reputation: the battle between perception vs reality
Taylor Swift’s Reputation era is a whole different animal from her sparkly & vulnerable earlier albums. Released in 2017 after a big wave of public backlash, Reputation is both a response to and a meditation on goodwill, public image, and the psychological cost of being misrepresented by a collective “they”.
Swift doesn’t tell a story of revenge or reinvention — she probes the very nature of 'reputation' itself: what is it, who controls it, and asks the question, does it have anything to do with who we really are?
In Taylor Swift and Philosophy, Swift’s 2016 fallout is explored through the lens of goodwill and reputation. The leaked phone call with Kanye West and the #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty hashtag symbolized the rupture between Swift and the public that once loved her. “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” is that betrayal — Swift mourns the trust and generosity she once gave freely, singing about guests in her home and second chances, only to feel stabbed in the back. But even in the sarcasm and bitterness, the song reveals a deeper truth: goodwill is a limited and delicate resource.
As the book says, withdrawing goodwill is not cruelty — it’s self preservation.
​
Beyond personal feeling, the album questions the philosophical nature of “reputation”. According to Dan Sperber and Nicolas Baumard, reputation is public opinion — a social consensus formed by the group rather than individual experience. We hear this throughout the album in lines like “they say I did something bad” or “they told you I’m crazy”.
The elusive “they” is public opinion — a crowd that forms an image of a person without really knowing them. Gloria Origgi says reputation is a “refraction”, not a reflection: it’s a distorted, amplified version of ourselves, shaped by gossip and hearsay more than truth.
This is at the heart of Swift’s exploration of self. In “Delicate” she’s dealing with the fallout of her damaged public image: “My reputation’s never been worse, so / You must like me for me”. Here Swift identifies the painful dissonance—the gap between who she really is and who the public thinks she is. Her reputation, as she sees it, is “fake”—a distorted image that prevents her from having real relationships. So Reputation is an album about finding something real in a world of illusion.
Swift also takes back power through symbolic imagery, most notably the ouroboros — the snake eating its own tail — in the “Look What You Made Me Do” lyric video.
Traditionally a symbol of cyclical rebirth, the ouroboros matches Swift’s line: “I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time”.
Here, she’s not a passive victim of public scorn, but someone who’s constantly reinventing herself in response to destruction.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Reputation is not just about surviving scandal, it’s about the philosophical tension between who we are and who others believe us to be. Through her lyrics and imagery, Swift critiques the unreliability of reputation and affirms the importance of self-definition. It’s a powerful reminder that what “they” say may be loud, but it isn’t necessarily true.