Song: “Look What You Made Me Do”
Singer: Taylor Swift
Album: ‘Reputation’
Song Writers: Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff, Fred Fairbrass, Rob Manzoli
It’s Taylor Swift’s birthday today, and boy she has had quite a year. Last year, with her tiff with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian escalating on social media, Swift, quite uncharacteristically, went underground briefly, and surprised us this year with her album Reputation. The first single ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ is, for the lack of a better word, lit – as the millennials would say.
The song marked the death of another pop culture icon – the old Taylor Swift. In this song, she ditches her goody-two-shoes music video characters and embraces a more darker, angrier version of herself. She takes a dig at all those who have ridiculed or wronged her in that past, and one-by-one, avenges those insults.
The music video, one of Swift’s longest, is full of symbolism and references. At the end, Swift appears in various versions of herself – the naive one when she started out, the funny one from her music videos, and the one who got interrupted by Kanye on stage at the VMAs. At the end of the video, all the Taylors start fighting with each other, describing each other as “so fake” and “playing the victim”, ending with one saying “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative” after which the other Taylors yell at her to “shut up!” in unison, while the version of Swift in the background watches in silence.
The lyrics and video are all far too clear that Taylor has clearly had enough with haters.