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...Ready For It - a not so brief meditation on reputation.

Hi! Long time listener, first time caller.

A few things to introduce. - I’ve been a huge Taylor Swift fan for a long time. She’s great.

I’m also really bad at brevity, and currently, I’m obsessed with the ...Ready For It video and the whole concept behind reputation. I think she’s doing some extremely interesting things and it’s got me massively excited for the album.

A warning before I get going - this might ramble and go on different tangents, but I’m trying to make somewhat of a coherent point, I promise!

Like anything else Taylor Swift does, there’s been a lot of discussion about the ‘...Ready for It’ video. While the general consensus is that it’s awesome, I’ve seen been a number of comments saying that it doesn’t fit the song, or that it’s a nice looking video that doesn’t mean much. And I completely see where they’re coming from.

That said, I absolutely and wholeheartedly disagree. Maybe it only makes sense in the wider context of reputation, but I feel like it is massively important. I think the story of the video adds huge credence to the visual album theory; it really does feel like the start of something, especially when you link to it to the LWYMMD video. This is the genesis of the Taylor Swift we see in LWYMMD. This is the moment where Taylor Swift “dies.”

But more on that later.

Imagine you're Taylor Swift. After the massively successful 1989 era, which towered over everything around it and left you on top of the world, it all comes crashing down. Not only does your personal life go through some considerable turmoil, but your name is dragged through the mud publicly. The reputation that you had worked hard to build, and were smart and diligent about, not out of spite but out of savvy, is stained. The reputation that you used to give back to your fans, to inspire people, to stand up against Apple; besmirched.

Now, the same people who just months earlier were praising you as the Joni Mitchell and Madonna hybrid the world has always longed for, have turned on you. Everything you do is being contorted into the worst possible "O M G - LOOK WHAT SHE DID" story. You can't even speak out against it, because every time you do, some thinkpiece writer [n.b.: irony noted] has something to say about it. You're a serial dater. You’re a serial victim. Your entire life is a manufactured PR power-play. You hate women. You’re a racist. You're a Trump supporter. "Taylor Swift is over" they say, but they still won't stop talking about how terrible you are for doing...whatever it was you did. Even if you made mistakes or did people wrong (that debate has been had a million times and isn’t really relevant to this), even if most of the terrible and cruel rumours are true; does it really warrant that level of vitriol?

If I was Taylor Swift, I would be tired. I would have little desire to deal with it anymore. In fairness, even if you disagree with her on everything she has said or done, could you blame her? I mean, this is exhausting. Why bother with the endless interviews, the endless promo, the endless fake award shows, when they are all just opportunities to subject yourself to people who want to hate you. So she goes away for a bit. She writes. She meets someone gorgeous. And while she won't let mean people get in the way of her passion, she knows she can't come back as "the old Taylor Swift" - her reputation precedes her. They want the old Taylor Swift back, so they can continue to throw rocks at her. It makes sense for the old Taylor Swift to play that role in the bible of celebrity. But that's not a fun role. She's a person too, and it's fair to ask whether this is a crossroads for Taylor Swift. Whether Taylor Swift can even be Taylor Swift anymore, or if it's unfair of us as an audience to expect that.

So that’s the background.

That brings us to '...Ready For It', and lady-in-white-android Taylor. We’ll start here, as potentially-exciting-album-hints-that-everybody-has-already-analysed aside, this is where it really gets interesting to me.

She's a shapeshifting, master-of-all-trades pop assassin, the likes of which you've never seen before. There are no rules for her. She can be savage and sexy, but guess what: the curls are back too, bitch. She's every type of Taylor, turned up to 11.

Meanwhile, Hooded Taylor plays the role of Dr. Frankenstein, inspecting her creation, putting it through the motions, each of which is a someone's version of Swift pushed to the extreme.

Taylor Swift was a snake? No, that's robot Medusa now.

Remember the Bad Blood video? Yeah, she's got a giant lightning sword now too.

Did she ever say something about a White Horse? Well that’s HER horse now.

And it's ready for WAR.

I’ll give you a moment to think of another time where we saw a bunch of different Taylors from over the years featured in the same video. More on that later.

Just as her creation is showing its creative, naive, whimsical side, Dr. Swift - while obviously fascinated - prods her creation instead of encouraging it, asking that all important question: “Are you ready for it?”.

If this is going to work, then she needs to be able to deal with this. Any good Taylor Swift needs to be able to deal with being prodded at, especially when they’re in a moment of happiness.

This sets off the extravagant, indulgent display of power we see next.

We get some really interesting moments with the lyrics here, with the video shedding a different light on the song. As Swift-via-Motoko becomes Thor-incarnate, the "let the games begin" part of the bridge starts, as Dr. Swift realises that her work is complete. She’s alive.

As the two Taylors approach each other, we get the rest of the bridge (which, as a sidenote, I think has one of Swift's most amazing harmonies, I absolutely adore this moment musically). It's here that the "touch me and you'll never be alone" line gains a new significance; it sounds a lot like Dr. Swift is warning Swift-Prime of the consequences.

The next thing that happens is where everything starts to become clearer. Dr. Swift (aka "the old Taylor") is replaced with this new, omnipotent ultra-Swift. There's no stopping her. She will obliterate everything in her path. If 1989 was Swift's skyscraper, this is a nuclear weapon. Not even Taylor Swift herself can stand in her way, and Dr. Swift knows this; she built it, after all. She willingly sacrifices herself for the cause of reputation. Taylor Swift is dead, long live Taylor Swift.

As an aside, there are more interesting lyrical bits here too, as you can read the chorus as a conversation between the two Taylors. In this context, "In the middle of the night, in my dreams/you should see the things we do, baby" reads less as a plea to a lover and more as a promise to herself, that they're going to be free from all of this one day. This works especially well if you read the subject of the song, the killer and the jailer, to be the pressures of fame rather than a particular individual (which is it's own kettle of fish, and not to say that the song isn't about a person - just an interesting perspective when tied in with the video!).

But this is also the moment when the proverbial ish hits the fan, and we get hit with the twist, as it's revealed to us that Dr. Swift IS A ROBOT TOO. WHAT IS GOING ON?!

But before our minds even have time blow, as Dr. Swift's skin melts away from the sheer fierceness radiating from Swift-Prime, we can see that the other robots are being destroyed too and SOME OF THEM ARE HALF-FINISHED TAYLORS.

Swift-Prime stands triumphant at the end as the last Taylor standing, asking us if we're ready for her. A single tear trickles down her face; happy to be free or sad in understanding her purpose?

I’m not sure, but, while we haven't heard the rest of the album or seen any more videos, I think it's a fair assumption (read: at best a solid theory, at worst a really, really fun thought) that this is the same Taylor Swift who goes onto slay the entire universe in the LWYMMD video. So, spoiler alert: WE WEREN'T READY.

Alright, wrapping up on the gist of what happens in this video: in this world, *someone* has been building robot Taylor Swifts to take the place of the real Taylor Swift, and it took many, many iterations to get here - even to the point that the robot Taylors took over the role of creator.

That leads us to the question of "who on earth is behind all of this?" Logically, I'd say there are a couple of options presented to us. The first is "the real Taylor Swift" - who has been conspicuously absent from all of this. The idea here is that Taylor needed someone who can take it to a level of shadiness, savagery, and literally-dying-ness that people could never have imagined. Why? There could be any of number of motivations behind it, which I'm sure will become clear after the album drops. Maybe she has sacrificed her previous reputation and taken ownership of her new one in order to continue doing what she loves. Maybe she just wanted to give everyone the most powerful response possible, and badass Terminator Swift is one big middle finger to the rest of the world. Maybe she just wants to get away from it all, but wants to continue to give us music, so creates this caricature version of herself to take the heat - a Ziggy Stardust popstar messiah that gives her a hard psychological split between public and private life. There are a million different ways you can read this (and it's getting kind of too deep), but I'm not sure I quite agree with any of them.

The other possible perpetrator, and the one I lean towards, is the outside world. With Swift having shied away from the public eye, there was nobody to give her take on things. This has a number of consequences; first of which is that she didn't defend herself from the endless accusations that were thrown her way. Another is that other people will speak up and give the other side of the story - but while they may have an understanding of who Taylor Swift is, there's no replacement for actually *being Taylor Swift*. The result of that is that all of these different opinions pile on top of each other, and snowball into creating an image of Swift she had no say in. Whether photos came out of her doing charity work, or it was another article about the Kardashian-West incident, what went ignored is that "the real Taylor Swift" was just living her life and didn't engage in any of this - and she seems to be okay with that; "There will be no further explanation. There will just be reputation."

To me, that sounds a lot like her letting go of any control she might have over these mirror universe versions of herself. She removed herself from every narrative, and just kinda did the stuff that she wanted to do. All the while, Taylor Swift as a concept continued to exist and evolve in gossip columns, tweets, candids, tumblr praise essays [n.b.: again, irony, I know], internet speculation and gif collections. It makes "Look what you made me do" look less like an "Oops! I Did It Again" moment, and more of a "no, literally, you did this. LOOK."

Swift-Prime is the culmination of that. She's the critical mass of every clap and clapback. She's the ultimate, and logical, conclusion to all of this. She is reputation - the armageddon of celebrity culture. Whether she's a false prophet or the second coming probably depends on who you follow. The key thing is that she isn't real, because the real Taylor Swift can't come to the phone right now. Why? Well, we don't know. Yet, at least. Some Taylor Swifts are dead - we know that much from the RFI video - but all of the above creates another very interesting parallel to the LWYMMD video (which is genius in its own right). If we know that someone has been building all of these different Taylor Swifts, then what does that mean for this scene?

Are any of these Taylor Swifts real? Are they all man-made (or Taylor-made) robot Swifts? Is Swift-Prime in this picture somewhere? AND WHO IS ON THE WING OF THE PLANE?!

I’m sure we’ll find out, but there's a theme here, and through everything else in this era, of only being shown what someone wants to show us. The story of reputation so far is that it's a narrative about the narrative of Taylor Swift. It picks up where Blank Space left off, in that it's not actually about Taylor Swift. Put simply, LWYMMD parodies and comments on all of these different versions of Swift that are portrayed in a certain way for whatever reason, only focusing in on one singular aspect of her personality or identity, and RFI gives us an origin story of sorts for how we got there. Whoever is behind these robot-Swifts is literally building a reputation.

Now, Taylor Swift is the author of the work, so at some point she's the person pulling the strings behind all of it. But whether she's the one narrating of reputation is a completely different story. There could be a LOT going on here. Could Swift channeling Cervantes, while simultaneously casting herself as Don Quioxte. I don't wanna be the "look at me I'm referring to a classic 17th century novel" guy, but if you're familiar with Don Quioxte then you're aware that that is completely insane and awesome!

But enough of that, there's an elephant in the room.

All of this begs the question: where exactly is the real Taylor Swift? Because if any of this is anything to go by, she might not just absent from this video; we might not even have seen her this whole era. It's a question that remains unanswered no matter what stance you take - because there's certainly no real, human Taylor Swift in the RFI video. Maybe she's somewhere with an island breeze and the lights down low. Maybe she finally picked a rose garden over Madison Square. However - to bring it back to RFI as a song - maybe, just maybe, the bigger question here is, "is it really any of our business?"

While '...Ready for It' as a music video sets the scene perfectly for the world of reputation (and I hope I'm right on that and hopefully more will become clear), I've skipped over the fact that, at it's core, '...Ready For It' is a song about wanting to be left alone. It's a song about the constant pressure that fame brings along with it, and the risk of subjecting someone you love to that. Swift has always had a gift for hiding sadness in happy packages. There's no doubting that RFI is a bona fide banger, and it certainly has its fair share of funny, snarling, exciting moments. But there's a longing underscoring it, from the sheer lust in the second verse to the genuinely melancholy bridge.

At some point it just hit me that it's actually quite strikingly sad. It made me feel that, after all that, I can't really blame her for wanting to be somewhere else for a bit. To be someone else for a bit. I would too. It makes sense that, for all intents and purposes, she isn’t here.

Maybe that is where reputation comes in. I'm in no position to magically guarantee that this is going to be some high-concept album, and that this idea resonates throughout the whole thing. I could be way, way off the mark. But if I was Taylor Swift, I'd sure want to show people exactly what they made me do: kill Taylor Swift, and turn out to be pretty damn proud of it.

So on November 10, we are getting a Taylor Swift album, with Taylor Swift songs that are written and performed by Taylor Swift. Some of which might be about Taylor Swift's life. It's going to have Taylor Swift on the cover, and Taylor Swift will tour in support of it. But is this really an album about Taylor Swift? Is this an album about what we think about Taylor Swift? Or is this an album that Taylor Swift wants us to think is about Taylor Swift?

Maybe it isn't about Taylor Swift at all.

Maybe it's just reputation.

Are you ready for it?

#taylor swift #ready for it #reputation #look what you made me do #lwymmd #...ready for it?

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