Taylor Swift has been in the spotlight for over 10 years. Even when she hid away for a year after the Kim and Kanye drama, she still found herself in the public eye, usually in a bad light. Now she has even more people talking about her, whether they’re fans or not. She went from a shattered reputation to shattering the YouTube and Vevo records. How? Because she’s a genius.
She’s been called every sexist name you can imagine, just for going on dates and being a girl in her 20s. Celebrity gossip sites make slideshows of all the boys she’s been involved with, and every single move she makes is inspected and criticized. When Kanye called her to “get permission” to use her name in his song and Kim secretly recorded that call, they declined to mention that Kanye was going to call her “that b****” and take credit for all of her accomplishments. For calling him out and being upset (as anyone should), she was called a snake and a liar by Kim Kardashian and thousands of others around the world.
She’s now reclaiming her name, taking control of her image, and brilliantly demolishing anyone who’s ever wronged her, all with her new song.
I’ll be the first to admit, I was confused and caught off guard when I first heard “Look What You Made Me Do.” It’s dark and a bit frightening, but the video explains so much. I look at it as a sort of “Blank Space” effect, where she’s taking what other people are saying about her and turning it around, showing us all how ridiculous it is.
The whole video is packed with symbolism and hidden messages that I could go on and on about, but perhaps the end of the video is the most meaningful. There are 12 different Taylors from the past lined up (notice the 13th is standing above them all, wearing a jumpsuit that says “REP” across it). The last 45 seconds of the video consist of these 12 Taylors from the past mocking things she has once said or done, and things that others have said about her. It’s this combination of making fun of herself and making fun of what others have said about her that leads me to believe she really is rebranding herself and killing off the old Taylor, but only because the media and everyone who doesn’t know her but hates her anyway, made her do it.
She’s telling them throughout the whole song, “Look what you made me do.” News outlets obsess over her relationships and make her insecure about writing about her feelings. They say she acts too surprised at award shows. They say she plays the victim too much and fakes being nice, when she’s really a lying and viscous snake. So Taylor decides to do the only logical thing to deal with her shattered reputation: bury it.