“ME!” [ft. Brendon Urie]

Taylor Swift has made essentially the same feint Justin Timberlake did last year, when the run-up to Man of the Woods hinted at a back-to-basics country project, only to produce some of the least-inspired pop of his career. The concept was even more believable from Swift, whose recent and much remarked-upon visual pivot seemed to return to the Cinderella-and-sequins aesthetic of her early albums. Harder to believe is where she ended up: “ME!” a brittle blast of synth-pop that drew immediate comparisons to Timberlake’s infantile Trolls theme song “Can’t Stop the Feeling.” Her duet partner, Panic! At the Disco’s Brendon Urie, singing his best Ed Sheeran impression, brings all the passion of a marionette, and if Swift’s venomous reputation as a bad girl sometimes felt forced, this song feels like a punishment.

Still less appealing was the corporatized midwifery of its debut, which began last night during network TV coverage of the NFL draft and continues today on “Good Morning America.” “ME!” immediately soundtracked teasers for both ESPN and the ABC lineup (where footage from “The Bachelor” is unironically cut over a line about “a lot of cool chicks out there”). The clear message is that a Taylor Swift song is a prime-time event, and yet it is objectively corny to piggyback on professional football, an institution beset by its own myriad problems, with a song about how there “ain’t no I in ‘team.’”

The brilliance of Swift’s best songwriting is in its heartfelt vulnerability and goofy humor, in simple wisdom that showed her to be empathetic and hopelessly romantic. Now she is here to remind us that “you can’t spell awesome without ‘me.’” The song is a showcase for the worst and weakest aspects of Swift’s work, the syrupy kitsch and occasional over-reliance on wordless vocal fillers—“Hee-hee-hee, hoo-hoo-hoo,” goes the chorus, like it’s laughing at you. The hook will stick, because it is more fascinating than it is boring; there will be better songs on the eventual album, because it is not hard to write a better song than this. “ME!” is two steps away from a corporate jingle, innocuous feel-good music in an airtight clamshell package.