Taylor Swift releases "Gorgeous," her first good single in forever
For a song that immediately skyrocketed to the top of the Billboard charts, setting streaming records and most of the internet on fire in its wake, “Look What You Made Me Do” can only be considered a misstep. Taylor Swift’s first single off the upcoming Reputation found her ditching the tunefulness and endearing specificity of her earlier work in favor of newscycle-stirring riffs on Kanye West and Katy Perry and an ill-advised shift toward the very early-2000s playground-pop for which she had once seemed anathema.
Older songs based around celebrity frenemies were shot through Taylor’s subjective experience; “Look What You Made Me Do” took a meta turn, a song filtered through the prism of its own media reaction and rendering Swift an unlikely (and unlikeable) heel. She followed that up with the better but still dispiriting hard-EDM turn “Ready For It?,” which only reinforced the direst prognostications about Reputation.
