In August, Taylor Swift released Look What You Made Me Do, the first single from her new album, Reputation, which finally emerges from its shroud of secrecy tomorrow. The track and its subsequent video broke three records within a week, including first-day streaming figures on Spotify and YouTube respectively. Swift’s sixth album has already thrashed pre-sale records, selling more than 400,000 copies – partially due to an industry standard reward system that gives early purchasers exclusive priority access to concert tickets.

These achievements are fairly typical business for Swift, who often finds herself breaking records that were set with her previous release. She has sold more than 33m albums worldwide, thanks to her reluctance to join Spotify until this summer, keeping her sales robust while most artists have experienced a decline. She and Adele are the only two female artists to win the Grammy for album of the year twice. And her music isn’t the sole draw. Her every heartbeat – her records, relationships and social media activity – is chronicled, inflated, and attributed with a significance far greater than Swift herself.

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Given her status and power as one of the world’s biggest pop stars, the vengeful tone of Look What You Made Me Do seemed a little surprising. Swift had stripped away her supernatural gift for melody, replacing it with a sound as hostile as the song’s message. The opulent video referred to her feuds with Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Katy Perry, the media and, basically, anyone who has ever criticised her. And she wasn’t just going after her peers. Not long after the single’s release, the blog PopFront – which then had 76 Twitter followers and 1,000 Facebook likes – claimed that the song’s antagonistic lyrics “reinforced white anger and white supremacy”. The author suggested Swift should distance herself from her fervent alt-right fanbase, who have interpreted her blond athleticism as an affirmation of Aryan values.

PopFront’s claims were ridiculous – the latest example of the bad faith that dogs Swift – but the chances of anyone reading them were minimal. That is, until Swift’s lawyers threatened to sue PopFront if it didn’t remove them, and the American Civil Liberties Union stepped in to remind Swift about the First Amendment. “Criticism is never pleasant, but a celebrity has to shake it off, even if the critique may damage her reputation,” it wrote in a letter made public on Tuesday.

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That Swift would use her muscle to intimidate a blogger, rather than denounce the alt-right, was just the latest example of the famously controlling musician losing grip of the narrative she has worked to maintain throughout her 11-year career. “I’m intimidated by the fear of being average,” she once told the Recording Academy.

Swift’s chosen narrative is, understandably, that she became the world’s biggest pop star because she is talented and hardworking. This is true. She was writing her own songs when she was 11. At 14, she convinced her parents to move from Pennsylvania to Nashville for her career. She knew record execs were wrong when they told her that teenage girls didn’t like country, because she was a teenage girl who was obsessed with country. Her self-titled 2006 debut, released when she was 16, showcased her knack for melody and peaked at No 5 in the US. Her pure yet prematurely wise depictions of teenage love impressed critics, as did the potent vindictive streak (“I’m just sitting here planning my revenge,” went one early lyric) that distinguished her from Disney’s juvenile cohort.

Her 2008 follow-up, Fearless, became the most garlanded country album in history. The 2009 MTV Video Music award for best female video wasn’t the glitziest trophy it won, but by far the most career-defining. As Swift accepted her award, Kanye West arrived suddenly on stage to tell the world that Beyoncé’s Single Ladies was the worthy victor. He later explained he had nothing against Swift, but wanted to take a stand against industry racism. Suddenly, Swift’s narrative splintered. What if talent, hard work and her emphasis on moral goodness weren’t the sole reasons for her success? What if her white privilege – which she had unwittingly exploited in her music’s dynamic of innocence and victimhood – gave her an advantage?

Every pop icon represents a shift in the cultural paradigm. Michael Jackson’s commercial peak marked the moment MTV allowed a black star to transcend segregated US radio formats. Britney Spears’s PG transgressions reflected the relaxing of moral codes in the Clinton era. Swift emerged a decade after the internet first reached a mass audience, and tapped into the solipsism of the medium, turning the teenage trivia of MySpace bulletins into timeless love songs. Born in 1989, she is a first-generation digital native. By 2009, social media was getting serious, the newly popular Twitter a crucible of debate on privilege – racial, social, financial – and the “right” way to be a feminist. West and Swift’s moment at the VMAs was kindling for the furnace.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kanye West taking the microphone from Swift as she accepts the best female video award during the MTV Video Music awards in 2009. Photograph: Jason DeCrow/AP

“From that moment, she has been a vector, and they together have been a vector, for this very incendiary ongoing conversation about racism in America, but also sexism,” says NPR’s chief music critic Ann Powers. “It’s one of those pop-cultural incidents that contains everything. A man harassing a woman. A white woman responding to an African American man as if he had victimised her. One celebrity shouting at another. And in the background is Beyoncé, an African American woman who is universally embraced as the standard-bearer for both popular music, and doing politics and pop. We start there, and it never really changes after that.”

The VMAs moment turned Swift into a lightning rod for debates around feminism, race and politics. It also taught her how to turn controversy to her favour, playing aggressor, victim and leader as it suited her best. She learned how to play the gossip cycle with 2010’s album Speak Now, dropping hints about the ex-boyfriends and nemeses it concerned. On 2012’s Red, she stepped into pop, which allowed her to express her sexuality, flex her songwriting craft and, naturally, sell bucketloads: more than 6m copies worldwide.

It was hard to remember an imperial period like it. Swift hadn’t just moved from country to the mainstream, but had credibility, too. Critics made sincere comparisons to Randy Newman and Joni Mitchell for her ability to capture the exhilaration and disappointments of a relationship within a couple of lines: “So you call me up again, just to break me like a promise,” she sang on Red’s All Too Well, “so casually cruel in the name of being honest,” a lyric as perceptive and nuanced as it is satisfying to yell in a packed arena. She realised early on that writing specifically about her life was more likely to make her relatable to fans than writing in platitudes. Her catalogue includes repeated motifs and references, as she established herself as a songwriter whose records played like perfectly turned screenplays, building distinctive worlds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Singing the US national anthem before a game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Colorado Rockies in 2007. Photograph: Jeff Gross/Getty Images

As far back as Fearless, on which the 18-year-old Swift wrote seven songs without co-writers, Rolling Stone picked up on her “intuitive gift for verse-chorus-bridge architecture that … calls to mind Swedish pop gods Dr Luke and Max Martin”, four years before she would actually collaborate with the latter on Red. Although their collaboration pulled away from country, adding dubstep and bratty cheerleader chants to the mix, it demonstrated the robustness of her songwriting, still recognisably Swiftian – perky, layered, irresistible – among the womps and shout-alongs.

If the success of Red came with any downsides, it’s that Swift’s references to exes Jake Gyllenhaal and Conor Kennedy (signposted via clues in the liner notes) gave her a reputation for being boy-crazy. Whether this perception was her doing or that of the press, she capitalised on it with 2014’s 1989, which marked another reinvention. The first, most effective element was Swift’s embrace of synth pop, though a kind that less resembled the hip-hop-influenced Billboard charts than “the late 80s MTV pop-rock exemplified by Jane Wiedlin’s Rush Hour,” as Alexis Petridis wrote in this paper. At serious culture site Grantland, writer Molly Lambert compared the record to Bruce Springsteen’s 1987 album Tunnel of Love, in which he shifted from guitars to synthesisers as he processed his divorce.

The second aspect of Swift’s transformation was her feminist awakening. In 2012, she had rejected the label, telling the Daily Beast: “I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls.” But now, she understood that the movement was a push for equality. It helped her realise that when her music was seen through the lens of her love life this was sexist, and limiting. Her friendship with Lena Dunham made her recognise, as she told the Guardian, “I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so.”

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But Swift’s actual remarks about feminism remained limited. Her “squad” – a group of models and singers who joined her for sleepovers and on stage – became a byword for showy exclusivity. When Swift martialled her troops in the video for Bad Blood, a diss track about Katy Perry supposedly “stealing” her dancers, it highlighted the darker side of this allegiance.

Swift’s burning need for personal justice started to become clear. She blundered when she interpreted Nicki Minaj’s comments on the certainty of thin, white women triumphing at the 2015 MTV VMAs as an attack. Minaj set Swift straight, but implored her to “speak on this” – the racial dynamics Kanye West had attempted to highlight. She didn’t. Swift’s predominantly white squad, and employment of black dancers’ bodies in the video for Shake It Off, had been noted, as had her silence on Black Lives Matter.

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The picture didn’t improve in 2016. Kanye West released the song Famous, including the lyric, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous,” and an argument ensued, between Swift and West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, about whether Swift had consented to the use of the lyric. Then there was a relationship with Tom Hiddleston, which played out in absurd scenes in public: smoochy beach photo ops, plus Hiddleston wearing an “I [HEART] TS” vest at her 4th July party. She ignored calls to endorse Hillary Clinton for president, and to denounce Donald Trump, her silence making her unwittingly synonymous, in many minds, with the 53% of white women voters who cast their ballot for Trump.

Swift’s personal righteousness – and her bottom line – appeared to outweigh her concerns about social justice. “She’s not someone who likes to be spoken for and she’s built a career off having the last word,” says Tess Purchase, who has edited two scholarly Swift zines. “There are some instances where she has very strong principles and a lot of conviction, but they’re rarely principles that go beyond her specific experience as an insanely wealthy white woman.”

Powers links Swift’s circumspection regarding politics to a part of her past that she will never escape: country music’s conflict-aversion. But Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield finds it misogynist that Swift is criticised for her silence when male artists are seldom asked to give their political views, and Kanye West’s Trump photo-op has been forgotten. “So, when people claim to feel offended by Taylor Swift’s personal or moral failings, it just seems they’re projecting their own neuroses on to her in ways that mostly have to do with gender,” he says. “She’s always sung about young women looking for ways to define themselves without internalising the hatred all around them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Swift performing in Texas in February 2017. Photograph: John Shearer/Getty Images for DIRECTV

In August, Swift returned to the spotlight when she won a sexual assault case against a DJ who had groped her at a meet-and-greet. Her testimony was razor-sharp. She acknowledged the privilege that enabled her to pursue the case, and promised to support other organisations providing such resources to less fortunate victims. For a moment, she was a feminist hero. But then she released the vindictive Look What You Made Me Do, finally unleashing her long-simmering rage. The imagery surrounding Reputation suggests the record will predominantly concern Swift’s relationship with the media. In its three other advance singles, she has been experimenting with hip-hop cadences, and forcefully expressing her desires.

Swift appears to be shredding the image of relatability she worked so hard to establish. Gone are the unified feminine archetypes that underpinned her previous records; in their place, a fractured aesthetic (cyborg, succubus, self-mocking sovereign) that rejects the idea of an authentic persona, and allows Swift to relinquish control over how she is perceived. She has always been perfectly attuned to the cultural moment: mirroring the mainstreaming of feminism, then the fallout from urgent discussions about identity and privilege. There are also convincing arguments that her partial fall from grace reflects the way whiteness is being decentred in pop culture. Swift spent a decade trying to show that she is just like us, desperately concealing her darker impulses. Now she has stopped bothering. Reputation may be ugly and myopic in places – making Swift no less in tune with the times than usual.

Reputation is released on Friday on Big Machine.