If you were hoping that “Look What You Made Me Do,” Taylor Swift’s disappointing, Right Said Fred–sampling new single, was going to be an anomaly on her upcoming album, Reputation, well, I have some bad news: her electric revolution is just getting started.
A preview of “...Ready for It?” dropped during ABC’s broadcast of the Alabama–Florida State football game—because nothing says tailgating, option runs, and Nick Saban quite like industrial pop music—before Swift released the full track on Sunday morning. Now, just like “Look What You Made Me Do,” the song is being used to score commercials for ABC’s fall TV lineup.
Sonically, the song has Swift dipping her toes even further into the kind of electronic pop that would sound more at home on a Selena Gomez album. Many compared “Look What You Made Me Do” to Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, but “...Ready for It?” draws clear inspiration from Yeezus, with an intro that sounds like a softened version of “On Sight” and the kind of brutal, manufactured percussion that defined that album. And oh yeah—Taylor Swift is also rapping on this song? Or maybe we should say “rapping” with air quotes.
Some boys are tryin’ too hard
He don’t try at all though
Younger than my exes but he act like such a man, so
Shout-out Joe Alwyn, I guess?
The main issue with this budding era of Taylor Swift isn’t that she’s trying new things (though by “new” I really only mean “new for her”), it’s that in doing so she seems to be losing the things that made her uniquely magnetic. Even on tracks like “Bad Blood”—songs that very abruptly separated Swift from her country-inspired past—the singer’s presence was palpable. The expert songwriting; the sharp pettiness. A Taylor Swift song was very clearly a Taylor Swift song. “...Ready for It?” could be by anyone—that it’s by Swift needs to be pointed out. For an artist who, in the past, has been so good at communicating a persona and rising above the overcrowded, same-sounding mass of pop artists, that’s a serious problem.
