RECLAIMING Her Reputation The singer returned with new music in 2017 following a scandal that prompted her to disappear from the public eye.

Taylor Swift was mired in controversy by the time her sixth album came out at the end of 2017, but instead of defending herself ad nauseam, she let her music do the talking.

Taylor was a certified pop star after 1989, but she found herself being more heavily scrutinized than ever. All of the attention came to a head in early 2016, when rapper Kanye West and his then-wife, Kim Kardashian, accused Taylor of lying about a phone conversation regarding her approval of his song “Famous,” in which Ye referred to Taylor as a “bitch.” The drama dragged on, with Taylor posting in July of that year that she “would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009,” when Ye interrupted her acceptance speech at the VMAs.
While Ye and Kardashian were never able to prove that Taylor had approved the use of the “bitch” lyric in “Famous,” the public’s perception of her had been damaged and Kimye fans flooded Taylor’s social media accounts with snake emojis.
As a result, the singer decided to isolate herself and began working on her musical response to the backlash. She called upon her trusted collaborators Jack Antonoff, Max Martin and Shellback to produce Reputation, which dropped in November 2017. It was her final album at Big Machine Records, and Taylor experimented with genres yet again, foraying into electropop and R&B.