressive chorus. In the final two tracks, ‘Call It What You Want’ and ‘New Year’s Day’, Swift claims to relinquish her long-standing desire for control and security: she seems to abandon the attempt to dictate to her audience, accepting that they will ‘call it what you want’ and finding reassurance in the knowledge that her partner ‘really knows [her] / Which is more than they can say’ (‘Call It What You Want’). Similarly, in ‘New Year’s Day’, Swift claims to be happy inhabiting the present tense of her relationship, enjoining her partner not to ‘read the last page’ of their story together. However, she cannot resist voicing her fear of abandonment once more, pleading, ‘please don’t ever become a stranger.’ While Swift claims to be focusing on their present happiness and disregarding public opinion, her persistent need to preserve their relationship ‘forevermore’ (‘New Year’s Day’) and insistence that she is ‘doing better than [she] ever was’ (‘Call It What You Want’) belie a continuing anxiety.

Throughout reputation Swift addresses a listener or an audience, but never, in the lyrics or videos, receives a response from them: the music videos (for her solo tracks — ‘End Game’, her collaboration with Future and Ed Sheeran, necessarily features both artists) feature only Swift in the starring role, with no male counterpart, even when the song’s narrative would seem to demand one. Rather than reaching out to another person, she chooses to turn inwards, creating alternative versions of herself when necessary. At the end of the ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ music video, fourteen versions of Swift are left standing in an airplane hangar — and a fifteenth watches them bicker from the background, positioned above them on top of a plane she has destroyed (and spray-painted the word ‘reputation’ onto). There is an implication that this Swift is somehow in charge; similar to the version of Swift that we see in the ‘…Ready For It?’ video, who controls her avatar. Swift’s request, in 2016, to be ‘excluded from this narrative’, is proven, on reputation, to be insincere: what Swift wants above all is to be its author. Reputation has multiple narratives — unlike 1989, whose story is explicitly spelled out, reputation combines love story with revenge fantasy, allowing Swift to hop between genres and personae at will. She reuses symbols and themes from her previous albums, producing something which is both vastly different to and a continuation of her work to date. Rather than dictating to us, Swift suggests; instead of explaining herself, she retreats into obscurity. Reputation, ultimately, is a paradoxical affirmation of Swift’s total control over the narrative through the pretence of relinquishing control. ‘Call It What You Want’ neatly distils the essence of the reputation era: Swift insisting that she doesn’t care about public opinion, while doing her best to contradict it — we can call it what we want, she seems to be saying, but we should probably call it what she wants us to.

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