Taylor Swift's "transformation" takes American showbiz by storm

Coming up on her 10th anniversary as a professional singer, Taylor Swift has returned and shaken up the American music scene.

Taylor Swift returns with a completely transformed image

The fatal blow of the "lying snake"

On August 25, after more than a year of silence, singer Taylor Swift suddenly reappeared with a song called Look What You Made Me Do. This product was only intended to introduce Taylor's upcoming album Reputation, celebrating 10 years of professional singing. But it ended up becoming a huge hit in a very short time.

As an A-list star, Taylor Swift is always associated with a high-quality music brand. That means all her products enjoy a special halo when they are released. But that does not reduce the magic that the song Look What You Made Me Do has created. After 24 hours of online sales, this song sold more than any song in the past half year, with nearly 200,000 downloads in the US alone. To date, there have been 8 million online purchases on distribution sites for this song. On Apple's Itunes store, it took exactly 30 minutes for Look What You Made Me Do to climb to the No. 1 position. The New York Times asserted that the song has "an appeal as clear as day. It is Taylor's fatal blow since the two songs We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together and I Knew You Were Trouble in 2012".

On August 27, the MV for Look What You Made Me Do was also officially released and in less than a day, the song entered the top list with more than 30 million viewers on Youtube, breaking the record of this website. Many newspapers were mixed in their comments. Writer Jake Nevins of The Guardian affirmed: "The MV is quite fun, even a little crazy and is the most ambitious pop product I have seen since Beyoncé's MV Lemonade last year."

Pour out your anger into MV

When decoding the phenomenon of Look What You Made Me Do, critics and audiences were initially puzzled. This song has an uncatchy melody, using nostalgic, even outdated materials like electropop, which was popular in the early 2000s. Everything gradually revealed itself when people realized the appeal came from the story behind the song. It was still a product composed by Taylor Swift, interwoven with details about her life and love story. Taylor Swift's life and love are always two keywords with strange magic for the majority of audiences.

The song is a melancholy confession about the loneliness that Taylor Swift experiences in American showbiz. Despite her high status, large fan base, and numerous achievements, she is often teased, uncooperative, and isolated from the community. Famous singers such as Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Kayne West, Demi Lovato, etc. have all secretly shown their discord with Taylor, causing her to almost only stand on solo stages for 10 years of singing. When listening carefully to Look What You Made Me Do, it is easy to recognize Taylor's loneliness expressed through the lyrics. The dark lyrics, through Taylor's addictive voice, become even more tragic: "I don't trust anyone and no one trusts me."

In addition, the MV for Look What You Made Me Do is full of Taylor's venomous metaphors for her opponents. In many recent products, the female singer often has this habit: venting her anger and sarcasm on her music products instead of arguing in real life. Taylor's number one enemy is the rapper couple Kayne West - Kim Kardashian, the couple who once publicly called the female singer fake, "a lying snake" in the media. In this MV, Taylor used a scene of lying in a bathtub full of diamonds, recalling the incident when Kim Kardashian was robbed, tied up and almost raped in the bathtub last year because she showed off too much jewelry. Kayne West couldn't escape either, when Taylor reenacted the scene that the rapper wanted to forget in his career.

The audience was extremely interested in these details, all the online newspapers spent time digging up the sarcastic metaphors that Taylor Swift inserted in the new MV, as well as monitoring the reactions of the victims. Kayne West and his wife, who had always been outspoken in insulting each other, are now remaining silent in front of public opinion. Many other opposing characters were also "invoked" by Taylor in the MV, such as the scene where she imitated Katy Perry's way of dressing and drove straight into an electric pole (recalling the false rumor that Katy Perry died in a car accident in 2013). Another scene shows a grave with the name Nils Sjoberg, which is the pen name of Calvin Harris - Taylor Swift's former lover, now enemy.

A spectacular transformation

However, the most important thing to learn from this comeback, with Look What You Made Me Do, is the radical change in Taylor Swift's personality and musical style. At the end of the song's chorus, there is a creepy line: "I'm sorry, the old Taylor can't pick up the phone. Because she's dead." This is like a declaration, wanting the whole world to wave goodbye to the ghost of the old Taylor.

Going back in time to when she first rose to fame, this female singer represented something pure and gentle. Her first appearance was on April 5, 2002, at an NBA basketball game in Philadelphia. Taylor was then an unknown 12-year-old girl, standing in front of 35,000 spectators and tremblingly singing the American National Anthem. After that, she gradually emerged as a young woman, playing the guitar and singing. The affectionate nickname "Princess of Country Music" was born from that. And obviously no one could have imagined that the princess would change like she does in 2017.

Now, from a blonde girl with a baby face to a beauty with heavy makeup and sharp mascara. From a trembling voice singing the National Anthem of the Star Spangled Banner to a musician - singer specializing in composing sad, sarcastic, ironic words about ex-lovers and enemies. From the innocent "Country Princess" to the "Venomous Snake Girl", making enemies with big names in the American music industry. 10 years of existence in the music industry, is 10 years of Taylor Swift's complete transformation.

However, the success of Look What You Made Me Do will still ensure a solid position for Taylor in the turbulent music market of 2017. The change even makes this female singer become something very special: "Degenerating" her image from angel to devil, but the quality of music in the products still does not decline./.

According to Traffic