Taylor Swift wasn’t the only one with a reputation.
For as long as I can remember, I have listened almost exclusively to Christian music. My parents were Southern Gospel enthusiasts, so I grew up listening to Southern Gospel all the time. We would listen to Sirius XM’s Gospel station every time we rode in the car and to Sirius XM’s Southern Gospel channel on our TV every time we cleaned our house and, of course, I grew up listening to and singing Christian music at my church. I even remember watching the Southern Gospel special on PBS every Saturday night.
Of course, I went through phases. My parents love to bring up my Shania Twain obsession that I apparently had at three years old, an obsession that included repeatedly begging my parents to play her soundtracks, memorizing the words to every song and dancing and mimicking her movements from her taped performances. And yes, while it’s even more embarrassing to admit, I went through a Hannah Montana phase in fifth grade.
It seems that I’ve always sort of listened to secular music in pockets. I’m always amazed at the people who seem to know every single lyric to every single song known to man. I would play or download a popular song that I heard about or that I had listened to and thought was cool here and there, but Christian music has always been the central thread in my listening experiences. I moved from Southern Gospel to Christian contemporary at some point during my childhood, and K-Love became my go-to station in high school.
I had a reputation for my affinity for Christian music. Every time I drove someone in my truck, K-Love played on the radio. I was even frequently teased by my U.S. Government class my senior year of high school after being the only one to raise my hand in response when my teacher asked if there was anyone who listened to just one radio station. I was known as the “good student” and the “K-Love guy.”
Things began to change towards the end of my first year of college. I had grown tired of K-Love’s repetitive playlist, a common complaint among Christians. My favorite genre other than Gospel or Christian contemporary was pop, so I decided to make the switch to FM 100, a local pop station (which, I soon discovered, had a playlist just as repetitive).
FM 100 had introduced me to a whole new world. I felt almost like a rebel. Christian music was what I had been accustomed to, so it felt wrong to stop listening to and singing songs about Jesus all the time, thinking somehow that my newfound taste for pop music was a regression or a threat to my faith, that God would look down upon me for exchanging beautiful, truth-filled, Christ-centered songs for brief periods of worldly, people-centered, self-gratifying songs. In a sense, I felt as if I was somehow losing an “innocence.”
I’ve always been a Taylor Swift fan. By fan, I mean that I enjoyed listening to her top-charted songs every once and a while, but it wasn’t until her latest album, Reputation, was released this past fall that I became a hardcore fan.
In many ways, her new album parallels my transition from Christian music to pop music. Swift’s new album is a departure from the innocence that she expresses on her previous albums. She’s now drinking, sleeping with men and throwing in her first real curse word. Her persona and the tone of her music shifts dramatically on this album; her music is edgier and more “mature,” a complete transformation from her early country days and last pop album. Swift’s transformation is never more apparent than when she utters her famous line in “Look What You Made Me Do”: “I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead.”
Not only does Swift’s tone change, but her themes and audience change as well. Instead of targeting her ex-lovers as she did on her previous albums, she embraces her lovers. Switching back and forth between addressing her lover (or love interest) and responding to rumors about her public feuds with celebrities like Calvin Harris and Kanye West, she seems to not only target her enemies, but also the naysayers who have abandoned her. Swift is still a vindictive victim, but she’s fighting back harder.
In hindsight, Swift’s transformation from naiveté to worldliness was inevitable; it’s the way all of the young artists have gone in the past decade (i.e. Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato). While I don’t agree with Swift’s seeming celebration of her sins, she does shift the focus from others’ flaws and mistakes and expose her own broken and flawed nature in Reputation. It humanizes her in a way, and I believe that that is what has made Reputation her most popular album.
The album itself offers a blend of different styles, from her vengeful and defiant “Look What You Made Me Do” to her bold and sensual “Ready for It?” to her breezy hip-hop collaboration with Ed Sheeran and Future on “End Game” to her sweet ballad “New Year’s Day.” All of the songs are catchy, perhaps with the exception of “Delicate,” a song with lyrics that I just can’t seem to recall other than “del-i-cate.”
My least favorite songs on the album, “I Did Something Bad” and “Dress”, are based solely upon their messages. “I Did Something Bad” is extremely catchy, but I’m always turned off by the lyrics: “They say I did something bad… and I’d do it over and over and over again if I could. It just felt so good.” The underlying message is that it is okay to do whatever you want as long as it brings you pleasure. “Dress” is also pretty catchy, but its catchiness is not enough to make up for its explicit sensuality: “Carve your name into my bedpost, because I don’t want you like a best friend. Only bought this dress so you could take it off, take it ah-ah-ah-ah-off.”
My absolute favorite song from the album is its final song, “New Year’s Day.” With soft piano music playing in the background throughout, Swift sweetly compares love to New Year’s Day and successfully captures what love, and ultimately marriage, is supposed to look like. Love may be easy and exciting on New Year’s Eve, but Swift explores what happens when all of the excitement and celebrations are over and you must actually face the tough realities of life together: “I want your midnights, but I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day.” Relationships take work, and in no other song is this concept more apparent than in this one.
Taylor Swift and Reputation represented everything about the shift that I had experienced over the summer. Swift and I both underwent a major change in the content and genre of our music, in a sense losing our strictly “pure” images and “reputations.” We had both ventured into mostly unknown territory and turned to music that revealed man’s flaws. We had responded to our detractors by doing the unexpected.
I still love to listen to Southern Gospel and Christian contemporary music, and I still enjoy the old Taylor Swift, but listening to a wider variety of music has given me a deeper appreciation for that type of music and an opportunity to connect with more people. Undoubtedly, this is also Swift’s goal for expanding her musical range: to connect with more people.
