Look what you made her do: The 8 takeaways from Prime Video’s Taylor Swift documentary

In 2003, when Swift was just 13 years of age, she traveled to Nashville to sign with major labels but was unsuccessful. The following year, Swift was given an artist development deal after performing original songs at an RCA Records showcase. 

 

Swift ultimately left RCA Records at the age of 14 to sign with Sony/ATV, making her the youngest artist ever to be signed by Sony Music Publishing.

Swift’s infamous battle with music exec and entrepreneur Scooter Braun reached its peak when Braun acquired Swift's old record label, Big Machine Records, for a whopping $300 million in June 2019. As part of the deal, Braun became the new owner of Swift's first six albums with Big Machine Records: her self-titled debut, "Fearless," "Speak Now," "Red," "1989" and "Reputation."

 

Although Swift was aware that her label would eventually sell the masters, she wasn’t expecting them to be sold to Braun, whom she claimed was an "incessant, manipulative bully" during their prolonged feud.

 

“I knew he would sell my music. I knew he would do that,” Swift recalled in a conversation she had with Scott Borchetta, the founder of Big Machine Records, during a CBS News Sunday Morning sit-down. “I couldn’t believe who he sold it to. Because we’ve had endless conversations about Scooter Braun, and he has 300 million reasons to conveniently forget those conversations.”

The video features West lying in bed alongside a row of naked, lookalike sleeping bodies of famous celebrities, including Swift. Although West did not reveal which bodies were real and which ones were fake, he maintained that the video was "not in support or [against] any of [the people in the video]" and was purely “a comment on fame,” in an interview with Vanity Fair.

 

Shortly after the video’s release, fans noticed that Swift had liked a tweet accusing West’s video of being “straight-up revenge porn.”

 

“The famous music video was straight-up revenge porn. Not to mention putting abuse victims next to their abusers and celebrating sexual assaulters. It was disgusting and he doesn’t get enough crap for it,” the full tweet read.

 

Swift also referred to West and his then-wife Kim Kardashian as "bullies" in a 2019 Elle interview:

 

"I learned that disarming someone’s petty bullying can be as simple as learning to laugh. In my experience, I’ve come to see that bullies want to be feared and taken seriously," Swift said. "A few years ago, someone started an online hate campaign by calling me a snake on the internet."

A few months after Braun’s acquisition of her music in June 2019, Swift claimed Braun and Borchetta had told her she wasn't allowed to perform any music from her first six albums during her 2019 American Music Awards performance. 

 

Per the documentary, Swift said Braun and Borchetta “exercised tyrannical control” over her music, and Borchetta had told her team “that she would be allowed to use the music only if she agreed to not re-record copycat versions of her songs.”

 

“The message being sent to me is very clear,” Swift wrote in a comment. “Basically, ‘Be a good little girl and shut up, or you’ll be punished.’”

“Folklore” was created amid quarantine when Swift was spending most of her time watching movies and reading books “that dealt with times past.” Swift was inspired by the works of fiction she consumed to write songs “that weren’t strictly autobiographical, and instead experimented with alternative points of view,” the documentary explained.

 

The stories told in "Folklore" include a ghost that discovers its murderer at its funeral, a young girl with a traumatized friend, an elderly widow shunned by her community, recovering alcoholics and a love triangle between the fictional characters Betty, James and an unnamed woman," the documentary added.

Swift’s lead single in her sixth studio album “Reputation” is riddled with Easter eggs, which she said are difficult to spot all in one go. The album was released when Swift stepped away from the public eye due to increased tabloid scrutiny on her private life. “Look What You Made Me Do” was Swift’s way of staying connected with her fans and expressing her sentiments about the heightened media attention she was garnering.

 

“Literally the whole video is just an Easter egg,” Swift told Entertainment Weekly. “There are thousands of Easter eggs. There are some that people still haven’t found. It will be decades before people find them all.”

The English actor — and Swift’s ex-boyfriend — collaborated with Swift on several tracks from “Folklore” under the alias William Bowery. “William” was the name of Alwyn’s great-grandfather, William Alwyn, while “Bowery” is the name of the Bowery Hotel, where Swift and Alwyn first met in 2016.

 

William Bowery’s identity was officially confirmed in Swift’s Disney+ film “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions.”

Following the release of Swift’s tenth studio album “Midnights,” the hit single “Anti-Hero” earned over 17.4 million plays in its first 24 hours on Spotify globally, making it the biggest opening day for a song in the platform’s history.

 

As for the album, “Midnights” also broke major records on Spotify, like the record for the most streamed album in a single day with a whopping 186 million streams in its opening day.