Taylor Swift-No-again recording album reputation- Millennium Group

After Replace your master recordingsthe superstar says that You have no plans to redo your sixth albumthe most ingenious, shocking and risky to date.

Reputationthe ruffled and cunning of Taylor Swift about exasperation and recrimination followed by the flowering of love, is, within an abundant catalog of very good albums, very good albums, the best.

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It is deep and confusingly effective – just and hilarious and almost cheerful in its cruelty – and also an experimental launch of a superstar that until then had greatly avoided the formal risk.

Reputation broke all swift formulastransforming her of underestimated prodigy that took each victory as an unexpected surprise to pop star willing to play in the mud (already throwing him against his enemies).

It may not be your most representative work, but demonstrates its versatility and his ability to commit to the predominant sound of the moment, and reveals a roar that had previously gone unnoticed.

Last Friday, Swift announced that I would not make a new recording of Reputation to join their Taylor’s version of Fearless, Speak Now, Grid and 1989. These releases are the result of a long battle on the property of the master recordings of their first six albums.

Now Swift has acquired those assets – in an agreement worth 360 million dollars, according to Billboard-, hence You no longer need to produce an alternative version to divert the interest of the fans of the originals. Which means that you no longer need to manipulate memory.

The projects Taylor’s version were Large -scale curiositiesahistoric, that clouded the place that Swift’s originals occupied in public consciousness. They also implied, by force, that Swift’s original art was somehow insufficient. And relegated the old recordings to the category of relics, largely for commercial reasons.

However, what they did were showing that for an artist with several generations of fans, A certain ancient material would be well updated and a reintroduction.

Commercial success and success in Rankings of these albums —su remake of 1989 had a week of premiere greater than the originalthe equivalent of 1 million 653 thousand sales in the United States – seemed to indicate that the Old work, rethinking and repossedit could be as lucrative as new songs.

But not acid Reputationthat could only have arrived at the intersection of personal grievance and the public disdain that Swift experienced in the mid -2010, when his domain was being attacked from all flanks.

She was excellent but also unreliable, tremendously popular and, nevertheless, somehow l lthey painted like an intruder. And there were tensions with Kanye West (now Ye) and Kim Kardashian, then his wife, after a disagreement about how he referred to Swift in his song “Famous”. The Swift project, which had shone relatively peaceful for several years, was attacked.

So she defended himself. While their previous albums put private stories in a key legible only for connoisseurs, Reputation It is an explosion of animadversion and fight that presupposes that listeners will be so familiar with real life dramas of swift As with his music, if not more.

The tension is in the lyrics and in the attitude (especially in the songs of Max Martin and Shellback). It was the first swift album that did not lean towards the Gentile. Before, when he was scathing, transformed his anger into something reassuring and reserved. But in Reputationyou can practically hear the foam that comes out of your lips.

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Swift even blatantly killed his former self:

“Sorry, the Antigua Taylor You can’t get on the phone right now. Because? Because it is dead! ”, He is still one of his funniest moments.

That level of emotional specificity made from Reputation A bold success; rebuilding it would do nothing but get worse. Swift recognized him in the letter he published announcing the acquisition of his rights.

“Total transparency: I haven’t even recorded 25 percent again,” he wrote.

“The album Reputation It was very specific to that time of my life, and when I tried to remake it I ran into a blockade. All that challenge, that desire to be understood while I feel intentionally misunderstoodthat desperate hope, that growl and devil born of shame.

“To be honest, it is the only album of the first 6 that I thought could not be improved by removing it.”

Refuse to review Reputation underline both the limitations of technology to recreate a tangible work of art and rSpeaker towards his rawnesswhich at the time was divisive. Reputation It was an argument that artists should take attacks as personal, and use them as fuel.

It almost sounds like the product of a challenge: take Swift, one of the most careful composers of their time, and expose it to one of the most rugged productions of pop, so challenging that it forces it to adjust its vocal approach and its tone.

Wonderful things brought out of her: the more rhythmically sensitive song of his career in “Delicate” and “Dress”; attractively angry complaints like “Look What You Made Me Do” and “This is why we can new nice Things”; a celebration of taking off the makeup of good behavior and leaving everyone’s views in “I Did Subthing Bad”.

The arrogant sensuality of “Don’s Blame Me”that does not fit at all with Swift’s delicate tone, it becomes a powerful tool at the end of the song.

He even recruited Future to rap on this album (along with Ed Sheeran, but still).

It should be said that Reputation It is not a purely corrosive album, especially in the second half. Is the passionate flirting of “GORGEOUS”the classic Swift narrative in “Getaway Car” and the closure of the album, “New Year’s Day”one of the crudest songs of Swift’s career and a reminder that under agitation there was still the purist.

The Taylor’s version They have had much more success as a marketing project than as creative effort (apart from the publication of the songs of the vault, which are the unpublished songs of each period).

At first, it was an intriguing exercise forensic to the new versions in search of differences with the originals, some clear and deliberate, others the inevitable result of inaccurate photocopies.

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But Swift’s gift It consists of capturing the now without ornaments; Creating replicas has felt like a cruel joke and an insult to the originals. The previous albums could not be improved either, not because they are perfect, but because They are faithful art at the time they were published.

That is why Swift’s announcement will not be carried out – at least for now – Reputation It is a relief. What encouraged that album was something I had never had access to, and what does not need to return.

In recent years, the notion of the times of pop stars has been greatly exaggerated; Gradual changes are treated as renovations, largely on behalf of the Strategic marketing. In an era of incessant information flows, listeners are supposed to want changes; That is what they are offered, regardless of whether it is sincere or not.

But an era should be something fundamentally unrecoverable. Something you couldn’t revive even if you wanted. Something that you could not recover even if you will try. Better not try.

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