In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
The Kanye West/Taylor Swift thing kept happening for so long. It’s still happening, or at least its aftershocks are still happening. Fifteen years ago, West drunkenly wandered onstage at the VMAs to tell Swift that the award she’d just won should’ve gone to Beyoncé instead. He was right, but he was also a dick about it, and he didn’t consider the idea that nobody should ever care about who wins an MTV Video Music Award. That live-televised shattered-glass moment continues to reverberate culturally. We can’t escape it.
This year, both Kanye West and Taylor Swift have made #1 hits — a surprise in the former case, a pure inevitability in the latter. Also, Swift released a song called “thanK you aIMee,” one of the many bonus tracks that she included on the extended version of her already-crazy-long blockbuster album The Tortured Poets Department. She had a reason for stylizing it like that: The capital letters spell out “KIM,” as in Kanye West’s ex-wife. Later on, she released an acoustic version retitled “thank You aimEe,” now signaling that the song was meant for West himself. (“thanK you aIMee” peaked at #23.)
So: It’s not over yet. It might never end. This one little offhand awards-show moment kicked up such a media shitstorm that it came to affect both artists’ careers in ways that nobody could’ve predicted. In that first moment, Kanye West was the villain, the guy who Barack Obama labeled as a “jackass.” Today, West is the villain again, to the extent that this story can even have a villain anymore. Once upon a time, though, Taylor Swift became the villain. This was new. She’d never been a villain before. She didn’t know how to handle it. She wanted to be excluded from the narrative, but that wasn’t up to her. Instead, she built the narrative into an album launch, one that would’ve been perilously scrutinized even without all the Kanye stuff.
Swift had to figure out a way to follow 1989, the mega-huge album that launched her to complete pop dominance. Swift was already wildly popular before 1989, but that album was something else. It had three different #1 singles, and it took Swift out of arenas and into stadiums. It’s always hard to figure out what to do after the moment when you first catch the zeitgeist in a chokehold. Maybe the Kanye situation gave Swift the material that she needed. It’s definitely the story that fuels “Look What You Made Me Do,” a song that became a huge hit even though seemingly everyone acknowledged that it’s mid at best.
“I’m, like, this close to overexposure.” That’s one of the things that Taylor Swift told Kanye West on the phone. We know this because we have video, and that video is the crucial document behind the release of Swift’s album Reputation. It’s a rare moment — a star at Swift’s level acknowledging that she can be overexposed — and she thought she was making it privately. That moment isn’t the reason that we now have the conversation on the record, though.
The great Kanye West interruption happened at the VMAs in 2009. Almost immediately afterward, Jay Leno was aggressively shaming West to his face on television, bringing him to literal tears. West apologized, and then he took back his apology a few years later, blaming it on “peer pressure.” One year after that incident, Swift used the VMAs to debut “Innocent,” her condescendingly forgiving song about how that one moment shouldn’t define West. For his part, West ended the show with the premiere of “Runaway,” the song where he raises a glass to douchebags and assholes. (“Innocent” peaked at #63. “Runaway” peaked at #12.)
It wasn’t really a feud back then. Swift, still in the final months of her teens, seemed shocked but not necessarily angry in the moment, and West suffered a massive PR crisis without ever attempting to blame it on Swift. Things went quiet, and then West and Swift were photographed in conversation at the 2015 Grammys. Apparently, they became friends after that, at least to the point where they went out to dinner once. Later in 2015, Swift presented West with the Video Vanguard Awards at the VMAs, and West sent Swift a giant thing of flowers. And then: “Famous.”
On “Famous,” a highlight from 2015’s The Life Of Pablo, West kicked things off with this line: “To all my Southside n***as that know me best/ I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ I made that bitch famous.” (“Famous” peaked at #34. It’s a great song.) A few days later, Swift won Album Of The Year at the Grammys for 1989, and she directed her acceptance speech to young women in the music business, warning them of those “who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.” West responded by releasing a “Famous” video full of deepfake models of famous naked people, Swift among them. Kim Kardashian, West’s wife at the time, told GQ that Swift had “totally approved” the “Famous” line, and Swift’s publicist denied it. Then the phone-call Snapchat came out.
Kim Kardashian’s anger over the Taylor Swift Grammy speech was the main storyline in a season-finale episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. When the episode aired in July 2016, Kim posted an edited, murky-looking Snapchat video of Kanye West talking to Swift on the phone. As Rick Rubin loafs silently nearby, West informs Swift of the lyric about the two of them maybe having sex one day. The unseen Swift says that she doesn’t mind, that it’s “not mean” and “kind of a compliment.” The tone is friendly but awkward. Kardashian posted the video with snake emojis, and West’s very-online fanbase had a great time with the idea that Swift had been playing the victim the entire time, going all the way back to 2009.
It might be the single most consequential bit of miscommunication in pop history. West did tell Swift about the line that he might have sex with her, and she was cool with it. But West did not tell her about “I made that bitch famous.” Taylor Swift didn’t mind West talking about maybe having sex with her, but she did not want him calling her a bitch or taking credit for her fame. (By the time of the 2009 VMAs, Taylor Swift was already handily outselling Kanye West, though the whole incident definitely did make her more famous than she already was. West was more of a media fascination than Swift at the time, and that situation is very different now.) When that phone video came out, Swift looked duplicitous, and she knew it. But the actual reason for her anger got lost in the noise. That happens sometimes. Really, that happens all the time.
As all this was going down, Taylor Swift was also suing a radio DJ for sexual harassment after he grabbed her ass during a photoshoot. She only asked for a dollar in the lawsuit, and she won it. This was during a societal reexamination of sexual power dynamics, and Swift, along with founders of the #MeToo movement, appeared on the Person Of The Year Time cover. At the same time, she found herself losing a PR battle to a guy who called her a bitch on record. (I think that was miscommunication, too. The word “bitch” means different things to Taylor Swift and Kanye West.)
Reputation is an album about falling in love, but it’s about falling in love while you’re serving as a target for widespread public hate. After a bunch of high-profile public breakups, Swift began a relationship with Joe Alwyn, an actor who might as well have been a Subway sandwich artist given the relative fame of everyone else in Swift’s orbit. Swift and Alwyn stayed together for a long time, though they’re not together anymore. But you already knew that; this is Taylor Swift we’re talking about. On much of Reputation, Swift sounds amazed that this other person could become a refuge in a time of crisis — as if she didn’t even know that this could be a possibility.
Some of us have real problems. Taylor Swift has enjoyed a historically charmed existence, and the Kanye West episode now looks like a footnote in her story, albeit a long and complicated footnote. It’s hard enough to relate to a pop superstar; it’s even harder when that pop star is melting down over people being mean to her on Twitter. But have people ever been mean to you on Twitter? That shit sucks. It’s not real, and it never lasts, but you can’t think about anything else when it’s happening. I’ve been through it a few times for things that I wrote, and my usual reaction is to wait until it’s over rather than troll my way through it. I’m not really a public figure, so my experiences have been way less than what Swift went through. Kanye West, meanwhile, has gone through worse than that many times. He seems like he’s addicted to it.
You can get addicted to pissing people off on Twitter. It’s a rush. There’s adrenaline. That’s how people turn into trolls, and troll can be an extremely successful career lane. Taylor Swift didn’t become a troll. She tried to tell the world that she didn’t want to be part of the story anymore, and that did not work. So she made some songs about it instead. One of those songs is “Look What You Made Me Do.”
It’s funny: Taylor Swift writes these mega-successful songs about herself and the other wildly famous people in her life, and then she never officially comes out and confirms the names of the people she’s talking about. At the time, there were still some people who assumed that “Look What You Made Me Do” was about Katy Perry, Swift’s presumed “Bad Blood” nemesis. Mostly, though, the song was received as what it is: A shot back at the first celebrity who’d ever succeeded in making Taylor Swift look bad.
“I don’t like your tilted stage” — that’s the floating platform thing that West used on his Saint Pablo tour. “I don’t like your perfect crime” — that’s the way that the edited phone-call video made her look. “The world moves on, another day, another drama drama/ But not for me, not for me, all I think about is karma” — that’s Swift’s inability to let this thing go even after the rest of the world got sick of thinking about it. In the song’s video, and in all the other imagery that she used around the Reputation release, Swift attempted to own Kim Kardashian’s snake emoji, putting decorative snakes everywhere. It’s one moment among many where Taylor Swift’s volumes of lore overshadow her status as a generational pop songwriter.
As a song, “Look What You Made Me Do” is just not that good. It’s a textbook example of Taylor Swift First-Single Syndrome. Swift albums don’t just get to be albums. They have to be rolled out like Star Wars movies or presidential campaigns. When she drops a single, that single has to outline the themes and aesthetics that she’ll ride for the next two or three years. That’s a big load to bear, and the actual song usually seems secondary to all that it has to accomplish. The great Taylor Swift songs, the ones that inspire starry-eyed devotion in so many people around the world, are not those first singles; they’re the deep cuts that are allowed to merely work as songs. But because of the nature of this column, most of the Taylor Swift songs that’ll appear here are just not that great. It is what it is.
Reputation rocks. Great record. I had fun writing about it at the time, and I still have fun when it’s on. I know plenty of people who argue that Reputation is the best Taylor Swift album, and I can’t go that far. But “Getaway Car”? “Delicate”? “King Of My Heart”? “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”? Bangers. Even in its most awkward moments, and there are plenty of those, Reputation represents Taylor Swift trying things. Those things — brash quasi-rap delivery, sawtoothed dubstep synths, harsh electronic textures — haven’t stuck around in her music, so Reputation remains distinct in her career — an era that makes for a fun Eras Tour mini-set. Sonically, it comes off as Swift’s attempt to make a Rihanna record, and it works way better than it should.
Swift made about half of Reputation with Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish songwriting and producing partners who’d helped craft all of her previous chart-toppers. She made the other half with Jack Antonoff, who’s already been in this column as a member of Fun. and who will be in here many more times as a producer and songwriter. Antonoff worked on a few 1989 tracks, and he was on his way to becoming Swift’s chief collaborator. One of the things that I really like about Reputation is that I usually can’t remember which co-producers worked on which songs. Everyone pushed themselves out of their comfort zones, and that led to interesting places. It also led to “Look What You Made Me Do.”
“Look What You Made Me Do” is one of the Taylor Swift/Jack Antonoff joints. At this point, there is a defined Taylor Swift/Jack Antonoff sound — wordy lyrics, soft synth textures, florid melodies. The two of them have been working together for long enough that some Swift fans are begging them to give the partnership a rest so that she can move on to other collaborators. But that sound, which really started with 1989 tracks like “Out Of The Woods,” is not evident on “Look What You Made Me Do.” I always have to double-check that Antonoff had something to do with “Look What You Made Me Do.” But yes: He co-wrote it and co-produced it with Swift, and it sounds like nothing else that they’ve done, before or since.
“Look What You Made Me Do” starts off with tinkly, cinematic strings, but they quickly give way to electronic hums and thunks. The sonic template seems to pull from the EDM-pop stuff that was already out of the zeitgeist in 2017, and the mix is full of little blurps and squelch-riffs. Swift sings most of it in a blank monotone, sometimes switching into playground cadences or mock-operatic darkness. Eventually, the strings return. Other stuff comes in: trap hi-hats, distorted guitar-blare, little high-note shards. There’s a lot happening in the mix, but it’s all there to serve a kind of Broadway-level goth-electroclash template. Swift wears all this like a costume, and the costume doesn’t really fit. When she says that the old Taylor can’t come to the phone because she’s dead, that’s a memorable bit of theater, but it doesn’t serve the song. There’s barely a song to be served.
“Look What You Made Me Do” cuts against everything that makes Taylor Swift a great pop star. This seems intentional. She wants the world to know that she’s responding to hostility with her own hostility, and so she’s not going to bother with sweeteners like hooks or melody or conversational lyrics. On the chorus, she just blankly repeats one phrase over and over: “Ooh, look what you made me do.” That cadence comes from an unlikely source: Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.” In a previous age, maybe nobody would blink at Swift using that cadence, but “Look What You Made Me Do” came out after “Blurred Lines,” so all three members of Right Said Fred got songwriting credits. Incredibly, this wasn’t the last #1 hit to feature an “I’m Too Sexy” interpolation; we’ll get to the other one down the road.
Jack Antonoff later said that he and Swift got the idea for the Right Said Fred interpolation after they’d written a wordier chorus. These days, Swift will always go for the wordier option. Back then, Antonoff told Stereogum, “The idea there was let’s make something that doesn’t sound like what’s going on right now. Sonically, it was like, let’s just fucking freak it out.” He also claimed that critics had “missed the camp” in it. Someone more versed in queer theory will have to tell me whether you can stage that sort of intentional camp on a normie mega-hit like this.
Swift definitely went for extreme camp with the “Look What You Made Me Do” video. She turned to her old collaborator Joseph Kahn, who went for big-budget self-referentiality, like a damn Deadpool movie. Swift is a zombie rising out of a grave, and then she’s a vengeful heiress reclining in a bathtub full of diamonds. (The diamonds were apparently real, and there’s also a single dollar bill in there, a nod to her lawsuit against that DJ. Those deep-reference bits can get exhausting pretty quickly.) There are tons of setpieces: A crashing luxury sports car, a giant birdcage, CGI snakes everywhere. Eventually, we see the evil Swift perched atop a mountain of Taylor Swifts from past music videos. When the song ends, the different Swifts stand around arguing with each other, accusing one another of playing the victim or promising to edit the “receipts” that they catch on cell-phone cameras. When one Taylor says she wants to be excluded from the narrative, the others all tell her to shut up.
That level of self-obsession is part of the deal with Taylor Swift fandom. Everything calls back to everything else, and it’s supposed to be fun to draw connections and tease out references. Sometimes, the fun is real. Even back then, she was already doing the Eras Tour thing, presenting her phases as interlocking segments in the grand grid of her pop career. But I tend to prefer it when pop songs function as pop songs, and “Look What You Made Me Do” doesn’t really pass that test.
When “Look What You Made Me Do” came out, I worried that Swift had totally lost her grip on making pop bangers. I thought it sucked. Over the years, I’ve mellowed on the song. At the Eras Tour, “Look What You Made Me Do” made for fun stadium spectacle, which was probably always the goal. I sang along, just like everyone else. I haven’t come to like the song, but I’m not mad at it anymore.
“Look What You Made Me Do” got the full platinum-plated rollout. Swift debuted the video during the VMAs, the site of so much of her past Kanye West conflict. The video got 43 million views in its first day, a record at the time. In its first week, the single sold more than 350,000 downloads, and it also did huge numbers on streaming and radio. The song topped charts around the world, and it became Swift’s first #1 hit in the UK. But those stats are more of a testament to the song’s cultural-event status than anything else. The real question is: Did the song hang around? It did, more or less.
It’s not a fake hit. If you chant the hook to most anyone who pays even a shred of attention to popular music, they will recognize it right away. The “Look What You Made Me Do” single is quadruple platinum, and the video has 1.5 billion views. The Spotify streams are in the billions, too, though they’re not as high as those for “Don’t Blame Me,” a Reputation deep cut that never made the Hot 100. It’s not like Swift has dropped “Look What You Made Me Do” from her setlists. The song remains. It’s a fact of life.
In any case, I didn’t have to wait too long for a Taylor Swift single that I actually liked. A few weeks after “Look What You Made Me Do,” Swift released “…Ready For It?,” her utterly ridiculous album opener. “…Ready For It?” doesn’t have anything directly to do with Kanye West or Kim Kardashian, but it’s just as much of a statement. This time, though, the statement is aesthetic. It’s a jagged mess, all hammering dubstep drops and hornily quasi-rapped lyrics. But the track also has hooks on hooks. Not too long ago, I heard “…Ready For It?” while shrooming, and that was an experience. “…Ready For It?” wasn’t a full-on smash like “Look What You Made Me Do,” but it debuted at #4. (It’s an 8.)
Reputation came out in November and sold more than a million copies in its first week. In terms of pure sales, it was the biggest-selling album of 2017 despite that late release date. Still, Swift’s buddy Ed Sheeran beat her out on the Billboard year-end list. Reputation was always going to be seen as a commercial step down after the perfect-storm dominance of 1989. It would be ridiculous to talk about a triple-platinum chart-topper as a cult favorite. At least in the context of Swift’s ridiculous numbers, though, Reputation is the weird little underdog, in the same way that Rogue One is the weird little underdog of Disney-era Star Wars movies. It’s not actually little at all, but it never quite became a culturally dominant monster, either.
After “…Ready For It?,” Reputation sent no more singles into the top 10. “End Game,” Swift’s deeply awkward kinda-rap team-up with Ed Sheeran and Future, peaked at #18. The actually-beautiful “Delicate,” which I thought should’ve been the first single, eventually reached #12, largely through radio dominance. Swift took the album on a giant stadium tour with a stage full of fake snakes, and it pulled in about $350 million and became a Netflix special. Taylor Swift was doing just fine.
Still, for a minute there, it looked like Taylor Swift’s imperial era might be over. “Look What You Made Me Do” ended the long chart reign of Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito,” keeping that song from breaking a Hot 100 record. But when she came back with her 2019 album Lover, a new Taylor Swift single was not an automatic #1 hit, especially if the song wasn’t any good. Swift steered hard into First-Single Syndrome with that rollout. First, she duetted with Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie on “Me!,” a Disney-princess confetti cannon in the shape of a song. “Me!” is ass, and it peaked at #2. (It’s a 3.)
In an unfortunate twist, the second Lover single also had Taylor Swift First-Single Syndrome. “You Need To Calm Down” is an attempt at a gay-rights anthem that’s also about how you shouldn’t say rude things about Taylor Swift online, and its relatively streamlined hooks weren’t enough to distract from that dissonance. Once again, that single peaked at #2. (It’s a 4.) With both singles, Swift competed with another long-running chart phenomenon. This time, she lost. (We’ll get to that phenomenon eventually, and that will be a long column.)
After “You Need To Calm Down,” Swift made it to #10 with her relatively homespun ballad “Lover.” (It’s a 7.) With that, the Lover album cycle ended. Reputation and Lover both sold a gajillion copies, and both are excellent records. Still, neither one got the Album Of The Year nomination at the Grammys, and Swift evidently took that personally. Before she turned Lover into another global stadium tour, the pandemic arrived. Swift was entering her thirties, and she’d already had a world-historical pop career. She would be famous for the rest of her life, but maybe her star was on the wane. It happens to everyone. But it didn’t happen to Taylor Swift.
Obviously, Taylor Swift is now king shit of fuck mountain. It doesn’t even feel fair to talk about her in relation to other pop stars. There’s at least some chance that she’s the single most famous person on the planet. She has no peers. Her old songs randomly go to #1 all the time. It took years, but a non-single from Lover will eventually appear in this column.
In 2020, the full phone call between Kanye West and Taylor Swift leaked, and it’s pretty illuminating. As it turns out, West, in deranged-soliloquy mode for much of the conversation, wasn’t looking for Swift’s approval for that “Famous” lyric. He wanted her to be the one to tweet the song out, to play an active role in its release. When he told her the lyric about maybe having sex, she said, “I thought it was going to be like, ‘That stupid, dumb bitch,’ but it’s not.” Later on, West insinuated that he might’ve written a line about “I made her famous,” and she didn’t give her approval for that one. She also pretty much said that she would not tweet the song out, telling him, “Anything that I do becomes like a feminist thinkpiece,” which remains true. The full transcript doesn’t really prove either of them right, but it adds a lot more context.
Taylor Swift still speaks about all the attempts to assassinate her character, as if she still has lingering PTSD from the Reputation days. Maybe she does. The rest of us simply cannot know what it is to live like that. But Kanye West and Kim Kardashian did not end Taylor Swift’s run. They barely slowed her stride. We’ll see so much more Taylor Swift in this column.
GRADE: 5/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s indie-rap lifer R.A. The Rugged Man going in over the “Look What You Made Me Do” instrumental as a kind of parlor trick:
BONUS BONUS BEATS: In 2019, Taylor Swift conclusively moved on from Kanye West and found a new antagonist: Big-deal manager Scooter Braun, who bought Swift’s label Big Machine and gained ownership of her master recordings, which she wanted to buy. Swift was famously unhappy about this, and she began work on the massive project of re-recording all her own songs and gaining a new kind of ownership. She may have secretly done this as early as 2020. An episode of the TV show Killing Eve used an ominous cover of “Look What You Made Me Do,” credited to the mysterious Jack Leopards And The Dolphin Club, an act with no other credits or digital footprint. Theories abound. Maybe it was Swift’s brother, or maybe it was Swift herself singing through a deepening voice filter. In any case, Scooter Braun didn’t own that version of the song. Here it is:
BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the part of the 2021 motion picture Sing 2 where a pig lady, portrayed by Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon, attempts to perform “Look What You Made Me Do” while dressed as an alien:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Ooh, book what you made me do. That’s a reach, isn’t it? Shit. Fuck. The old Tom can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh. Because he’s dead. Buy the book here.
