

#Taylor swift reputation abum trial
Her crusade to get Apple Music to pay artists during the service’s inaugural three-month trial period made her look like an industry hero (until some hammy cross-promotion drew suspicion that the back-and-forth was a keen publicity stunt). Swift has long seemed like a grade-A villain playing it cool until the right time came to twist the knife, like pop music’s own Scar from The Lion King.
#Taylor swift reputation abum crack
Kim Kardashian producing audio of Taylor hearing and approving the “Famous” lyric was the Black Mirror crack a lot of us had been waiting for. What to get for the woman who has everything? The dignity of her nemeses. Taylor Swift played Kanye West harder than she needed to, pretending to be blindsided by his crude lyric about her in The Life of Pablo’s “Famous” and using her Album of the Year acceptance speech at the 2016 Grammys to drop a roundabout accusation that he’d been using his power to tear her down. It’s hard work being everything to everyone, though, as Swift learned in a devastating tiff with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, where she banked on the loudest rapper alive and the most well-documented reality television star of our time not keeping a record of their private dealings. It’s a to-do when she pops up places, because of the sense that she’s communicating something about her brand with every move. She weaves a narrative through carefully curated Instagram photos, talented Ken-doll beaux, and conspicuous paparazzi shots in all the right places with all the right people. She moves more like Beyoncé in that she stays rather quiet most of the time, making it hard to tell what she’s thinking. Taylor’s not a messy public figure like, say, Katy Perry, who built her entire Witness promotional campaign around the singular weirdness of being Katy Perry.

In public, she was America’s sweetheart, but on record, she could be withering, and in business, she was an ironclad capitalist, the daughter of a Pennsylvania banker who proved every bit as calculated with money as the pedigree suggests. Taylor Swift played the fame game harder than most. Genteel grandmas and grandpas are letting their bigotry fly. Powerful, popular men are being revealed as monsters. Part of why the last year of news has felt so cataclysmic is the worrying sensation of all pretense of goodness slowly being cast aside (or else ripped away). Successful stars are affable in public but protective of their lives in private. Fame is a shell game, a precarious balance between real grit and the performance of decency.
