The Life (and Possible Death) of a Showgirl
How Taylor Swift's latest album missed the mark and singlehandedly unraveled her own mythos.
It is April 2010. My mom and I are attending the Fearless tour and I am at the pinnacle of anticipation and excitement. I cannot wait to see and hear her live for the very first time. Little did I know that that concert would set me on the track to become a full-time fan.
It is October 2010. Speak Now has released and it is on repeat on my iPod Touch.
It is October 2012. I am a sophomore in high school and am leaning on this album as a way to navigate the incredibly tricky time that is teenagerhood.
It is October 2014. I am in my senior year of high school, getting ready to go to college, and this album becomes the soundtrack to my early adult years.
It is November 2017. Reputation came out and, although not everyone loves it, I find myself returning to it time and time again. It plays endlessly in my car speakers on long drives.
It is August 2019. I just started a new job where the commute is an hour each way. I rely on this album to be the entertainment while I make my commute. At this time, I am also navigating a divorce and am looking to this album as a way to find comfort.
It is July 2020. She releases Folklore out of the blue. It becomes (and remains) my favorite album of hers.
It is December 2020. She gives us Evermore, a sister album to Folklore. I find that they become intertwined in my mind, echoing each other and existing as a perfect pair.
It is June 2021. I am explaining to my current boyfriend (now husband) how much I love the lyricism of Taylor Swift. He is not totally sold so I compile a playlist of all of my favorite songs and play them for him on a long drive.
It is November 2021. Red TV comes out and we listen to it on our way to Savannah where we are spending the weekend.
It is December 2021. He proposes on New Years Eve and I spend the following day listening to New Years Day on repeat.
It is October 2022. We are getting married and our first dance song is Lover - First Dance Remix.
It is May 2023. I am attending the Eras Tour in Nashville. We drove there for the weekend solely for the concert, attending a Taylor Swift drag show as well.
It is April 2024. We happen to be driving home from Nashville again and listen to the entirety of TTPD on the drive home.
It is October 2025. The Life of a Showgirl is released and I have never felt more confused.
Taylor Swift is a person that I have grown up listening to. 1989 came out when I was in college and it became the soundtrack to those years. Folklore came out right after I experienced a hard breakup and I used it to help aid my healing. Midnights came out right before our wedding and several songs made last minute additions to our playlist. She is someone whose lyricism has always captivated me. Until now.
My partner and I held a virtual listening party where we started the songs at the same time and discussed each one before proceeding onto the next.
The Fate of Ophelia was a very underwhelming start for me but one mid-tier song does not ruin an album. I remained hopeful.
Elizabeth Taylor starts to begin my slow descent into criticism, and it starts early on.
“That view of Portofino was on my mind when you called me at the Plaza Athénée
Ooh, oftentimes it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me.”
The irony of describing a life that, to most people, would be considered glamorous and then saying that it oftentimes does not feel so glamorous, to me, is ineffective irony. The sentiment is clear and, for me, it did not land. In this current political climate, having the immense amount of wealth, access, and privilege IS glamorous.
Opalite is another one for me that is very underwhelming in addition to being one of the more frustrating tracks, which I will touch on later in this article.
Father Figure on its surface seems like one that I would like and offers some of the better lyrics, all things considered. It’s only when you consider the story it’s telling that it starts to fall apart for me. It is describing herself as someone who controls the industry and if you don’t fall in line, you will be exiled. She is at a point in her career where she does wield an enormous amount of influence and power and it only continues to grow with each passing year. To insinuate that, in order to make it, you must comply and not outshine her, leaves a sour taste. Pun intended.
Eldest Daughter is a particular standout, and not in a good way. For the uninitiated, the track 5 on every Taylor album is known to be one of her most personal and heartbreaking songs. The stakes were high for this one from the start. The lyrics and the sound are tonally opposite and the story being told seems incredibly disjointed.
“Sad as it seems, apathy is hot.”
Ironic considering that she made an entire documentary dedicated to her desire to use her platform to speak out on important issues because she owes that to her fans and has reconsidered that over the past few years.
Ruin The Friendship is one of the few that I appreciate. I admire the vulnerability and love when a very clear story is being told in the lyrics. It is also a sweet tribute to a person that she loved and admired and remains of the few defendable parts of this album.
Actually Romantic is one of the most egregious missteps I have ever seen Taylor make in her career. Based on both the title and the lyrics, one can infer that it is talking about Charli XCX. Charli’s most recent album, BRAT, has a song titled Sympathy is a knife where she describes feelings of insecurity knowing that she will never be someone like Taylor and the sympathy of being told that she is just as good when she is not at that same level is painful to hear. Charli was very clear after BRAT came out that the only song on the album that is a diss track is Von dutch and that it is about multiple people. Actually Romantic refers to Charli and describes her hatred towards Taylor as romantic because she is unable to stop talking and thinking about her, likening their one-sided beef to a crush. There are two sides to this coin and they are Taylor Swift and Lorde. Famously, Charli wrote the song Girl, so confusing in regards to her strained friendship with Lorde and, in a decision that became a cultural moment, Lorde reached out to Charli wanting to write a verse and record a remix version of the song. It became a huge celebration of these two pop icons coming together to uplift one another, in an industry that famously pits women against each other. Taylor, on the other hand, decided that she would take the diss track route. Given how famous she is and how much more influence she wields compared to Charli, it is perceived as her punching down and portrays her as a mean girl. Pun intended, again.
Wi$h Li$t is a song that details her desire to pursue the trad wife lifestyle, as she is free to do. As someone who appreciates a more nontraditional lifestyle, this was a miss for me.
Wood is one that I think speaks for itself, which I why I am going to include several lyrics below to illustrate.
“Forgive me, it sounds cocky
He (ah!)matized me
And opened my eyes
Redwood tree
It ain’t hard to see
His love was the key
That opened my thighs.”
Now, before you think it couldn’t quite possibly get worse, I hate to be the bearer of bad news.
“And baby, I’ll admit I’ve been a little superstitious
The curse on me was broken by your magic wand
Seems to me that you and me we make our own luck
New Heights of manhood
I ain’t gotta knock on wood.”
That’s all I need to say about that one.
CANCELLED! is a song that certainly feels like a choice for this particular moment in time, and not a great one. While the concept of cancellation can be arbitrary and one can argue that true cancellation is rare, saying that you like your friends cancelled and cloaked in scandal is off-putting.
“But one single drop, you’re off the roster
‘Tone-deaf and hot, let’s fuckin’ off her’
Did you make a joke only a man could?
Were you just too smug for your own good?
Or bring a tiny violin to a knife fight?”
It positions her as this person who is the perpetual victim, as though she is not responsible for the way the general public perceives her own words and actions. What is that one lyric from Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince? You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
Honey is describing the words that she has been called condescendingly, like honey and sweetheart, and the new meaning they have now that her lover uses those words to describe her. Decent song, all things considered.
The Life of a Showgirl (feat. Sabrina Carpenter) is one of the few that I enjoyed while listening to this album, even if my favorite part was Sabrina’s contributions. This song is the only one that I find truly fits the theme of the album. It starts off strong and then becomes a song straight off of The Greatest Showman soundtrack, which paired with the rest of the album, feels sorely out of place.
As a whole, this album feels disjointed, rushed, and poorly marketed. It also oozes of overcompensation. With previous albums, it felt like the songs were her way of saying what she wanted to say in regards to her experiences and feelings. With this album, it feels like she felt the need to release and album and then had to come up with things to talk about. One thing that this album really hits home for me is her perpetual victim complex as well as her own romanticization of the tragedy she’s experienced. She sees herself as Ophelia and in so many tragic female characters. In regards to feeling victimized and being compelled to defend yourself, I want to quote a lyric that Lorde sang in the Girl, so confusing featuring lorde remix.
“And it’s just self-defense
Until you’re building a weapon.”
At this point, she has reached the pinnacle. There is no one else, aside from Beyoncé, who is at her level. The victim narrative rings hollow in this album. It seems like a position that she has seen herself in for so long that she is unable to reframe her perspective.
Another thing is the amount of intonations in this album. Of course your brain will like a song if it sounds almost identical to another song you already like. With most of the samples used, she gave credit to the existing songs. One that seemed to have been overlooked is 1 + 1 = 2 Enamorados by Luis Miguel. If you listen to that song and Opalite back to back, it is hard not to hear the overt similarities. Was that song listed in the credits? I’ll save you a Google search. It was not. When it comes to someone with a platform as large as hers, it is paramount that proper credit be given to the artists used as inspiration, especially when you consider the ordeal of her demanding writing credit be given to her for Deja Vu after Olivia Rodrigo admitted that she took inspiration from Taylor’s song Cruel Summer. Taylor had no involvement in the writing of Deja Vu and received writing credit anyway.
Throughout Taylor’s career, she has received countless accolades applauding her lyricism and her writing in her songs and, before this album, I would have been one of many who echoed those thoughts. This album has almost singlehandedly destroyed the mythos of Taylor Swift as this otherworldly wordsmith and has revealed the side of her who is more concerned with filling her songs with slang references than she is with crafting a detailed and poignant story through the lyrics.
More than anything, this album feels like an overt cash grab. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last time, that she has been criticized for the amount of money she makes with every album release and this one feels the most unnerving to date. Usually, each album comes with its own “era” where the merch and aesthetics are themed around the title of the album. This time around, the era feels incredibly lazy and arguably cheap. The glitz and glamour of the “life of a showgirl” is nowhere to be found.