Maybe I got mine, but you’ll all get yours.
Apparently even Taylor Swift is at home in the Macabre Republic. Never has threatened vengeance sounded so catchy as in her latest single, “Look What You Made Me Do.”
Singing about rising from the dead, Swift invokes the horrific from the opening verses. The accompanying music video makes the imagery that much more graphic, depicting a raven-infested cemetery and Swift (or, technically, her personified Reputation) breaking ground as a moldering, reanimate corpse. More than a nod to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the Halloween-worthy scene signals that Swift is hardly looking to bury the hatchet as she comes back from the grave. In the figure of a zombie–a bogey known for its relentless aggression, Swift puts her enemies on grim notice.
The video subsequently fashions Swift as a Gothic monarch, vampirically-taloned, ensconced on a snake-swarmed throne. Dressed in uncheery cherry, she forebodes bloody comeuppance: “I’ve got a list of names and yours is in red, underlined.” After sounding a thoroughly antisocial note (“I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me”), Swift insists on haunting nocturnal visitation: “I’ll be the actress starring in your bad dreams.”
In past performances, Swift has shown that she isn’t averse to publicly airing grievances via allusive lyrics. Here, though, the rhetoric is stronger, the stance decidedly darker. Swift plays the deadly female, furious over her own scorning and hellbent on redressing perceived wrongs. With her coolly-delivered refrain, Swift channels the victim-blaming, violence-justifying demeanor and dubious composure of a classic Poe narrator. And while the media inevitably gets swept up in decoding Swift’s lines and the video’s symbolism, it’s less the “you” (whichever former lover or rival musician being referenced) than the disturbingly vague “what” of the song title that proves so arresting: what exactly has this questionably-driven speaker done?
At the very least, she has compelled me to write this post. Because all of the forced comedy of the video’s conclusion–in which Swift pokes fun at her previous images/personae–does nothing to diminish the sinister overtones of this surprisingly prickly piece of pop music.