Ever since Kanye West didn’t let her finish, Taylor Swift has rolled out a new villain alongside each new album. While 1989 positioned Katy Perry as the main foil to Swift’s squad, 2010’s Speak Now saw figures as varied as John Mayer and Camilla Belle filling out her rogues gallery. Whatever the merits of Taylor Swift’s grievances, her antagonists all served the same useful function in her narrative: allowing her to continue to play the underdog while her record sales and bank account told a different story. If her new album art is any indication, this time she’s decided to up the stakes by casting the entire media-industrial complex as her nemesis. By setting herself up as a bad girl crusader against fake news, Taylor Swift has made a miscalculation in a career that’s barely seen any of the kind. With “Look What You Made Me Do,” she’s made a villain of herself.

Some of this, of course, is intentional. The snake Instagrams, Kanye-biting merch, and Hot Topic chic might as well be billboards printed “Good Taylor Gone Bad.” Then again, marketing this lacking in subtlety is unnecessary when your comeback single features a voicemail declaring that your old persona is dead. Taylor Swift wants us all to know that she’s not the woman who sang “Love Story” or even “Blank Space”; she’s too busy imitating the woman who sang “My Humps”.

As for the actual song behind her new guise, it is unsettling, though not for the reasons Swift wants it to be. “Look What You Made Me Do,” a track that seems to lash out at Kanye West, borrows more heavily from Yeezus than from anywhere else, save for the “I’m Too Sexy” rip in the chorus. Instead of committing to the industrial aesthetic that’s become popular in hip hop (just ask Lil Uzi Vert), Swift hints at it while stopping somewhere closer to Gwen Stefani. Rather than going on a full Downward Spiral, Swift has given us the Fifty Shades of Grey version.

None of this would matter if the song were any good and bore the hallmarks of Swift’s best songwriting. It seemed likely in advance that whatever she put out would be met with some kind of backlash, but had she emerged with a song of “Style” or “All Too Well” quality, all would likely have been forgiven. Pop songs are inevitably products of business decisions made by committee, but when artists put out music that permeates audiences’ lives as much as Red and 1989 did, behind the scenes calculation becomes irrelevant. If we are in fact headed for a whole album litigating Taylor Swift’s spats with TMZ and Radar Online, the longing for connection characteristic of her best work will likely remain elusive.

All of which underscores why her new single is so disconcerting. Without songs that at least approximate real human feeling, Taylor Swift the artist is at risk of laying Taylor Swift the multinational corporation bare. She’s always recorded on a label literally called Big Machine and displayed the ruthless sense of craft required to sell 130 million records worldwide, but when her instincts to rebrand, target her enemies, and market her latest product are the only things left in her music, her songs risk sounding hollow in a way they haven’t before. An artist publicly killing off a persona isn’t new — David Bowie invented the practice by murdering Ziggy Stardust onstage in 1973 — but Swift is also in danger of killing off what her fans liked about her music in the first place.

Much like Goldman Sachs, Taylor Swift is too big to fail. Too much industry machinery is in motion for her upcoming album to fall short of platinum status. Indeed, if Reputation ends up being as polarizing as its lead single, it might only better prime audiences for the stripped-down, back to basics album that’s sure to follow it. Even so, Taylor Swift descending into the levels of narcissism and insularity reminiscent of late-period Michael Jackson would be a huge loss for an artist who has written at least a dozen of the decade’s best pop songs. Reputation will sell in the millions no matter what Taylor Swift does, but when its follow up comes around, she might actually end up the underdog she has always imagined herself to be.