Taylor Swift's "...Ready for It?" is not as bad as it seems.
This weekend, Taylor Swift released “…Ready for It?,” the opening song from her forthcoming Reputation. If the new single was, as it seems, an attempt to move past the widespread disdain for “Look What You Made Me Do,” then its release was yet another miscalculation in an album rollout full of them. Because “…Ready for It?” is a baffling song. There are artists you expect to put out a clunker every once in awhile: people like Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Ed Sheeran. For Swift, whose quality control is legendary, to release a song this … off is unsettling.
Thankfully, “…Ready For It?” is much better than “Look What You Made Me Do,” a song about inner turmoil that feels like its fighting itself, with ugly parts fused together searching for a compromise that is never found. Comparatively, “…Ready For It?” is melodically rich and, when it all comes together, far more coherent. Still, its pleasures are mostly on the surface. It opens with a sustained blast of distorted bass—an obvious confrontational pose—and briefly transforms into a floaty sort of riddim, darting its eyes in the direction of America’s renewed fascination with dancehall. To its credit, it does sound like a properly big, monolithic pop song—Max Martin is the headline collaborator here, after all—and not a tryhard approximation of it. Lyrically, there is also more to chew on, with Taylor backing away from the Kanye feud to write a song in which she positions herself as a carnivore in the romantic food chain, yet one who is still vulnerable all the same, dreaming of the things she is going to do with the man she is purusing and assuming that it will all go to plan.
Nonetheless, the song still feels ill-fitting. The central story it tells—not of Taylor Swift being swindled by a bad boy, but instead of her turning the tables—gets lost in a jumble of metaphors, involving killers and ghosts and ransoms and thieves and islands and jails. There are some good lines which crucially display self-awareness via wit (“I see nothing better, I keep him forever, like a vendetta”), instead of being so effortful as to make you question whether she has any self-awareness whatsoever. She used to thread that needle routinely, but now you can still notice her sanding down her songwriting considerably—to Martin, after all, words are just more sounds. (This perhaps explains the rhyme of “bad blood” and “mad love” on “Bad Blood,” easily her worst lyric ever.) Further, it’s just difficult to buy her singing over bits of production that sound like Yeezus and Major Lazer. Part of being a pop star is selling your persona, and at the moment it still feels as if Swift is wearing a costume.
Thankfully, “…Ready For It?” is much better than “Look What You Made Me Do,” a song about inner turmoil that feels like its fighting itself, with ugly parts fused together searching for a compromise that is never found. Comparatively, “…Ready For It?” is melodically rich and, when it all comes together, far more coherent. Still, its pleasures are mostly on the surface. It opens with a sustained blast of distorted bass—an obvious confrontational pose—and briefly transforms into a floaty sort of riddim, darting its eyes in the direction of America’s renewed fascination with dancehall. To its credit, it does sound like a properly big, monolithic pop song—Max Martin is the headline collaborator here, after all—and not a tryhard approximation of it. Lyrically, there is also more to chew on, with Taylor backing away from the Kanye feud to write a song in which she positions herself as a carnivore in the romantic food chain, yet one who is still vulnerable all the same, dreaming of the things she is going to do with the man she is purusing and assuming that it will all go to plan.
Nonetheless, the song still feels ill-fitting. The central story it tells—not of Taylor Swift being swindled by a bad boy, but instead of her turning the tables—gets lost in a jumble of metaphors, involving killers and ghosts and ransoms and thieves and islands and jails. There are some good lines which crucially display self-awareness via wit (“I see nothing better, I keep him forever, like a vendetta”), instead of being so effortful as to make you question whether she has any self-awareness whatsoever. She used to thread that needle routinely, but now you can still notice her sanding down her songwriting considerably—to Martin, after all, words are just more sounds. (This perhaps explains the rhyme of “bad blood” and “mad love” on “Bad Blood,” easily her worst lyric ever.) Further, it’s just difficult to buy her singing over bits of production that sound like Yeezus and Major Lazer. Part of being a pop star is selling your persona, and at the moment it still feels as if Swift is wearing a costume.
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