“I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh. ‘Cause she’s dead.”
Taylor Swift would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one she has never asked to be apart of. But since the general public — and/or Kanye West and Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry and The Media™ — won’t allow for that: she’ll have to kill us all, instead.
“Look What You Made Me Do” marks The Grand Return of the inescapable, unstoppable, omnipresent cultural force that is Taylor Swift, the first single released ahead of her forthcoming album, reputation, out in November.
Exhausted already? Same.
“The world moves on another day, another drama / But not for me, for me, all I think about is karma / The world moves on but one thing’s for sure: baby, I got mine, but you’ll all get yours.”
“You’ll all get yours.” Is that? Did she? I just checked the lock on my door. You should do the same.
Almost the polar opposite of 1989‘s irritatingly chipper “Shake It Off,” Taylor is very much disinterested in shaking it off. In fact, she’s all-too-eagerly taking the bait from Enemies Of The Squad™ on the piano-tinged, electroclash (!) moment of campy pop menace: it’s the emoji snake littering her comments section come to life.
“No, I don’t like you.”
Fuck a blank space, she’s already got a list of names — and yours (and mine) is in red, underlined. Side note: do you have a home alarm system installed?
If the obsessive, power-hungry, blood-thirsty villain of a Disney movie were to sing an original song set to The Teaches of Peaches (and maybe some Ashlee Simpson circa Bittersweet World, too), “Look What You Made Me Do” is exactly what that would sound like.
“I don’t trust nobody, and nobody trusts me / I’ll be the actress starring in your bad dreams…”
Taylor’s pissed, and this era’s only just getting started? Do not eat the freshly baked cookies mysteriously left on your doorstep tomorrow morning.
Good luck sleeping tonight.
“Look What You Made Me Do” was released on August 25. (Apple Music / Spotify)
