Taylor Swift's 'Reputation': Are sensuality and bitterness really the pillars of a strong woman?
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RCA/ Big Machine
I've followed Taylor Swift’s career from the beginning. I’ve admired her flair for storytelling, her ability to transform the mundane details of everyday experience into profound life lessons. I’ve also admired her knack for creating an endless number of catchy melodies. Being a fellow millennial woman, I feel like I’ve gone through the awkward transition from insecure, adolescent teenager to self-assured woman right alongside her. Yet I can’t help but feel that each of our brands of womanhood are worlds apart.
With Swift’s latest album, Reputation, the world has witnessed her complete evolution from squeaky-clean country sweetheart to femme fatale sex symbol. This shift has seemed to jolt many a critic and T-Swift fan. The synth sounds that she introduced on 1989 are center stage on Reputation. Gone are the guitars, replaced by layers and layers of keyboards and bass-filled drums. Even Swift’s voice goes through a vocoder on “Delicate.”
As John Caramanica noted in The New York Times, there is a shift away from Swift’s signature melodies into a style that uses her voice as an “accent piece, or seasoning.” (To be sure, “Delicate” and “Dress” retain the one-note melody that has worked so well for her in the past.) According to Caramanica, the songs of her new album “emphasize the cadence of her singing, not the melody or range.” This musical element is an appropriate choice, since it seems to reflect Swift’s move to further de-personalize herself.
Reputation is a coming-of-age album, showcasing plenty of “firsts” for Swift: her first on-record curse word (“I Did Something Bad”), her first time singing (repeatedly!) about consuming alcohol, and her first time singing overtly about her sexuality. Of course, boasting of sexual prowess is pop culture’s way of dubbing a female artist a true “woman.” Although Swift had been dropping hints for a while, from 2010’s "Sparks Fly" (“Give me something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around”) to 2014’s "Wildest Dreams" (“Tangled up with you all night / Burning it down”), Reputation is shamelessly drenched in the theme of sexuality.
