This started its life as a draft of notes for reputation (taylor’s version) which didn’t happen. A lot of this was written sufficiently long ago that TTPD wasn’t even announced, let alone out, but… I think it’s fine? I went through and tweaked some parts, but the bulk of it I wrote in December 2023 and I wanted to leave it alone where I could. If you do not want to read Taylor Swift posts, you can opt out of this section through your subscriber settings. :)
reputation is Taylor’s screwball comedy album. I mean, OK, it’s not really—but it is, kind of.1 Specifically, like The Lady Eve or Christmas in Connecticut or Ball of Fire or Remember the Night, it’s a comedy about a con artist in love,2 that con artist being Taylor herself, the character she’s playing in this album.3
The brash bad girl of “…Ready For It?” (“knew I was a robber first time that he saw me / stealin’ hearts and runnin’ off and never sayin’ sorry”)4 becomes the flirt of “Gorgeous” (“you should take it as a compliment / that I got drunk and made fun of the way you talk”). “I Did Something Bad” quips about taking men for a ride (“so I fly ’em all around the world / and I let them think they saved me”). In “Don’t Blame Me,” she references this pattern again (“toyin’ with them older guys / just playthings for me to use”). In “Getaway Car,” we even watch her do it (“but I didn’t mean it and you didn’t see it”).5 And then in the very next song, “King of My Heart,” she’s dropped her guard (“’cause all the boys and their expensive cars / with their Range Rovers and their Jaguars / never took me quite where you do”). In short, Taylor the thief of hearts meets the king of her heart—add in the snake imagery, and you got yourself a Barbara Stanwyck movie.6
I’m a partisan of this album (though I wasn’t always). I think you can argue that Red established Taylor as a serious artist, that 1989 established her as a hit-making pop star, but—in retrospect—it was reputation that said she was here to stay. This three album run built Taylor Swift, Superstar.7 “Look What You Made Me Do” is dumb as hell. But it absolutely did its job, which was saying: the only person who is going to run me off the road is me.
There are a lot of reasons reputation tends to go at the bottom of people’s Taylor rankings (like “…Ready For It?”) and plenty of them are fair (like “…Ready For It?”).8 It’s very entangled in drama in ways that inevitably date it. I’m more forgiving of its missteps than I am of, say, Lover’s, because reputation’s bad songs are clearly part of a project.9 And it’s worth saying the “bad persona” songs on reputation are mostly done with tongue firmly in cheek.10 “Look What You Made Me Do” is a funny song. “I Did Something Bad” is a funny song. “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” is… uh… it’s supposed to be a funny song. Taylor is not doing a real villain pivot in reputation, but, like in “Blank Space,” she is having fun inhabiting a villain persona.11
And some of the album’s image comes down to choices Taylor made to foreground the aspects of the album that are abrasive and embittered, a self-described bait and switch. Since Red, there’s often been a big gap between the albums Taylor’s singles portray and what the albums are like,12 but it was never as pronounced as it was with reputation.13 If you wanted the real story—the love story—you had to listen to the whole thing. If you were just there for the Kanye headlines, you could watch the video for “Look What You Made Me Do” and stop there.
But if you were paying attention, each of the singles off of reputation got progressively softer—“maybe I got mine, but you’ll all get yours” to “I keep him forever, like a vendetta” to “it’s like your eyes are liquor, it’s like your body’s gold”—until you got the genuine sweetness and anxiety of a song like “Delicate,” with its “when I look into your eyes / I pretend you’re mine all the damn time.”14 reputation is barely about settling scores; it’s about letting yourself fall in love, even though you’re scared to.15 All of this silence and patience, pining in anticipation / my hands are shaking from holding back from you.… “Delicate” aside, the emotional heart of this album was never getting sent out to the radio.
And it was for this reason that when Taylor called reputation “a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure” in Time I was like… oh no. Oh no oh no oh no.16 Because her whole thing used to be saying: people missed what was going on in reputation. And she was right. So what was this? What was this, Taylor?
Whatever that comment was seeding, though… it did not happen. Instead, Taylor got her masters back and admitted she had really struggled with trying to record reputation again. Taylor used some of her re-recordings as a way of shifting the narrative and aesthetic around her albums—Red became a “sad girl autumn” album and 1989 became a beach album. Red also existed in an interested and moving dialogue with itself, in which Taylor preserves her feelings at the time while bringing a tinge of adult perspective. She had a reason to want to do something like this with reputation, which is that the main inspiration for the softer, romantic side of that album, her angel boyfriend Joe, is not her angel boyfriend anymore. And while I don’t really care about that, you know, it changes the tone from “the love of my life” to “a love in a life.”
But as she herself said, it didn’t really work. Despite the prologue of reputation, where she said don’t match these songs to guys, the meta-story of reputation was that by trying to take everything away from her, The Haters gave her her great love. And all the stuff that makes reputation a good album despite its dud tracks is because it tells its story so well. It’s too anchored to real life drama and too cohesive in its themes. The love songs have a tentative “testing the strength of the ice” quality that is romantic here and which don’t need to be re-contextualized for that bittersweetness, their brand of glass-half-empty optimism, to be clear. I love “So It Goes…,” with its mixture of doom and hope. Maybe this whole thing only works when it’s just the two of us in a room, but look what happens then. The humor of saying you did a number on me, I did a number on you, but who’s counting? followed by… counting under her breath.
What I particularly like about “So It Goes…” is the contrast between the album version, where Taylor sounds distant, her voice echoing and forbidding, and the acoustic version she did on tour, which is vulnerable and tender. I prefer the acoustic version, personally, but the two versions together encapsulate the emotional sides of the album’s love story, where our heroine wants both to be untouchable and unknown and touched and known. One thing about Taylor is that she’ll always bet big on love; no matter how many times it doesn’t work out, and no matter how bruised she feels, she will be willing to do it all again as many times as it takes. If nothing else, she made that extremely clear on The Tortured Poets Department. Taylor may make stupid choices, choices she will portray as stupid, but she’ll never say she has stupid feelings.
Is The Life of a Showgirl going to be reputation (2025 version)? Ever since
left this comment on the Showgirl announcement thread, I’ve been keeping an eye open for parallels to reputation. There are quite a few, including Taylor’s use of “So It Goes…” and “Gorgeous” in the promotional material. But… what does it mean? I mean, what does it mean for this to be reputation vol. 2, if that is what it is?The Tortured Poets Department was already sort of an inverted reputation: “I’m on top of the world, and I’m dying inside.” But it was more like Red in its willingness to be all over the place in terms of its sound. You had high energy, synthy tracks… and you had songs like “The Albatross”:
Premise zero of Taylor Swift Studies is that there are many Taylors, but one dichotomy we can draw is between “perfect Taylor” and “messy Taylor.” Perfect Taylor is 1989 and folklore. Messy Taylor is Red and evermore.17 Perfect Taylor is good, but—I like messy Taylor the best.
So one thought is just that reputation is both messy and perfect Taylor. reputation and Lover are the only Taylor albums that have no deluxe tracks. Showgirl will be, if Taylor herself is to be believed here, the third. But reputation’s also an album where Taylor tries a lot of things that do not always work. Even when they work, they don’t always “hit”—“So It Goes…” is, by the numbers, reputation’s least popular song. So maybe Showgirl will be another synthesis of messy and perfect Taylor. Or maybe it will just be something else entirely. We’ll see.
"But My Reputation is not a screwball comedy,” you say. “It’s a melodrama.” Yeah yeah whatever.
Some of evermore is also screwball dame–coded: “willow,” “cowboy like me,” maybe “champagne problems” and “gold rush,” “evermore” if you… squint… really… hard.
Also, I’ve always found Taylor’s hair and makeup on the reputation tour to feel very Old Hollywood—though, to be honest, Old Hollywood in a way that is older than screwball comedies. She looks like Lillian Gish? Or some other silent star whose name I’m forgetting. I wrote this footnote before “Clara Bow” and stand by it.
“…Ready For It?” unfortunately sets the whole story of the album up really well, even though it is also, well, “…Ready For It?”
I think “Getaway Car” might be one of harsher songs Taylor has written about herself, though it’s not really guilt-ridden either. It’s like “yeah, I screwed you over, but you weren’t exactly innocent either.” In the screwball comedy reading, however, this is the same guy as all the love songs, because he’s a mark before he’s Her Guy.
Taylor loves Barbara Stanwyck, incidentally. I mean, that’s on the record. She allegedly owns a Stanwyck-related piano (possibly the one from My Reputation, but I don’t know) and she’s cited Stella Dallas as an influence on one of her music videos. All the screwball movies I mentioned above are, not coincidentally, Stanwyck movies. Plus melodramas like Baby Face fit some of the lyrics in reputation pretty well.…
Fearless and folklore are the other two key albums here. I think reputation’s assumed a place in her fandom that is sort of interesting. On the last South American tour, the crowd actually starting chanting reputation!, reputation!, in anticipation of her announcing its taylor’s version (she didn’t).
Sometimes when reading through old forum posts you find people responding just the way you did:
Here’s how I split up the songs for reputation (preston sturges’s version), for the record. “Getaway Car” sort of belongs to all categories and no categories but for simplicity’s sake I’m putting it in the first one.
bad girl persona: “I Did Something Bad,” “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Getaway Car,” “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”
brash girl persona: “…Ready For It?,” “End Game,” “Don’t Blame Me,” “Gorgeous”
our con girl’s in love (“real persona”): “Delicate,” “So It Goes…,” “King of My Heart,” “Dancing With Our Hands Tied,” “Dress,” “Call It What You Want,” “New Year’s Day”
Taylor can be the bad guy in her songs, or be frank about her failings, and in other songs on reputation, she is. In “Gorgeous,” she’s clearly cheating on her boyfriend (who might be cheating on her), and so on.
this is, at least according to her, something she does on purpose
Of course now she never even does lead singles.
“New Year’s Day” was technically a single (sent to country radio) and “Getaway Car” was also technically a single (in Australia and New Zealand), but they did not get music videos so I’m not counting them. “Gorgeous” and “Call It What You Want” also were released ahead of the album but again, weren’t given music videos or pushed in the same way.
Much like Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, it must be said, the guy in this album is a total blank. (We are not talking about actual people.) Things we know about him from the lyrics of reputation include:
“he don’t try at all” (slacker icon)
“[he’s] been callin’ [her] bluff on all [her] usual tricks” (good at poker)
“[he] can make [her] a drink” (a bartender, perhaps)
“come here, dressed in black now” (he’s a goth-punk moment of female rage)
“you were drivin’ the getaway car… we’d never get far” (can’t drive)
“you are so gorgeous, it makes me so mad” (handsome)
“drinkin’ beer out of plastic cups” (poor)
“oh, twenty-five years old” (twenty-five years old)
“fly like a jet stream” (like Taylor, he enjoys private air travel)
“I’ll be cleanin’ up bottles with you on New Year’s Day” (he recycles)
In conclusion: screwball dames love their chumps. And Taylor loves guys who can’t drive.
Something I think is key to keeping your sanity as a Taylor fan is understanding she will always do this to you. She’ll always follow something where you’re like “yes!!! yes!!!” with something deliberately goofy and stupid. The evermore to “karma is a cat” pipeline.
Messiest Taylor is Lover which… well, it’s a land of contrasts.
Every time I forget and learn again that the most Stanwyck coded person to walk the earth since Barbara Stanwyck loves Barbara Stanwyck and I die a little inside (complimentary)(Her noir Stanwyck side is when she and Harry Styles or whoever ran somebody over with a car and kept driving)
"the only person who is going to run me off the road is me."
that's RIGHT