Taylor Swift - The Life of a Showgirl
By Aideen Gabbai
Charli XCX is showing up to her Boiler Room set in a white long sleeve and sunglasses. Chappell Roan is yelling at the paparazzi on red carpets. Doechii is arranging showstopping dance numbers. Sabrina Carpenter is slipping in innuendos in every other line of her songs. Olivia Rodrigo is bringing back pop punk. And they’ve all been taking the world by storm.
The current pop music scene is dominated by fearless women who are blazing their own paths with their flairs for the dramatic, and Taylor Swift is having an identity crisis.
Swift can’t seem to figure out where she fits in anymore. Her twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, feels elementary, and strays from everything she’s come to be known for. The production feels like it belongs in 2018 or 2019 pop, overly bright and optimistic, and more than anything, deeply boring. The album strives to be provocative and interesting, but the effect that it ends up evoking is vulgar and trite. In the wake of the declining quality of Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department, she’s starting to make me think Folklore and Evermore were just flukes.
The choice to bring back the producers from 1989, Max Martin and Shellback, suggested that this album might have a similar sweeping cinematic feel to it, but instead it feels tinny and overplayed before I’ve even listened to the songs all the way through. This change might be in response to some criticism that Taylor Swift’s music has adopted too uniform of a sound under her frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff. Frankly I never thought Antonoff was the issue here. He was just an easy scapegoat. His work on Bleachers and with other artists shows his still potent ability to make catchy and iconic pop songs. It’s Swift that’s unable to hold a vision of what compelling pop is anymore.
Conceptually, it’s a mess. The visuals and album title suggest a glitzy Vegas showgirl theme, but those concepts are conspicuously absent from the songs. You might expect a big band number, something really indulgent and glamorous, for one of the main singles or a moody and orchestral sad ballad, but there’s just bland pop instead. One wonders if the visuals are not as much about the actual album, but more a response to what’s been working well for the other pop girls right now, like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, who’ve recently been feeding into that retro glamorous aesthetic in their wildly successful album releases.
As much as Swift has mythologized herself as a performer, that has never been the thing that made her famous. Her dance moves are awkward, she’s gone viral for videos of her stilted performances (the Speak Now armchairs…), and her fans often criticize her fashion choices for each era. The thing that made her great in the past was her ability to spin a narrative through an album, to tell stories about her life that people see themselves in. And unfortunately, the narrative that she spins for herself in this album is not likable in the slightest.
Throughout the course of the album, Swift laments ‘the haters’ and the constant online cycle of criticism, to the point where it feels cringey and too referential. No one likes to be reminded of the internet when they’re trying to lose themselves in a song, and they especially don’t want to hear about it from a millennial. It rings so flat because over the past two years, it’s become clear that Taylor Swift wants to be the most famous artist in the world. The Eras Tour propelled her to the top of every headline, and the close releases of Midnights and TTPD made sure she would never leave the public consciousness. She cannot have both. She can’t complain about being a victim but continuously seeks out fame and attention. Which brings me to my next point.
Half way through the album, “Actually Romantic” is allegedly a diss track about Charli XCX, who on her runaway smash hit BRAT, had a song about Swift,“Sympathy is a knife.” The song on XCX’s album is about her own insecurities and the fact that she knows she shouldn’t be jealous, but she simply cannot get over it. It’s vulnerable, truthful, and barely says anything about Swift at all. It’s mostly about XCX’s emotional journey, being totally honest with her listener.
Swift’s response to the song is petty, self-aggrandizing, and makes her look wildly immature. She makes fun of Charli XCX’s coke habits and says her jealousy makes her wet, a blind stab at an artist who didn’t even actually drag her at all. I genuinely can’t tell if it’s a grab at the headlines or if Swift is truly so far in her own head that she can’t recognize how bad the song makes her look.
“Wood” is her attempt at a sexy song, but it’s genuinely so unaware that it hurts to listen to. It’s so obvious that Swift is trying to adopt the brand of sexually explicit yet playful songs that Sabrina Carpenter has made her brand. However, Taylor Swift is not, and probably never will be, a funny lyric writer. It’s just not her style, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It requires a certain level of carefree that Taylor cannot achieve, not after having branded herself for her whole career as an obsessive person, a “mastermind”.
I don’t need to say anything about “Cancelled”. Listen to it. Or save yourself. I couldn’t get through it.
The only song on this album that wasn’t downright hard for me to listen to was “Honey”, and even that sounds like a Lover reject.
My ultimate opinion on this album is that Taylor Swift needs to unplug. She needs to get away from everything about music and social media and herself and let herself be boring for a while. This album is the result of someone who is spiraling in the face of having reached the top of the mountain, and realizing that there’s nowhere to go but down from there. She’s lost what makes her music good, and is too worried about being something that she’s not, and the only way that she will be able to regain any kind of perspective is if she stops listening to what everyone has to say about her.