Taylor Swift Is God and I Won’t Be Discussing This Further

Taylor Swift cleared her entire Instagram, went dark, and my pulse actually went up. Then the announcement came: new album, November, called Reputation. I got a little hard about it, which is a sentence I never expected to type about a pop announcement, but here we are and I refuse to apologize.

The obvious counterargument writes itself—she’s calculating, cold, the whole persona is a product assembled by committee and road-tested on demographics. Fine. Probably true. But the songs are real, or at least they function like real things. They land somewhere specific in the chest and don’t leave. 1989 alone contains more pure pop craftsmanship than most artists manage across entire careers, and the Katy Perry comparison isn’t remotely close. The first single from Reputation—Look What You Made Me Do—was due within days of the announcement, and the whole surrounding atmosphere was darker, harder, snake imagery everywhere, a title that reads like a declaration of war against everyone who’d spent the previous two years writing think pieces about her.

I’d read those think pieces. I’d nodded along. And I was still completely ready for whatever she was building. Taylor Swift is God. Not necessarily a good person—God doesn’t have to be.