Analyzing Taylor’s “reputation” Prologue, Line by Line (Full Text)
Taylor Swift has always included an album prologue that gives context to the songs that follow. But, up until this point, no album prologue had been more vulnerable, more pointed, and more revealing than her reputation Prologue.
Between 1989 and reputation, Taylor disappeared from the spotlight after the Snakegate scandal. This was a time of deep reflection and examination, and when she re-emerged, we saw a brand new Taylor we had never seen before.
Here’s my full English teacher analysis of Taylor’s reputation prologue, line by line. Let’s dissect the themes and messages within, and examine how it introduces the new Taylor and lays out the album that follows.

Important Context
In 2017, Taylor re-emerged from self-imposed seclusion, after isolating in London for over a year. The Snakegate scandal tarnished her reputation, and when she stepped back into the spotlight, we knew something big had changed.
reputation was the first album in which Taylor did not leave secret messages for her fans in the liner notes. It’s also the first album in which she didn’t have a list of thank-yous in the prologue.
This drastic change immediately sets the tone for the album: it won’t be like the others, and we’ll learn why in the prologue below.
Read the full text, then I’ll analyze the major themes and messages. Also check out my analysis of the reputation’s accompanying poem, Why She Disappeared, which expands on the prologue message.
“Reputation (Prologue) by Taylor Swift”

“Here’s something I’ve learned about people.”
We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us. We know our friend in a certain light, but we don’t know them the way their lover does. Just the way their lover will never know them the same way that you do as their friend. Their mother knows them differently than their roommate, who knows them differently than their colleague. Their secret admirer looks at them and sees an elaborate sunset of brilliant color and dimension and spirit and pricelessness. And yet, a stranger will pass that same person and see a faceless member of the crowd, nothing more. We may hear rumors about a person and believe those things to be true. We may one day meet that person and feel foolish for believing baseless gossip.
This is the first generation that will be able to look back on their entire life story documented in pictures on the internet, and together we will all discover the after-effects of that. Ultimately, we post photos online to curate what strangers think of us. But then we wake up, look in the mirror at our faces and see the cracks and scars and blemishes, and cringe. We hope someday we’ll meet someone who will see that same morning face and instead see their future, their partner, their forever. Someone who will still choose us even when they see all the sides of the story, all the angles of the kaleidoscope that is you.
The point being, despite our need to simplify and generalize absolutely everyone and everything in this life, humans are intrinsically impossible to simplify. We are never just good or just bad. We are mosaics of our worst selves and our best selves, our deepest secrets and our favorite stories to tell at a dinner party, existing somewhere between our well-lit profile photo and our drivers license shot. We are all a mixture of selfishness and generosity, loyalty and self-preservation, pragmatism and impulsiveness. I’ve been in the public eye since I was 15 years old. On the beautiful, lovely side of that, I’ve been so lucky to make music for a living and look out into crowds of loving, vibrant people. On the other side of the coin, my mistakes have been used against me, my heartbreaks have been used as entertainment, and my songwriting has been trivialized as ‘oversharing.’
When this album comes out, gossip blogs will scour the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song, as if the inspiration for music is as simple and basic as a paternity test. There will be slideshows of photos backing up each incorrect theory, because it’s 2017 and if you didn’t see a picture of it, it couldn’t have happened right?
Let me say it again, louder for those in the back…
We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us.
There will be no further explanation
There will just be reputation.”
-Taylor Swift, reputation Prologue, reputation Magazines 2017
On Image and Reputation

“We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us.”
One of the major themes of reputation is perception, and being perceived as one thing when the real you – the one you don’t show the entire world – is something quite different.
What Taylor is telling us here is that there is a side to her that no one knows about, and it’s because she chooses not to show us. Because she keeps her private life (mostly) hidden, the rumor mill churns to try to fill in the blanks.
On the other side of the coin, she is hinting at another album theme: deception, and betrayal. You think you know someone, but they can turn on a dime. They’ve only shown you their facade, and haven’t let you in on the real person they are. But you’ll find out, one way or another.
For Taylor, this realization came with major growing pains, as it does for many of us. Once we realize that we keep parts of ourselves hidden, we come to find that everyone else does, too. And this means that we can never really know anyone fully. The only thing we can do is try to know ourselves.
🐍🐍🐍 Are you ready for the reputation Lyrics Quiz? 🐍🐍🐍
On Our Façades

“Ultimately, we post photos online to curate what strangers think of us. But then we wake up, look in the mirror at our faces and see the cracks and scars and blemishes, and cringe.”
Continuing the theme of perception, Taylor explains that we try to show the world the most polished versions of ourselves. Especially on social media, all is not what it seems, and that’s a disconnect that we all have to take into account when deciding who and what to trust.
Taylor has always – very intentionally – shown us only what she wants us to see. But pre-reputation, that facade began to crack. She could no longer “curate what strangers” thought of her, as Snakegate took a lie and ran with it.
She knows she isn’t perfect, and we know she isn’t perfect. But what Snakegate did was force her to reexamine her entire existence in the world of celebrity, and burrow into her inner world in a way she hadn’t done before.
When she re-emerged with this album, the person in the mirror and the person on the screen had merged. She had confronted that reflection, made peace with it, and then smashed the mirror to bits.
As she said in Why She Disappeared, “When she stood, she stood with a desolate knowingness.” She knew that these two people – the reputation of Taylor Swift (the brand), and the person Taylor Swift – could no longer be at odds. So what did she do?
She leaned into that forced vulnerability, confronted her innermost demons, and decided to make the most revealing and self-reflective album of her career. This album combines those two people – the media brand Taylor and the real person Taylor – and charts a new path forward for both.
On Finding Real Love

“We hope someday we’ll meet someone who will see that same morning face and instead see their future, their partner, their forever. Someone who will still choose us even when they see all the sides of the story, all the angles of the kaleidoscope that is you.”
Another large theme on reputation is love, and finding a love that makes you feel like your best self, no matter what the world may be saying about you.
She dreams that she can find a love that will see both sides of her – the brand Taylor Swift, and the person Taylor Swift – and accept both, warts and all.
As she said in Why She Disappeared, when she was at her lowest point, she dreamed of “a love that was really something, not just the idea of something.”
For Taylor, a love that is “really something” is a partner that “will still choose [her] even when they see…the kaleidoscope” of her soul. She’s not just one thing, and her life comes with more complications than most.
She has always longed for someone who can stay, even when the road gets rough. And, as we’ll learn a bit further on in the prologue, she believes she found a true partner during this era.
On The Human Mosaic

“…humans are intrinsically impossible to simplify. We are never just good or just bad. We are mosaics of our worst selves and our best selves… We are all a mixture of selfishness and generosity, loyalty and self-preservation, pragmatism, and impulsiveness.”
When the world tried to paint Taylor as a liar and manipulator, she withdrew from the spotlight. She knew the gossip wasn’t true, but it forced her to confront her deepest fears of being misunderstood and not believed.
What she says here is that we all contain multitudes. We all have a bit of a liar, and a bit of manipulation within us. But to paint someone in broad strokes doesn’t do justice to the mosaic of who we are as humans.
No one is just one thing; we are many things. And part of the message of reputation is that what you see, versus what the truth really is, are two different things. We have to see and accept all parts of one another if we want to reach understanding.
Part of what she’s getting at here is the lies that the public believed about Snakegate didn’t do justice to who she really is as a human. But she’s also getting at the other side of the coin: people who hurt us aren’t only bad, or only malicious.
The real story is somewhere in between, and our “selfishness…generosity, loyalty…self-preservation, pragmatism and impulsiveness” motivate our every move. And with multiple motivations come multiple interpretations.
On Living in the Spotlight

“I’ve been so lucky to make music for a living and look out into crowds of loving, vibrant people. On the other side of the coin, my mistakes have been used against me, my heartbreaks have been used as entertainment, and my songwriting has been trivialized as ‘oversharing’.”
Taylor described the dark side of being a celebrity prior to reputation, in songs like The Lucky One and Nothing New.
Up until 2017, we had hints that her life wasn’t all rainbows and kittens. But – for the first time in this prologue – she says specifically that she was (and is) hurt by the constant rumor mill and gossip.
Why is she addressing it now, when she didn’t in the Speak Now Prologue, the Red Prologue, or the 1989 Prologue? Because it gives context to her motivations. She’s saying, ‘I’ve lived this way for too long, and enough is enough.’
Snakegate may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it wasn’t the only straw. This is important, because if she had not addressed her previous criticisms, reputation would have been seen as an explosion of female rage (just like her past breakup songs).
She’s giving us context to the mosaic of this situation, and this album will further explain every crack, for the very first time.
On Her Muses

“When this album comes out, gossip blogs will scour the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song, as if the inspiration for music is as simple and basic as a paternity test.”
When Taylor began leaving secret messages for her fans in the liner notes, she never could have known that it would snowball into the world’s most intriguing guessing game. The media and her fans have always speculated which boy each song could have been inspired by. But why?
It comes back to the first premise of the prologue: we only see what she chooses to show us. Therefore, we try to fill in the gaps to get the whole picture.
But here, she’s directly pointing away from the muses. It’s as if she’s saying, ‘Stop trying to figure out my personal life through my lyrics.’ As she should, but even this very clear and direct statement wouldn’t quiet the rumor mill.
We still try to interpret every line, and try to figure out who each lyric could be pointing to. But she wants us to take into account the multitudes – or “kaleidoscope”, as she calls it – of her being.
The “paternity test” of her lyrics is not the point; the point is that her entire life, warts and all, inspires her music. And attributing a song to one particular muse goes against everything Taylor is saying in this prologue, and this album.
On Showing vs. Telling

“Let me say it again, louder for those in the back…
We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us.
There will be no further explanation
There will just be reputation.”
This iconic tagline is often taken to mean, ‘here is my album, with no explanation,’ or ‘my reputation speaks for itself.’ But it’s not that simple.
What Taylor has said about her personal reputation in the rest of the prologue boils down to: ‘you think you know me, but you have no idea.’
The Snakegate crowd thought she was a liar. The critics thought she was talentless. The media thought she was a maneater. But none of those things come close to explaining the vast mosaic of her being, and none of those things help explain the truth.
“The version” she’s about to show us on reputation is biting back at all those other perceived “versions” of herself. She’ll do it with satire, she’ll do it with exaggeration, and she’ll do it with brutal, pointed lyrics.
She’s saying here, ‘I’m going to stop explaining myself, right here, and right now. I will show you who I am, and I will tell you who I am. But will you believe me?’
Some people will, and some people won’t. But it’s no longer Taylor’s problem, as she’s given up trying to show people who she is.
She’ll tell us, one last time, “louder for those in the back”: ‘this is me, and I am multifaceted. If you can’t understand that, or distinguish a media narrative from a first person account, then I give up.’
‘Here is my reputation,’ she says, ‘and it’s not just one story. It’s many stories. Which one will you believe?’
🐍🐍🐍 Are you ready for the reputation Lyrics Quiz? 🐍🐍🐍
reputation Prologue: Final Thoughts
When you combine the reputation Prologue with the accompanying poem, Why She Disappeared, we get the full picture of what the album will be, and why it is the way it is.
Just like Taylor’s reputation, the album is multi-faceted. It’s about revenge (Look What You Made Me Do, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, I Did Something Bad, et al), but it’s also about love (King of My Heart, Delicate, New Year’s Day, etc al).
Just as she says we shouldn’t point to one single muse for each song, we shouldn’t point to any single emotion, either. This album contains multitudes, just like Taylor herself.
Will we take it all in? Or will we narrow-mindedly choose which narrative we like best?
More Album Prologues
- Debut Album Prologue
- Fearless & Fearless TV Prologues
- Speak Now & Speak Now TV Prologues
- Red & Red TV Prologues
- 1989 & 1989 TV Prologues
- Lover Prologue
- folklore Prologue
- evermore Prologue
- Midnights Prologue
- Stevie Nicks’ TTPD Prologue Poem, TTPD Epilogue Poem “In Summation”
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