“Reputation,” Taylor Swift’s rowdy and sly 2017 document of exasperation and recrimination followed by blooming love, is, in a deep catalog of very fine albums, her finest. It is profoundly and disorientingly effective — sinister and hilarious and almost lighthearted in its viciousness — and also an experimental release from a superstar who had previously largely steered clear of formal risk.
“Reputation” broke all of Swift’s formulas, taking her from an underdog prodigy who treated every win as an unexpected thrill to a pop star willing to play in the mud (and hurl it at her enemies). It may not be her most representative work, but it demonstrates her versatility and her ability to engage with the predominant sound of the moment, and reveals a snarl that had previously gone unseen.
Last Friday, Swift announced that she would not be making a new recording of “Reputation” to join her Taylor’s Versions of “Fearless,” “Speak Now,” “Red” and “1989.” Those releases are the result of a long-running battle over the ownership of the master recordings of her first six albums. Swift has now acquired those assets — in a deal reportedly worth about $360 million, according to Billboard — so she no longer needs to produce an alternate version to draw fan interest away from the originals.
Which means she no longer needs to tinker with memory, either. The Taylor’s Version projects were foundationally ahistoric, grand-scale curios that muddied the place Swift’s originals held in the public consciousness. They also implied, via force, that Swift’s original artistry was somehow insufficient. And it relegated old recordings to relic status, largely in the interest of commercial concerns.
What they succeeded at, however, was acknowledging that for an artist with several generations of fans, some older material might benefit from a refresh and a reintroduction. The commercial and chart success of these albums — her remake of “1989” had a larger opening week than the original, the equivalent of 1,653,000 sales in the United States — suggested that old work, rethought and repackaged, could be as lucrative as new songs.
Not the acidic “Reputation,” though, which could have only arrived at the intersection of personal grievance and public disdain Swift experienced in the mid-2010s, as her dominance was being poked at from all sides. She was excellent and also mistrusted, wildly popular and yet somehow painted as an interloper. And there were the tensions with Kanye West (now Ye) and Kim Kardashian, then his wife, after a disagreement about how he referred to Swift on his song “Famous.” The Swift project, which had gleamed relatively peacefully for several years, was under assault.
So she pushed back. Her prior albums encoded private stories in a way legible only to those in the know, but “Reputation” is an explosion of animus and combativeness that presumes listeners will be as familiar with Swift’s real-life dramas as her music, if not more so. The tension is in the lyrics and the attitudinal production (especially the songs by Max Martin and Shellback). It was the first Swift album that didn’t lean into the genteel. Previously, when she was caustic, she massaged her rage into something reassuring and coy. But on “Reputation,” you can practically hear the spittle coming off her lips.
Swift even cheekily killed off her old self: “I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh. Because she’s dead!” remains one of her funniest moments.
That level of emotional specificity made “Reputation” a bold smash — to remake it would only make it worse. Swift conceded as much in ” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>the letter she released announcing the acquisition of her masters.
“Full transparency: I haven’t even rerecorded a quarter of it,” she wrote. “The Reputation album was so specific to that time in my life, and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it. All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposely misunderstood, that desperate hope, that shame-born snarl and mischief. To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in the first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it.”
Declining to revisit “Reputation” underscores both the limits of technology to recreate a work of tactile art, and also honors its divisive-at-the-time rawness. “Reputation” was an argument that artists should take attacks personally, and then use them as fuel. It almost sounds like the product of a dare — take Swift, one of the most careful songwriters of her era, and expose her to some of the most scabrous production in pop, so defiant that it forces her to adjust her vocal approach and tone.
It pulled wondrous things out of her: the most rhythmically sensitive singing of her career on “Delicate” and “Dress”; appealingly angry plaints like “Look What You Made Me Do” and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”; a celebration of wiping off the makeup of good behavior and leaving behind the smears for all to see in “I Did Something Bad.” The swaggering sultriness of “Don’t Blame Me,” which doesn’t necessarily sit cleanly atop Swift’s slim tone, becomes a powerful tool by song’s end.
She even recruited Future to rap on this album (alongside Ed Sheeran, but still).
For what it’s worth, “Reputation” is not a purely vitriolic album, especially on the second half. There’s the rapturous flirtation of “Gorgeous,” the classic Swift storytelling on “Getaway Car” and the album closer, “New Year’s Day,” one of the starkest songs of Swift’s career, and a reminder that underneath the turmoil, the purist remained.
Taylor’s Versions have been far more successful as a marketing project than as a creative endeavor (apart from the release of vault tracks, previously unheard recordings from each period). Initially, it was an intriguing exercise to forensically analyze the new versions for differences from the originals, some crisp and deliberate, others the inevitable result of imprecise photocopying. But Swift’s gifts are in her unvarnished capturing of the now; creating replicas has felt like a cruel joke, and an insult to the originals. The prior albums couldn’t be improved upon either — not because they’re perfect, but because they are the art that was true to the moment in which they were released.
And so Swift’s announcement that she will not — at least for now — see the “Reputation” rerecording through comes as a relief. What animated that album was something she never before had access to, and never needs to access again.
The notion of pop-star eras has become wildly overblown in recent years; incremental changes are treated as wholesale renovations, largely in the name of strategic marketing. In an age of relentless information streams, it is presumed that listeners want change, and so that is what they’re offered, sincerely or not.
But an era should be something that’s fundamentally unrecoverable. Something you couldn’t relive, even if you wanted to. Something you couldn’t recapture, even if you tried. Better to not try.
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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