Taylor Swift did not record ‘reputation’. Thank God

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, the best. 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 He broke all Swift formulas, transforming 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 his most representative work, but demonstrates his 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 it 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. Swift has now acquired these assets – in an agreement worth 360 million dollars, according to Billboard -, so 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 They were large -scale curiosities, ahistoric, which 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 to show that for an artist with several generations of fans, a certain update and reintroduction could be good for a certain old material. Commercial success and success in the ranking of these albums – his remake of 1989 He had a week of premiere greater than the original, the equivalent of 1,653,000 sales in the United States – seemed to indicate that the old work, rethinking and repossed, could be as lucrative as the new songs.