Misreputation

Or, the album that could have been

I didn’t attend the Eras tour in person. For one thing, I have two chronic illnesses and still live my life as if it’s roughly 2021, staying up to date on my vaccinations and masking in indoor public places and generally avoiding unnecessary outings. For another, even without the public health concerns of it all, I get anxious in large crowds, and the Eras tour—which I theoretically would’ve attended at SoFi Stadium, had I gone—would’ve been the largest crowd of which I’d ever been a part. For yet another, the chronic illnesses make the idea of standing for three-plus hours like something out of a horror movie. So when Taylor Swift announced that the Eras tour film—which I also avoided seeing in theaters, for similar reasons—would be available to stream online, I was thrilled. I’d been watching clips online all year, and I wanted to see it all come together as the cohesive whole that Swift intended.

There’s very little I can say about the show that hasn’t been said. It’s sprawling; it’s a feat of insane athleticism and stamina; it’s impressive; it’s moving; it’s a tour de force. But the thing that struck me most of all was unexpected, and it was while watching the reputation era.

I wasn’t a fan of reputation when it came out. It was the first week of my junior year of college when she dropped “Look What You Made Me Do” and its accompanying music video, and my overwhelming feeling was frustration. She had been out of the public eye for so long—this was the grand comeback she’d been teeing up? It felt anticlimactic at best, indulgent at worst. I had been such a fan of Red and 1989, and even as the rest of reputation trickled out, I barely registered it. Listening back to it years later with a renewed fascination, the word I most often used to describe it was “uneven.”

While watching the reputation section of the Eras tour, it was “Look What You Made Me Do” that felt like the standout track. The symbols that Swift deployed in 2017 played as more compelling to me in 2023. And watching her sing a song about retribution live, at the peak of her career and on top of the world, the word I most want to use to describe her aura is…one that Australians use freely but that I avoid in polite company. It was delectable, it was cocky, it was angry. And I couldn’t help but feel that reputation had missed a huge opportunity in tapping into that anger.

When Swift was named TIME’s Person of the Year, there was plenty of online discourse about her choice to describe reputation as a “goth-punk moment of female rage.” There’s the obvious, which is that absolutely nothing on reputation sounds like a punk song, and that wearing a lot of black clothing and eyeliner does not a goth make. Then there’s the issue of rage. Angry songs on the album are outnumbered by lusty, starry-eyed ones. Ultimately, while reputation was billed as a direct response to Snakegate, it’s mostly about the relationship she forged while recovering from it. Many Swifties regard it as more romantic than its follow-up, 2019’s Lover. Where Lover is peppered with anxiety and doubt about its titular relationship, reputation is a straight-ahead love story, a woman in the depths of despair who is joined by a man who is unfazed by the outside world insisting she is damaged goods.

I’m not saying Swift was wrong to make that album. “Getaway Car” is one of my favorite songs of all time, and songs like “Dress” and “King of My Heart” are beloved by Swifties the world over. And there’s something beautiful about devoting a record to the love story that helped you survive what could have been a career-ending setback. However, I do think that reputation should have been billed as a love story. More than that, though, I believe Swift should have made the album that reputation was supposed to be.

I consider, for example, a world in which reputation was an album performed entirely in character. Who would Taylor Swift’s Sasha Fierce be? I think of the character of Ethel Cain, the narrative constructed in her album Preacher’s Daughter, and wonder what might have happened had Swift written the story of a conniving evil genius who seems defeated, only to rise from the ashes even more powerful and even more vengeful than before. I imagine the contrast between the Swift presented in interviews—a goofy, humble, thoughtful, homebody cat mom—and the Swift she could have created for the album—a cold, calculating man-eater. I think of the camp masterpiece she could have created, an act of gauche, glittering sleight-of-hand that detailed exactly what went down in the summer of 2016 and all the events that led up to it, starting with the 2009 VMAs.

Maybe it doesn’t matter now, because Taylor Swift is maybe the most powerful woman in the entire world, and the narrative she has set is the only one that matters. Maybe it doesn’t matter because when you’re that famous, you are always a caricature, a disparate set of outfits and quotes and memes that people assemble in their minds in an attempt to know you as a real human person. Maybe it doesn’t matter because Swift went onto pen two fictional albums—folklore and evermore—with a complex cast of characters and stories that enabled her to do the kind of play-acting I was hoping she would do with reputation. Or maybe there’s still a chance for Swift to do something she’s been afraid of doing for so long—playing the villain.

The villain at the heart of reputation is still a victim. The brief posturing at breaking bad is undermined by the reminders that the true villains are the people who wronged her in the first place. And the fact that Swift—the supposed villain—still gets the prince feels like a tacit acknowledgment that she was the hero all along. Again, I don’t think she was wrong to do this. I realized in college, while stumbling through early attempts at real romantic relationships and friendships, that being a songwriter means you are always the hero of your own journey. We are the most unreliable narrators around. Even when we try to take accountability for our mistakes, we tip the scales in our own favor automatically, because we are the one telling the story. The other characters might be more sympathetic, but they’re not the ones holding the pen.

Right now, Taylor Swift is, by all accounts, the happiest she’s ever been. She’s drowning in money. She’s drowning in accolades. Every time she steps onstage, it’s to an audience of tens of thousands of people who know every word to every song she sings. And, after a life of doing greater things, she is, in fact, dating the boy on the football team. So now is certainly not the time for “goth-punk rage” in the kingdom of Swift. But, while I don’t wish for another Snakegate, I do look forward to the next body of work that Swift creates to challenge what we know about her—if we know her at all to begin with.