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Taylor Swift has been so busy dropping hints, she’s forgotten to write a good song

The singer is the master of her own hype, but in the wake of the brilliant ‘Reputation’, writes Alexandra Pollard, her new offering feels remarkably toothless

Saturday 27 April 2019 14:09 BST
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The world moves on but one thing’s for sure,” sang Taylor Swift two years ago, on her scowling, prowling comeback single “Look What You Made Me Do” – “Maybe I got mine, but you’ll all get yours.” The song was camp, melodramatic and exhilarating. Swift had run out of patience with the toxic narrative surrounding her, and proceeded to threaten every single human being accordingly. Reputation, the brilliant album that followed, had fangs that were just as sharp: Swift buried hatchets with one hand and gleefully burnt bridges with the other. Cut to 2019. By comparison, her hysterically hyped new single is so toothless that it's almost admirable.

“Hey, kids! Spelling is fun!” announces Swift on the bubblegum pop song “ME!”, before Panic at the Disco’s Brendon Urie (why?) announces, “Girl, there ain’t no I in ‘team’ but you know there is a ‘me’.” “Me-e-e, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh” goes the chorus. “I’m the only one of me, baby that’s the fun of me.” The song, which Swift described on Good Morning America as “about embracing your individuality and really celebrating it”, is as cheerfully anodyne as that quote suggests. Its video is just as pallid; all pastel hues, rainbows and flying umbrellas.

But that hardly seems to matter. For one thing, Swift is clearly having a great time. It’s hard to begrudge her that. In a recent piece for Elle magazine listing the 30 things she’s learnt before turning 30 – with entries ranging from “vitamins make me feel so much better!” to “in cases of sexual assault, I believe the victim” – she advised readers to “banish the drama”. It seems she’s practising what she preaches.

What’s more, the video is so chock full of “Easter eggs” – hidden messages about the forthcoming album, future singles, even Swift’s personal life – that among it all, the song feels almost incidental. Swift has already been hiding clues about the single for months, sprinkling breadcrumbs across social media and streaming platforms for her fans to pick up. In response, they’ve spun outlandish theories from even the smallest of tip-offs (scroll too far through a certain corner of Tumblr, and it all starts to get a bit Pepe Silvia).

Swift clearly adores it. Dropping hints, it seems, has become her full-time job. On Spotify, she changed the background art to every one of her songs to “4.26” (the release date of the new single), except for “The Story of Us”, the seventh song (this will be album number seven) on her 2010 album Speak Now – a song that runs at four minutes and 26 seconds exactly. Are you keeping up? She also posted pastel-hued pictures on Instagram, teasing the video’s aesthetic, as well as photos of chickens in sunglasses, and rainbow cobblestones, alluding to certain lyrics. Fans couldn’t get enough. Some even optimistically interpreted the rainbow imagery as evidence that she would be coming out. (There’s still a glimmer of hope in that regard – while performing at the Time 100 gala this week, she changed the lyrics of “New Year’s Day” from “I want your midnights” to “I want her midnights”. Twice.)

Music critics, too, were swept up in the hype – understandably so given the impressive, perplexing twists and turns that Swift’s career has taken thus far. A Rolling Stone deep dive pondered every possible direction her music could take. The Guardian recruited six critics to “discuss what’s at stake for Swift’s career in this new era”. In the wake of it all, “ME!” has proven something of a damp squib.

I’d suggest it was a clever attempt to avoid the usual deluge of think pieces – release something so blandly uncontroversial that there is literally nothing to say about it – but Swift clearly still loves to stir up conversation. “There’s a secret in the video I’ve been keeping for months,” she said in a YouTube Q&A last night. “Let’s see who can guess it.” Fans have been hard at work ever since.

Taylor Swift is the master of her own hype. No one drops hints, sparks conversation, or stirs things up quite like her. I just hope she’s spent enough time working on the actual music, too.

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