Review Summary: While I'm Feeling Parasocial:
Taylor Swift can write good music. Her album rollouts are quite the cynical affair at this point with the variants that her fans lap up, but let it be known! The girls got talent and she wouldn’t have landed where she is now otherwise. Her story is compelling and her talent is tangible. It’s hard not to sing along to something of hers unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past twenty years. Even with the deluge of content post-COVID, TTPD and Midnights had some tracks that were compelling, theatrical, engaging or catchy. And the topics, though well-trodden, were still well-written.
Some of my favorite Swift songs are the ones that acknowledge that Machiavellian sense of cold cunning, the ones where she plays up being the anti-hero, being a little narcissistic, being a little unhinged (Anti-Hero, Blank Space, my personal favorite - I look in peoples windows). And it has been getting more interesting the more popular she gets. “It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero” as she works her way through relationships, mining them for content for 20+ song album cycles, closing in on billionaire status.
And now she’s done it. With the Eras Tour and TTPD, Taylor Swift is now worth 1.6 billion dollars. She pollutes more in one day than I will in 10 years. She has a legion of fans ready to tear into anyone mentioned negatively in any form, and likewise will hype up anyone she collaborates with (which, in terms of the ‘pop girlie’ pantheon, is few and far between). The power she has is immense. The sway she holds is something tangible and decisive.
And now coming off of a 20 month long record-breaking sold out at every show tour and a marriage, everybody was looking forward to something refreshing. She’s back with Max Martin. She’s thriving. It sounds like she’s ready to drop some more raw honest looks at her life. But reception has been rather…muted-negative both inside and outside of Swifty circles.
So what the Hell happened here?
Let’s speculate.
One: She wrote this album on tour. In the middle of her tour that involves her being on stage for the better part of four hours on a show day. Maybe that’s why everything sounds like a first draft? I mean, stuff like Wi$h Li$t just lyrically sounds lazy and stupidly hypocritical. The line “Every jokes just trolling and memes” is one of many that comes off as ‘how do you do fellow kids?’. Wood, as funny as I find it, is just a couple dick jokes wrapped with a ‘Knock on wood’ metaphor bow. There are a couple things here that are catchy - The Fate of Ophelia and Opalite are the two songs that feel like they got the right amount of time in the oven. Unfortunately, everything else feels like it’s being served raw.
There’s a world in which Showgirl actually has something to say about fame, celebrity and its constant performance. But the only songs with lyrics that touch on it in any meaningful way are Father Figure and Cancelled. And these songs don’t work when you factor in that Taylor Swift isn’t just the performer in the real world. She’s the one running the show. As she says herself, the empire belongs to her.
Two: Moving back to Martin and Shellback was advertised as an album that sounded lively. But that is quite the opposite of what we got. Every song feels factory-made, lacking any real spunk or proper theatrics. The closest thing to a bounce it has is Wood, which comes with the caveat that you are forced to listen to her apparently thriving sex life.
A lot of the songs sound like…other songs. That Taylor Swift didn’t write. There is nothing inherently wrong with taking influence and even interpolating in the case of Eldest Daughter. But Wood has a very similar rhythm to I Want You Back and Actually Romantic uses a pretty well known chord progression that draws comparison to Pixies and Weezer songs. Opalite has been drawing comparison to Post Malones’ Circles. And even if these aren’t direct interpolations it’s funny to see people point out the similarities so quickly. Simplicity and familiarity can be crucial to a pop songs success - so why not make all of them simple and familiar? A great marketing strategy, a horrible way to make an interesting album. I hate to use this as a comparison, but it’s like someone fed a robot a bunch of Taylor Swift lyrics and asked it to put other artists songs over them. Showgirl sounds like slop content for Swifties.
Three: The vengeance doesn’t hit right anymore! Taylor Swift is living the romantasy. She has supposedly found true love with her football husband. Her tour has broken records. Everybody has read her diary and they all agree that she has been the victim of some horrible things. The Kimye debacle is something she has written about for over a decade now and I get it. She has been cheated on god knows how many times (and likely been the cheater but whatever). Hell hath no fury like Swift scorned.
And as someone who likes when she leans into playing the anti-hero, the villain, the obsessive weirdo, it doesn’t feel necessary in this way! Why are we taking pot shots at Charli XCX who already put out a pre-emptive sorry in Sympathy is a Knife, a song about how her insecurities and anxieties make her say things she hates herself for? Why are we calling out dog-moms and people that want to be rich when you’re already a billionaire? Cancel culture definitely has its problems, but do we NEED Swift to be the American to tear it down in the year 2025?
And if we’re not writing vengeance, we’re writing love…right? The closest we get is Opalite, one of two songs on this record that feels like it had the time to bake. Its night and day/dark and light imagery works and as much as I’d like to her put the thesaurus down, the gem metaphor works pretty nicely. Then we have Wood, which is a song about how great Kelce’s dick is. I’m not even gonna front, I admire her for releasing this. A couple dick jokes is all it takes to get people saying “She’s been hanging around Sabrina haha!!!”, but I’d like to think that Kelce really did just dickmatize her for the first time, and she is making it EVERYONES business, and that’s funny to me. How Swiftian.
Following this ‘ballsy’ line of thought, I think Actually Romantic is so tone-deaf that it’s the only other track that feels very Swiftian here. Calling a smaller pop girlie who has publicly stated ‘hey you DO make me feel insecure and I hate myself for it’ a cokehead who is like a little chihuahua and kind of makes you wet is unhinged! It’s an unhinged thing to say. I understand WHY - Charli is married to someone from the 1975 and is close with her ex and his fiance. And hey, maybe she calls her ‘Boring Barbie’. To go ahead and make the most generic sounding Weezer-Lite dud over it and say ‘Im not pressed!! I’m not pressed!!’, though? Again, very Swiftian.
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So we’ve got a total of two songs that spent time in the oven and two songs that are so bad that they are laughably entertaining. There’s a song about how being Cancelled is the mark of being a girlboss, and a song about how all she wants in this life is to live in a suburban neighborhood in a medium sized house with a couple kids (she is a billionaire) and people that want to be rich or have dog-children are annoying. There is actually a sweet ode to an old deceased friend called Ruin The Friendship that is nice, but unfortunately sounds like greige looks.
The Life Of A Showgirl is an undercooked first-draft plodding mess that poorly interpolates as much as it originates, lyrically reads like someone who can’t put down the thesaurus, and thematically sounds like someone running out of things to hate but not knowing how to express actual joy. The person she sounds most passionate about is Charli XCX, it has the energy of a senior-citizen home, and is as adventurous as a Saturday night in with a jigsaw puzzle watching reruns of I Love Lucy on MeTV. It is uninspiring, boring, out-of-touch, mean-spirited and messy in a way that isn’t fun. And messy can be fun! Being the mean girl can be fun! But she is on top of the damn world and she’s supposed to be in love. So why do we hardly get that sense? At the end of the day I really think this one needed more time to stew to be anything worthwhile. A showgirl needs her practice, after all.
