Look What You Made Her Do

Flipping the script on the haters of Taylor Swift’s new single “Look What You Made Me Do”

Everyone has an opinion about Taylor Swift. Bursting onto the scene as a corkscrew-curled ingenue with a forced country twang, she has spent the last ten years in the industry outsmarting and outrunning her detractors with new looks, new sounds, and new drama. From the meme-worthy VMA incident in 2009 to the emoji-ridden take down of 2016, Taylor Swift has battled her fair share of the haters. But it’s to her credit that we’re still talking about her. Even more telling: she’s still winning.

The genius of Taylor Swift has never been her vocal range or her shaky likability. It has always been her determination to succeed in spite of everyone telling her “no.” She convinced her parents to move to Nashville; she convinced Scott Borchetta to sign her; she convinced mainstream radio to play country music; and she convinced her label to let her go full pop. If it was anyone else, this resourceful, eagle-eyed, even calculating star would be a feminist icon; instead, she has consistently been one of the most ridiculed and vilified celebrities alive today. It bears the question, “Why?”

Just over the last two weeks, when Taylor Swift blacked out her social media, released a series of unsubtle snake images, and then announced her first single off a new album, the vultures came circling. Without even opening her mouth, the talk around her started back up and it was all aimed at this first song, “Look What You Made Me Do.”

This is a polarizing number. Probably her most controversial song ever. It’s both a departure from her usual sound and yet an obvious next step in her evolution towards synthetic pop princess. But before it was even released, people were picking apart the name, mocking the album art, rolling their eyes at the publicity campaign seemingly taking back the snake emoji with a heavy use of goth serif fonts.

Once the song dropped and the video followed, it just got worse.

Even despite a complete lack of acknowledgement on her part, there has been a huge influx of think pieces about Taylor Swift and her “victimhood.” This piece by Buzzfeed is probably the sloppiest, while this new piece by Vulture is — I cannot say this enough — absolute trash. Both of these are ill-researched, far-reaching, totally biased and clickbaity examples of this inexplicable, blinding thirst to give the readers what they seemingly want but struggle to find: a justifiable, 140-character-long reason to explain their hatred for a woman who hasn’t really done much bad.

In a Facebook post the other day, someone asked, “I’m not a fan but I don’t understand…when did it become popular to hate Taylor Swift?” The comments flew in about all the ~problematic~ things Taylor Swift has done, most of which were frankly untrue or misrepresented and all of which completely ignored the other things Taylor Swift has done with her life and resources.

She owns two private jets so she doesn’t have to sleep on the road. (so what?)

Her new ticketmaster thing requires people to buy merch to get tickets. (untrue)

She tried to bury Kanye and got blasted by Kim and won’t just own up to it. (fine)

She is always playing the victim.

That last one? That’s the one people are really honing in on with this new song. After all, the very title lacks responsibility: look what you made me do. People first (including yours truly) took this to be a dig at the whole Kimye incident. There is no doubt that Taylor Swift loves calling out her haters and it seemed like that would make the splashiest sense.

But then Taylor Swift released the music video. Instantly, the narrative was contextualized. This wasn’t about Kim or Kanye or any of the drama that shadowed her overdue hiatus; this was about the media.

I can already feel the eyerolls; it’s coming from the same people who “like” these articles hating on Taylor Swift, hating on her calculated persona, hating on the pretty white girl who always gets her way.

But bear with me.

Do I think this is Taylor Swift’s strongest song she’s ever written? No. Like the lead single before it (“Shake it Off”), it lacks some of the depth and emotional cognizance of her greatest hits like “All Too Well” or “Holy Ground.” Here Taylor foregoes rich details and sumptuous imagery, instead pounding into our heads an unforgiving and ever unrelenting chorus of “look what you made me do / look what you made me do / look what you just made me do / look what you just made me do.”

It’s impossible to move on from and, frankly, I think that’s sort of the point.

Taylor Swift has been disrespected and discredited basically since the beginning. If it wasn’t Kanye storming the stage to tell the world she didn’t deserve that win (and maybe she didn’t, but she still won) then it’s the many men who’ve come up to me to insist — always with a smile — that Taylor Swift doesn’t write her own songs. They sneer as they explain to me real simple-like that lots of pop stars get writing credit but they’re rarely actually involved.

Overt sexism aside, this is just categorically false and it has been proven time and time again. Most deliciously in the last year when, while oh a hiatus, Taylor managed to top charts with her secretly penned Little Big Town’s “Better Man” and even more hilariously the Calvin Harris hit “This Is What You Came For.” So, Taylor Swift is first and foremost a songwriter, but she is also a smart and savvy businesswoman.

Enter LWYMMD.

This is an earworm. It has risen the charts and shattered over a dozen records in less than a week in spite of lackluster reviews and a huge clapback from the haters. This cacophonic sound is simultaneously unsettling and unforgettable. It was a statement, one that was emphasized by Taylor Swift’s unwillingness to participate in the usual promo and media interviews. On instagram she wrote, “There will be no further explanation, there will just be reputation.” And that seems to be the theme of the era.

Since the announcement of reputation, she has dug in her heels and taken up a back row seat to the show. She will not be playing the media’s game. She will not allow herself to become the punching bag yet again.

At the start of 1989 she was everyone’s darling. She was at the top of her game and people were loving it. They wrote charming little odes to her and her friends, to her and her sound. It was peak Taylor Swift. And then, as they usually do, the tides changed.

Instantly, those media conglomerates who had been feeding off of her name and her image flipped a switch. Taylor Swift had a few unfortunate gaffes and made some straight-up tactical errors, leading most notably the #TaylorSwiftIsOver party that Kim threw in the summer of 2016 on the day of the snake. The media’s badgering was unrelenting.

Taylor had messed up. Her carefully crafted image was tarnished. She “went into hiding” (a phrase I hate) and people reveled in this supposed downfall. Murals to her life and death rose up. It was hard to imagine how Taylor Swift could bounce back from all that.

But she’s back. And now everyone is tripping over themselves to be the first to say of course the woman who made a living writing biting song about all the wrongs she’s been dealt would write a song about Kimye. Of course the woman who plays nice but works tirelessly to bury her exes and wash her hands of any fault would like to say she’s still excluded from the narrative. Of course the woman who made a career off of playing the victim would start afresh with a song called “Look What You Made Me Do.”

Only, if you actually listen to the song and the context in which Taylor has released it, that’s not what she’s saying at all.

In the music video, you see tongue-in-cheek images of exactly the atmosphere the media has built around her. She crashes her car and, even with a grammy in hand (these accolades meant to make people take her and her work seriously), all they care about is the crash, the fire, the drama of it all. She leads a cult of pretty, brainwashed girls because after all she is a calculating ring leader who does it all for publicity’s sake. She stands on a tower of public personas all clawing their way to the top, all piled uselessly beneath her because she is, after all, dead, her reputation destroyed. And then the group of men in I ❤ TS crop tops, eight exes who were each of course PR stunts she ate up and spat out for the drama, drama. But the best and most telling part is the end, where fifteen Taylor’s line up to complain in exactly the same words we’ve been hearing for years.

She is so fake. What a bitch. She can’t be that surprised. She’s always playing the victim. And isn’t it delicious to wrap it all up with a nod to the straw that arguably broke the camel’s back?

“I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative.”

Only, we never figured out how exclude her. Everyone writes about her and talks about her, even when she’s not doing anything but romancing her new boyfriend in Rome or frolicking with friends at Fourth of July. The attention and the scrutiny is unending. It forced her into hiding for the better part of 2017 until she could pick up the phone and answer her haters with resplendent sarcasm:

“I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, because she’s dead.”

But the “new” Taylor isn’t about her adopting a grunge look or being more acidic or unforgiving. Rather, it’s a middle finger to the haters — the haters she hasn’t been able to shake in her 10+ years in the industry. And that hate is at its worst sexist, at its best simply unfair.

After all, Katy Perry is the one who won’t shut up about their boring, no good, terribly awful “feud,” who played it up to boost her sales and her song. But somehow it’s Taylor who is the petty one who won’t let go. Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry again, and so many others appropriate culture again and again yet it’s the innocuous “Shake It Off” that somehow gets a bad rap. It’s strange to see these disparities. It’s hard to imagine what higher standard we’re holding Taylor Swift to and why.

And then we have the she-only-writes-songs-about-her-exes narrative. OneDirection’s Harry Styles, John Mayer, Joe Jonas — they all released songs about Taylor Swift, they all profited off of their relationships. But that’s not the same. It’s just karma, right?

This double standard is seemingly frustrating to a lot of people in the industry, except when it comes to Taylor Swift. And where does it come from anyways? After all, pop music is arguably built on feuds and bad blood and romances and dalliances and all the drama. Madonna, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears — they have all profited on the notoriety of who their songs are about. Kanye and Jay-Z don’t have feuds, they have beef. Nicki Minaj comes at everyone, but that’s just her style. It’s Taylor Swift who is problematic, who somehow doesn’t go about it the “right” way.

And if you don’t think it’s a gendered issue, consider how we are so forgiving of men as long as they’re talented. Chris Brown is still making music even after he hit Rihanna. Justin Timberlake got a career after the Superbowl incident while Janet Jackson was slut shamed out of the spotlight. Kanye West openly supports Donald Trump, snipes at everyone, and he’s somehow less problematic than a girl he called a bitch in a song before proceeding to make a naked, lifelike mannequin of her to sleep next to for “art.”

That’s the world we live in. We celebrate men’s brashness, their fury, their dramas, but we crucify who aren’t handling it in the same way.

Kanye, Jay-Z, Zayn and Louis, Drake and Meek Mills: look at how the media talks about their relationships and then look at how they dissect Taylor Swift’s. It’s a strange contrast. And it’s one where articles spend spreads and word counts not discussing her success but rather sifting through why she doesn’t deserve that success in the first place. The media seems to want Taylor Swift to be more open and outspoken but also more subtle and less of a victim.

No wonder she’s no longer interested in talking to us.

It’s not that Taylor Swift can’t be problematic; she is, after all, human. But people put in so much time and effort to trash a woman who’s only job, really, is to write catchy songs about HER feelings about HER life/breakups and now stands up to give HER take. And what’s more? You don’t have to listen to them if you don’t want to.

So, LWYMMD isn’t about Kim and Kanye twisting her arm into some boohoo, woe is me, you ruined my life pop hit. LWYMMD is about an environment that won’t let Taylor win — even when she wins — for no real tangible reason. Look What You Made Her Do?

She broke records across all platforms — youtube, streaming, radio, sales — and she did it without playing their game. She didn’t have to go on an apology tour; she didn’t have to show up on GMA and explain herself; she didn’t even go to the VMAs and make nice with Katy Perry.

She posted a link to a new sound and watched as the haters and the naysayers all clicked “download.” Four days later, that music video has over 100 million views. That is power, and that is empowering.

You helped her win everything in an atmosphere where she cannot win at anything.

She let us think about the title, she let us listen to the song. She watched us whip ourselves into a tizzy over who it was about, how it must reference Kim and Kanye, how she is such a victim. And then she dropped the music video. That splashy performance piece let us know that she has been listening, she has been reading, and she knows exactly what you’re saying in all those vicious exposés and the snake-ridden Instagram comments. And you know the best part? She played us all.

You helped her win everything in an atmosphere where she cannot win at anything.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think that’s the modus operandi for a victim. That sounds like someone taking over her narrative and playing it to her strengths. Because she is still coming out on top even when the odds, the fans, the haters are stacked against her.

This is one song off of a new, yet-to-be-heard album, and all it proves right now is that Taylor Swift is here to play. She will be taken seriously, not because of the think pieces and the Buzzfeed articles and the tweets either for or against her reincarnation, but because she is going to win the game and she’s going to continue to do it on her own terms.

I think that is badass. What’s more, I think it’s admirable.

Earlier this year Taylor Swift took on a money-grubby pervert suing her for getting him fired after he grabbed her butt–sorry, her ass–during a meet and greet. She took the stand, cool and collected, and batted back innocuous questions on if she was really a victim, what damage did he really cause, shouldn’t she be more upset? Not even her most ardent haters could complain about her testimony which was filled with unapologetic zingers that proved how smart and level-headed she really is.

That’s Taylor Swift. She doesn’t stand for bullying, not of her character or her choices. Sure, she didn’t march, she didn’t say who she voted for, she didn’t tweet about Kesha. Instead, she paid for Kesha’s defense; she donated to women’s shelters and LGBT organizations; she quietly funded educational programs and musical scholarships that speak loudly of her priorities and interests. She cares about her community, enriches the lives of her fans, donates to the causes she cares about. She embraced feminism as she learned about feminism and she apologized for co-opting the conversation from Nicki Minaj. But, hey, she is not perfect and it is after all her penchant for the dramatics that make for boppy tunes.

So you can hate her music, hate her style, hate her “fake” persona. I think you’re wrong and I definitely think you should find somewhere else to channel all that negative energy, but, sure, go for it. Hate on her lyrics, her character, her sound. You should just know that you’re part of the joke now.

These ill-conceived articles, these thirsty titles begging for clicks, these half-assed, half-researched take-downs — this maniacal obsession shadowing her every move, analyzing every lyric, cheering every misstep — all of it just means you’re listening. And so she is going to continue to win. She’s going to top charts and break records and she’s going to do it without breaking a sweat, shedding a tear, or getting in front of a camera to apologize for what you think of her. All she is going to do is get in your head with a chorus you can’t quit even if you want to. Especially if you want to. Because she wants you to know…it’s on you.

That’s what you made her do.