As with many people my age, Taylor Swift is a name that is pretty household. She’s well known now for her pop music. However, some people—myself included—still remember all of the country songs she used to sing, with their catchy beats and predictable country music plotlines. Now I love Safe and Sound, Bad Blood, Never Getting Back Together, and many of the other pop-esque songs that she’s made since I’ve been in high school. However, the problem now lies in her newest single Look What You Made Me Do.
To start off, the chorus is repetitive to the point that it’s like beating a dead horse. Yes, we get that whoever (*coughKanyecough*) this song is about “forced” you into this place that you are in now. The chorus is literally “Look what you made me do” with a few “oohs” interspersed for eight whole lines. Not only is that super annoying, but it’s also pretty tacky for an experienced songwriter.
Next, the melody is so plain. Songs are supposed to make you feel something, at least in my experience. The only thing that this songs makes me feel is boredom and irritation as it comes over the radio for the seventh time in the last hour. It doesn’t make me want to dance or sing along, and it also doesn’t evoke any sort of mental imagery aside from Taylor angrily sitting in a bush staring at Kim and Kanye through a window. Creepy, right?
As my friend Kathryn put it, “Pretty sure I wrote the lyrics to Taylor Swift's new single when I was an angsty fourteen year old. Pretty sure I could have come up with a better melody, too.” This song practically screams “I want attention, GIVE ME ATTENTION!” And, much like an angsty teenager, Taylor “shut everyone out” of her social media before the big single’s reveal, trying to put on an air of mystery for the whole thing. The only thing she really succeeded in was giving a bunch of millennials some terrible flashbacks to when they had striped hair, raccoon eyeliner, and said things like “Rawr means I love you in dinosaur” while writing really “deep” poetry about being a tortured soul because they sold out of chicken nuggets at lunch.
There are also some claims that T-Swift is ripping off scenes from Beyoncé’s lemonade video. The video has also sparked some outrage over dancers who were segregated by the color of their skin. Granted, I do not have an attention span long enough to purposefully sit down at my computer and drag on through the three and a half minutes of boredom that is Look What You Made Me Do so I will leave those opinions to those who have seen the video in its entirety and those who are familiar with Beyoncé’s video.
Now, I don’t want to hate on people who might like her new single, I just know that it’s been way over-hyped, and quite frankly, I would very much appreciate if she picked the single back up and never dropped it again.
