“Look What You Made Me Do,” a critically reviled song, is the fifth no. 1 single of Taylor Swift’s career. It’s also a failure.
Three weeks after the song hit the no. 1 spot, the Bronx rapper Cardi B—the breakout music star of 2017—drop-kicked Swift’s single down a couples of notches, to the no. 3 spot, below not only her own no. 1 hit, “Bodak Yellow,” but also Post Malone’s rap single, “Rockstar,” which succeeded “Bodak Yellow” last week in the no. 1 spot. Swift’s single has fallen precipitously down the Hot 100 ever since, currently sitting at no. 34, just below the 42-week-old Bruno Mars hit, “That’s What I Like.” Swift’s follow-up promotional single, “... Ready for It?,” debuted at no. 4 and promptly slid down the chart with all the grace of a Plinko chip. The subsequent singles from Reputation, “Gorgeous” and “Call It What You Want,” are too new to conclusively dismiss, but “Gorgeous” fell from no. 13 to no. 69 in the span of a week, and “Call It What You Want” has failed to chart in its first week out. So far, none of Swift’s latest songs are unambiguous, uncomplicated successes like her spree of hits from 1989, which marked Taylor Swift’s career peak in 2014. Just three years and one album later, the rollout for Reputation has come to signify Swift’s calamitous decline, made further embarrassing by the singer’s ongoing mismanagement of criticism for her brand and her music’s appeal to the alt-right.
For Swift, the problem isn’t just her songs, or her politics, but also the mainstream musical landscape, which has grown inhospitable to her hyper-white pop brand in the time since 1989. It is easy to understand the failure of “Look What You Made Me Do” and “... Ready for It?” once you consider what’s flourishing on the Hot 100 instead: rap music. It is a genre that has long functioned in stark contrast with Swift’s sanitized pop appeal, and her resilience against prevailing black musical cues. Writing about 1989, the music critic Jon Caramanica once characterized Swift’s appeal as a nostalgic aversion to hip-hop’s influence of pop music. Three years later, that aversion has brought Swift to the brink of obsolescence, where Reputation will likely sell a few million copies to her broad base of hard-core fans while nonetheless being dismissed by critics.
The Hot 100 is a tumultuous and illegible chart, subject to Nielsen’s semi-frequent recalibration of its priorities and methods for measuring the popularity of new music. The streaming-music ecosystem, which has also morphed throughout the past decade, has made a mess of the songs charts. Still, there are a few big, broad music trends that track across platforms, such as hip-hop’s coup on the Billboard charts, which began in November 2016, exactly one year ago, when the Mississippi rap duo Rae Sremmurd dethroned electropop duo the Chainsmokers at the top of the chart. On the strength of the trap ballad “Black Beatles,” Rae Sremmurd was the first non-Drake rap act to top the chart since Desiigner went no. 1 with the baritone trap ditty “Panda,” which topped the Hot 100 for two consecutive weeks in May 2016 right as Swift’s final 1989 single, “New Romantics,” finally dropped off the chart.
To review hip-hop’s previous state of disfavor on the Hot 100, though, the most instructive year is 2015: It was Future’s breakout summer, the beginning of Peak Drake, and also the year when Kendrick Lamar countered Drake’s hip-hop dominance with the release of To Pimp a Butterfly, the year's most acclaimed rap album and one of its best-selling hip-hop releases. And yet, despite their wild success, both Future and Kendrick would struggle to chart in the Top 20. “Commas” and “March Madness,” two ubiquitous Future records, were virtually insignificant to the Hot 100; “Commas” would peak at no. 55 and “March Madness” never even charted. Kendrick’s singles from To Pimp a Butterfly would all fare poorly on the charts, even as his album went no. 1 on the Billboard 200; his highest-charting single that year, “King Kunta,” peaked at no. 58. Even Drake, the most successful rapper in the history of the Hot 100, struggled for years to game his way into the upper echelons of the chart. At his peak output a couple of years ago, Drake would famously chart every song, from the singles to the Z-sides, from If You’re Reading This, What a Time to Be Alive, Views, and More Life somewhere in the Hot 100; and yet even he struggled mightily to score his first no. 1 record until “One Dance” topped the chart in May 2016. All the while, Swift ran the chart with “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” and “Bad Blood” all topping the Hot 100 in close succession and confirming Swift’s white pop dominance. So while Drake riddled the Hot 100, Swift sat at its peak.
For the first year since 2009, however, Drake has now fallen off the Hot 100 entirely. He’s been replaced by a wider variety of rappers, some of them pop, some of them street, all of them propelled by streaming fan bases that Billboard has struggled to consistently and comprehensively track. The Hot 100 didn’t even begin to count Soundcloud streams until November 201,6 after rappers such as Fetty Wap and Lil Uzi Vert launched whole careers and hit singles on the popular audio-upload service. Billboard recently announced that it will count streaming activity from paid music services such as Spotify Premium and Apple Music more heavily than free streaming from services such as Soundcloud and YouTube effective next year. While Nielsen has struggled in recent years to stick to a formula for quantifying impact, music streaming services such as Spotify, with its popular Rap Caviar playlist, have marketed stars such as Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Pump as hitmakers, regardless of whether Nielsen data reflects their reach. Together, these artists form a hip-hop conquest of the musical landscape, including the Hot 100.
Swift’s latest pop singles have come and gone, shoved down the chart by hip-hop singles from Cardi B, Post Malone, and Logic. All three rappers are younger brands and have much smaller discographies, but their music is more in tune with the zeitgeist than the latest songs from Swift, whose rigid, offbeat disposition makes her a strange fit in the year of “Bad and Boujee” and “Bodak Yellow.” For hip-hop and white pop, it’s a pretty dramatic reversal of fortunes a few years in the making. In the first week of September 2014, when “Shake It Off” debuted in the no. 1 spot on the Hot 100, there were five rap songs in the upper half of the chart, and three hip-hop records, all from non-black artists—Eminem, Pitbull, and then Iggy Azalea—had occupied the no. 1 spot that year. Today, there are 13 rap records in the upper half of the chart, and six rap singles have captured the no. 1 spot in a year that is still eight weeks from over.
With the release of Reputation later this week, Swift is struggling for more than just chart dominance. As she flounders musically, Swift has also succumbed to political controversy foisted upon her by alt-right trolls who, given her idealized blonde phenotype, have claimed the singer as an unwitting avatar (or else a covert champion) of white supremacist ideals. For months, Swift has declined to offer any public denouncements of these people. In fact, the ACLU recently publicized Swift’s legal intimidation of a blogger who wrote about Swift’s significance among white supremacists in September; an attorney for the singer says the blog’s characterization of Swift’s lyrics as white supremacist code is “a malicious lie.” Other websites, including Jezebel, have suffered similar threats from Swift’s attorneys for similar coverage of the singer this year. But because Swift hasn’t spoken out strongly herself, her critics have insisted that Swift’s refusal to engage with the dire U.S. political climate has doomed Reputation to irrelevance.
No manner of political conviction can salvage music as bad as “Look What You Made Me Do.” It’s not as if Taylor Swift is one Sorkinesque denunciation of Donald Trump away from total resurgence; it’s not as if Cardi B endeared herself to a massive pop audience just by calling Trump a “carrot face.” Katy Perry, a longtime rival of Swift, ran head-first into political discourse, and yet she, too, botched three singles (“Rise,” “Chained to the Rhythm,” and “Swish Swish”) just as quickly as Swift’s songs are flopping now. In 2017, it’s not what Katy or Taylor do or don’t say about the national mood that’s frustrated their success so much as what both women represent: a decade of white pop dominance that a new generation of rappers have drawn to an unceremonious close.
