TAYLOR IN REPUTATION IS JAY GATSBY!!!
No disrespect to cats or food or sleep or Florida or hockey or Chris Pratt or Star Wars or Mark Hamill or Christmas or snow or porgs or Robert Downey Jr or cheesecake or even my Avy, but Reputation literally just brought my two favorite things on this planet together and I want to cry: Taylor Swift and the Great Gatsby.
Don’t believe me? It took me an entire listen all the way through but I AM DYING; Gatsby is my all time favorite book and I have written about it, read it, and watched the movies thousands of times…so, let me know what you think.
Let’s start off simple. For those of you who haven’t read the Great Gatsby, it’s a dramatic love story that doesn’t have a very happy ending. Jay Gatsby is a rich, yet shady to the public eye, man who throws parties for the girl he used to love before he went to war. He moved near her and eventually they got back together…only to end up in a crazy, mixed up tragic ending. Daisy is married to Tom, but Tom is seeing Myrtle..this will all make sense later on. So, if you don’t want spoilers, don’t read ahead…but please do anyway, haha.
The book/movie had a few themes that were repetitive – the color green, which included hope and wealth, the locations, and giant parties representing the 20s. Start with So It Goes, Dancing With Our Hands Tied, and Dress - all mention the same color gold, which is also equal to the idea of wealth and money that the color green gives in Gatsby. The lyrics in SIG are ‘gold cage, hostage to my feelings’, DWOHT says ‘painted my golden’, and a ‘golden tattoo’ is mentioned in Dress.
Now, take notes of the songs Ready For It, Delicate and Dress – all discuss the theme of an island or the east and west side. In RFI, she talked about moving to an island, and in Delicate she talks once about the ‘east side, where you at?’ and later says ‘third floor on the west side’ – yes, she is talking about New York, I assume, but the East and West Egg are mentioned over and over again as the home bases for the characters in Gatsby. Last: in This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, King Of My Heart, and New Year’s Day, the lyrics are almost a mirror to the party life of Gatsby. TIWWCHNT is a complete match, using lyrics like ‘it was so nice throwing big parties’, ‘everyone swimming in a champagne sea’, ‘bass beat rattling the chandelier, feeling so Gatsby for that whole year’. This is probably the only time I’m going to mention this song in this rant, though, since it’s solely about the parties when discussing this Gatsby idea. KOMH mentions fancy cars and the idea of ‘fancy me not fancy stuff’ which is how Daisy sees past the parties to see Gatsby for him. NYD discusses ‘glitter on the floor after the party’, which again, is obviously a party mention.
Now, here we go with chronological things that I feel line up to the story of Gatsby and how Reputation follows this.
In Ready For It, the question of ‘ready for it?’ definitely reminds me of when Daisy asks ‘Gatsby? What Gatsby?’ in the opening of the book/movie; this sets up the whole story, as does this first song on the album.
Lets move onto End Game. The words ‘big reputation’ are repeated over and over again, which, yes, is the album title, but in Gatsby, Jay is always given a bad wrap by people he doesn’t know, and he knows the rumors being shared about him – example, when Nick is trying to locate Gatsby at his first party and he is told several things, including murder, about the man before they meet by other guests. Gatsby definitely has ‘big enemies’, like Taylor has in End Game.
I Did Something Bad and Don’t Blame Me both remind me of the song Lana Del Rey did for the latest movie version of Gatsby, ‘Young and Beautiful’ - they both have that mystical backing vocals. Now, I Did Something Bad links back to the reputation of Gatsby/Taylor, saying ‘cause for every lie I tell them, they tell me three’; she is saying the can always one up her with more rumors or lies. Then, Don’t Blame Me states that ‘your love made me crazy’ – yes, we can relate this back to Blank Space, but in the end of the book/film, he also goes over the edge and gets angry, eventually scaring Daisy off.
With Delicate, Taylor asks ‘is it cool that I said all that’ – which directly uses the word cool, as Daisy does when she tells Gatsby he always ‘looks so cool’. She also talks about pretending someone is ‘mine all the damn time,’ as Gatsby does the entire time they are separated and he is pursuing getting Daisy back. Gorgeous also uses the word cool, then mentions ‘consequence[s] of you touching my hand in a darkened room’, which could relate to when Gatsby and Daisy go off to the woods during the first party of his that Daisy attends.
Let’s head into So It Goes, which furthers the discussion of the party in which they escape together in secret, hiding from Tom, Daisy’s husband. Taylor sings ‘all eyes on us’ and ‘but when you get me alone, it’s so simple’, which is how easy it is for Daisy to fall right back into place with Gatsby once she realized he is living near her. She also writes about ‘doing bad things’ which could foreshadow how Gatsby and Daisy get in trouble near the end, but NO, I do not feel like this mimics how the book/movie ends…completely.
Look What You Made Me Do was our first single from the album and while I love this, it also covers a big part of the Gatsby story line. ‘You said the gun was mine’ directly relates to how everyone blamed Gatsby for killing Mertyl, when in reality, it was Daisy but no one knew. This is the part of the book/movie where everything turns from good to bad, and for the album, this is where it goes from good to bad and is the beginning of the demise of Gatsby…so, turning points at the same place?
Getaway Car follows, which ironically follows the story line of Gatsby, too! Yes, Taylor is probably referring to Joe saving her, BUT it also can relate to Gatsby and Daisy using the car to escape back to New York after Jay raises his temper and scares Daisy off while in the city. The song starts off with ‘I wanted to leave him, I needed a reason’ and Daisy wanted to leave Tom and was waiting for Gatsby to tell him and give her a reason to. ‘We’d never get far’ refers to Gatsby and Daisy never getting far with their relationship, as Taylor hadn’t with her past relationships. Then, she writes ‘I shoulda known I’d be the first to leave’, as Daisy leaves before Gatsby dies, knowing she could never truly be with him. The other big parts in this song are ‘but you weren’t thinkin, and I was just drinkin’, well, he was runnin’ after us, I was screaming’ and ‘it hit you like a shotgun, shot to the heart’ – the first just sets up the car ride home where Daisy is wildly driving after they were all drinking in the hotel in the city, and the latter is the scene where Gatsby is, quite literally, shot and killed in the heart by Mertyl’s husband. Last, one of the lyrics is ‘the last time you saw me’, and after that scene I just described, Gatsby never saw Daisy again.
Continuing… Dancing With Our Hands Tied uses the phrase ‘love you in secret’, for obvious reasons. It also says ‘nothing in the world that could stop it’, which is what Gatsby though, because, after all, he was seeing the world through the eyes of God…but that’s a different in-book concept. Later on in the song it talks about ‘I’d hold you as the water rushes in if I could dance with you again’ – Gatsby hears the phone ring while in the pool before he is shot and whispers Daisy’s name, even though it was Nick calling; he is shot and killed with the hope that Daisy had come back, and as he sinks into the WATER, he is thinking about the past few days he spent DANCING with Daisy and trying to get her back.
Call It What You Want, a personal favorite, generally relates to the incident with the gun at the end and how Gatsby was finally taken down by Mertyl’s husband. His ‘castle crumbled [literally] overnight’, and he didn’t bring any weapons when his killer brought the gun. After he died the windows of the house were boarded up – ironically after the shit show of a storm their lives became. AND ‘late November’ is in the fall (even though Gatsby is shot near Labor Day).
And now the last song on the album, New Year’s Day, is the one that differs, but it is GOOD. The one big line that stands out to me is ‘don’t read the last page’ – DO NOT READ THE LAST PAGE OF GATSBY, because it delivers the end of his life, and states it is time to move on, not be ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past’.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO MY LAST POINT! As a recap…one of my FAVORITE THEMES that I have not mentioned yet is the idea of repeating the past. In the book/movie, Nick tells Gatsby he ‘can’t repeat the past’, in which Gatsby replies ‘can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” He will never let go of that hope of getting Daisy back. I Did Something Bad says ‘I’d do it over and over again if I could’. Don’t Blame Me uses ‘I would cross the line, I would waste my time, I would lose my mind’, talking about how desperate Gatsby is to go back to how things were. AND in Dancing With Our Hands Tied, the lyrics are ‘I could’ve spent forever’.
AND THE KICKER? She blatantly uses the name Gatsby in TIWWCHNT and even says ‘now I’m your daisy’ in Don’t Blame Me – SHE IS NOW JOE’S DAISY, AS HE DOESN’T WANT TO LET HER GO, EITHER. But in a healthy way…so DON’T READ THE LAST PAGE AND KILL THE STORY – the story will go on!!!
IN CONCLUSION, Taylor is the epitome of Gatsby, from starting as a party thrower to having rumors spread about her, to desperately clinging for love and trying to repeat the past until she finally killed herself (the ‘old Taylor’), only she is REWRITING HER OWN STORY and not killing herself off…she is simply jumping characters and being in love.
THERE YA GO, THIS IS MY FAVORITE ALBUM BY FAR. PLEASE REBLOG AND TAG @taylorswift
