Reputation, Taylor Swift’s sixth studio album, is a jarring combination of disparate sounds, petty disses, and her trademark candor. It’s also a sublime document — a weird, cacophonous album that feels like a product of the internet. It’s so packed with borrowed sounds and aggressive statements about the nature of modern celebrity that it becomes, on a grander level, the paragon of pop music’s twin dominating trends: it’s never been more omnivorous, it’s never been more dependent on personality.

Last year, writing about the back-to-back releases of Rihanna’s Anti and Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Jamieson Cox pointed out that neither of these albums had any credible claim to genre beyond the one-woman cultural force behind them. “They throw genre…

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