Taylor Swift Never Rerecorded ‘Reputation.' Thank God.
'Reputation,' Taylor Swift's rowdy and sly 2017 document of exasperation and recrimination followed by blooming love, is, in a deep catalog of very fine albums, her finest. It is profoundly and disorientingly effective — sinister and hilarious and almost lighthearted in its viciousness — and also an experimental release from a superstar who had previously largely steered clear of formal risk.
'Reputation' broke all of Swift's formulas, taking her from an underdog prodigy who treated every win as an unexpected thrill to a pop star willing to play in the mud (and hurl it at her enemies). It may not be her most representative work, but it demonstrates her versatility and her ability to engage with the predominant sound of the moment, and reveals a snarl that had previously gone unseen.
Last Friday, Swift announced that she would not be making a new recording of 'Reputation' to join her Taylor's Versions of 'Fearless,' 'Speak Now,' 'Red' and '1989.' Those releases are the result of a long-running battle over the ownership of the master recordings of her first six albums. Swift has now acquired those assets — in a deal reportedly worth about $360 million, according to Billboard — so she no longer needs to produce an alternate version to draw fan interest away from the originals.
Which means she no longer needs to tinker with memory, either. The Taylor's Version projects were foundationally ahistoric, grand-scale curios that muddied the place Swift's originals held in the public consciousness. They also implied, via force, that Swift's original artistry was somehow insufficient. And it relegated old recordings to relic status, largely in the interest of commercial concerns.
What they succeeded at, however, was acknowledging that for an artist with several generations of fans, some older material might benefit from a refresh and a reintroduction. The commercial and chart success of these albums — her remake of '1989' had a larger opening week than the original, the equivalent of 1,653,000 sales in the United States — suggested that old work, rethought and repackaged, could be as lucrative as new songs.
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