On Saturday, Taylor Swift teased her new single, “… Ready for It?,” in a short video for ESPN. The idea, I think, was to boost morale in advance of a college-football game between the University of Alabama and Florida State. In the video, a man riding a horse and wearing a hat with a feather sticking out of it dramatically stabbed the field with a decorative spear. The words “Mercedes-Benz Stadium” were flashed, twice. Women cheered; men pounded their muscled chests with their fists. The same day, the sixty-second snippet of music was used again, in a promo for ABC’s new fall lineup of sitcoms, dramas, and high-intrigue reality competitions. The soundtrack occasionally broke for dialogue: “You’ll do whatever you want in your heart!” a voice pronounced, earnestly.
I suppose this is what “synergy” means—choreographed promotion across platforms, in which everyone commands attention and makes a bunch of money. Swift does not abjure corporate meddling. She recently signed a deal with UPS, declaring it the official “delivery partner” for her new record; selected trucks are now decorated with her likeness. (In a press release, UPS referred to this as a meeting of “two cultural icons.”) She is also involved in a strange racket with Ticketmaster, requiring her devotees to enroll in something called the “Verified Fan” program, which ostensibly discourages scalpers but ultimately means that the more money and time a person invests in Swift or Swift-adjacent activities and products, the further he or she can jump the line for concert tickets.
It’s surely old-fashioned to find any of this offensive. Yet it’s left me feeling like a balloon that has been wrested free of its bunch only to get entangled in some power lines and slowly deflate. What a cynical way to offer new art to your fans.
Swift did eventually release all of “… Ready for It?,” disentangled from commercials. Like the single “Look What You Made Me Do”—which appeared at the end of August, after Swift posted a video of a hissing snake to her social-media accounts, thus setting a tone of lethal retribution—the song is very much of its moment, musically. Little about its throbbing, electro-pop production or performance feels at odds with the Zeitgeist, which makes it curiously anonymous, as if it could have been sung by almost any contemporary pop ingénue.
That’s a drag, because Swift’s best songs, like “Blank Space,” from her last album, “1989,” feel distinctly her own: meticulous, cheeky, and heavy with want. Swift does a bob-and-weave vocal on “… Ready for It?,” maneuvering sharply around the melody. She is an astoundingly precise singer—this is why she’s been such a good foil and partner for Max Martin, the rigorous Swedish songwriter and producer who worked on “1989” and co-wrote “… Ready for It?”—even when she’s falling into a purposefully lackadaisical drawl. But affectations don’t suit her. I scoffed instinctively when I first heard her half-rap the words “I see how this is gon’ go,” and again each time she failed to deliver a convincingly desirous “Mmm.” Swift obviously hungers for things: her entire career is built upon articulations of love gone wrong, giving voice to the particular ache of romantic rejection. To hear her now resort to weird mimesis, echoing hollow, boring expressions of lust—“Mmm”—feels like a collapse of imagination, and of honesty.
“… Ready for It?” is the second single from “Reputation,” Swift’s sixth album, which will be released on November 10th. It is easy to opine about what appears to be the absurd narcissism of the record’s conceit: that the world continues colluding against Swift, thwarting and victimizing a beleaguered (and faultless) young woman. Look, I don’t know—maybe we did all spend a little too much time japing about Swift and her band of lovers, back when the world felt steadier. Maybe, for a while, it truly did feel as if every headline in the newspaper was a variation of “Taylor Swift,” per the unsubtle cover art for “Reputation.” Maybe we exaggerated her importance, and now we have to answer for it. Certainly, pop stars shouldn’t suddenly be expected to produce overtly or explicitly “political” art; I’m not sure what that would look like for Swift, even. But I do think there’s a mandate now to make work that feels meaningful in some capacity—not mercenary.
