Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
In a year of disappointing blockbuster pop records, the top dog has just come in to show them how it’s done. Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, her fifth this decade, is the year’s most disappointing blockbuster pop record. It is disappointing in a way that sparks frustration beyond the apathy that I felt after hearing Midnights, beyond the dejectedness I felt after hearing The Tortured Poets Department. That album’s worst offense was being boring, but The Life of a Showgirl enters the territory of being offensive at its worst moments. After a childhood of Swift’s undeniable career-defining hits, I, like many others, was re-endeared to her through 2020’s folklore. That record has not only aged incredibly, but as it continues to wane in the rearview, it feels like an anomaly in her catalog. In the initial reactions to this record, many fans seem to be looking back at how Taylor began the decade with one question in mind: What happened?
It seems as though Taylor has contracted a rare case of CTE by proxy. But let’s face it–is it really that surprising Travis Kelce is not a particularly interesting muse? Her partner in public spectacle, there seems to be nothing compelling to say about him other than she’s excited to get married and subsequently impregnated by his massive penis. She jacks her supposed protégé Sabrina Carpenter’s stylings on the hackneyed, innuendo-clad “Wood,” a song about how Kelce dicks her down so good she no longer feels beholden to superstition. “Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet / To know a hard rock is on the way,” she sings atop a disco-influenced instrumental that sounds too trite to have even been a Man’s Best Friend throwaway. Swift has never been much of a sex symbol, only ditching her “good girl” image less than a decade ago, but she has written about sex effectively in the past as recently as two years ago. Tortured Poets highlight “Guilty as Sin?” communicates both tender sexual desire and its implications on her career in its bridge better than anything on the entirety of Showgirl. “What if I roll the stone away? / They’re gonna crucify me anyway / What if the way you hold me is actually what’s holy? / If long suffering propriety is what they want from me / They don’t know how you’ve haunted me so stunningly / I choose you and me religiously” is a bout of lyrical prowess on an otherwise dull record that made me believe she still had the pen that made her a star in the first place. No such moment exists on Showgirl.
Since we’d last heard from Taylor, she also became a billionaire–a feat that cannot be reached without turning a blind eye to worker exploitation–and all of her opps have been defeated. Kanye’s a washed Nazi, Scott Borchetta is dust, Scooter Braun is jobless, and she bought back her masters earlier this year. Swift is the furthest thing from an underdog, but she still can’t help but frame herself as one. Presently, her career feels like an Animal Crossing save file with every achievement unlocked, every fish caught, and every uggo villager evicted for daring to not be as cute as the others. The further her life has strayed from reality, and the more she secludes to an echo chamber of acolytes that don’t know any better to express any amount of dissent, the worse her music becomes. Her answer to Borchetta in particular, the George Michael=interpolating “Father Figure,” is stunningly strange as Swift plays the role of a cunning mafia boss (Italiophobic?). “I protect the family,” she huffs repeatedly in her lower register. The unmemorable, warbling instrumental produced by Swedish pop chemists Max Martin and Shellback (Showgirl’s only collaborators ,working with Swift for the first time since reputation) dances into the first of two laughably unearned key changes in the record’s 42-minute runtime, a length that’s born out of the only criticism Swift internalized from the Tortured Poets album cycle.
Beyond just clunky, unimaginative lyrics and Max Martin being asleep at the wheel, there are a handful of distinct points where Swift comes off offensively out of touch. She fully leans into her stature and wealth in both a way that’s not only tone deaf, but frustratingly uninteresting. She abandons the thing that made her music compelling in the first place and replaces it with something that would only appeal to her (admittedly abundant) die hard fans that clap and cheer at a line like “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?” Tortured Poets, in hindsight, was a midpoint between this and where she was before in the realm of relatability. There were a few genuinely compelling moments of commentary on her fame, but she then continued to self aggrandize. Now, her storytelling resides exclusively in the latter, with each attempt more confounding than the last.
“Eldest Daughter,” the newest addition to the canon of Swift’s track-five emotional centerpieces, made me laugh out loud at its banality before the first verse had ended. “Everybody’s so punk on the internet / Everyone’s unbothered ‘till they’re not / Every joke’s just trolling and memes / Sad as it seems, apathy is hot” she sings softly atop a sincere piano accompaniment. A retread of the ideas expressed more intelligently in a now deleted Ethel Cain tumblr post, I am still baffled at how these lyrics got past the cutting room floor. “But I’m not a bad bitch, and this isn’t savage,” she croons in the chorus. With every album it’s become more and more obvious that Taylor makes a point of forcing in some SEO-slop lyrics made to be slapped on merch made by Cambodia’s hardest working ten-year-olds.
“Actually Romantic” was the first song to make waves upon Thursday’s leak-fest, and for good reason. Swift has decided to pick a one-sided fight with Charli XCX, who saw the fruits of her labor finally pay off last year with the groundbreaking, vulnerable dance-pop masterpiece BRAT. “Sympathy Is a Knife” chronicled the complex insecurity of being suddenly thrust into social settings with Taylor Swift during her brief stint dating The 1975 frontman Matty Healy (Charli is now married to that band’s drummer, George Daniel). At the time, Charli was among the ranks of pop’s “middle class”–a cult favorite among real heads, but seemingly unable to penetrate the charts like she did at the very beginning of her career. It seemed like the promise of success was slowly inching away from her reach. It’s an equally unique and tough spot to be in, and it was communicated with poise and honesty on “Sympathy” without sacrificing the album’s club aesthetics. “Why I wanna buy a gun? / Why I wanna shoot myself? / Volatile at war with my dialogue / I’d say that there was a God if they could stop this,” she laments over pulsing synth bass in the song’s second verse. It seems Swift misunderstood why Charli didn’t care for seeing her “backstage at my boyfriend’s show,” despite the question being quickly answered in the chorus: “I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” Swift’s response was to just belittle her–some real playground bully type shit. “It’s actually sweet / All the time you’ve spent on me / It’s honestly wild / All the effort you’ve put in / It’s actually romantic / I really gotta hand it to you,” she sings coyly on the chorus backed by a direct instrumental rip of Wheatus hit “Teenage Dirtbag.”
Taylor’s music worked when she was punching up, but there is nobody left for her to punch up to. She’s left punching down to a former opener of her stadium tours, someone who had a triumphant breakthrough record a decade into her career, and all Swift could think about was how she’s actually the victim in all this. This should, and I reckon it will be, a stain on her career that will not be swept under the rug.
The final, and in parts most shocking offender of the album is “CANCELLED!” By the name alone, you could imagine the humor doesn’t necessarily land too well. “I like my friends cancelled,” Swift proclaims. If by cancelled you mean voted for the fascist downfall of America for the sake of a girthier wallet, then sure! You go, girl! With a sound I can only vaguely compare to Imagine Dragons, “CANCELLED!” sounds like a song that would play during the sex scene of canonically underage characters in a CW show. “I like ‘em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal”–give me a fucking break.
The closest we get to a decent song is “Ruin the Friendship.” An admittedly catchy song, it finds Swift tackling the topic most dear to her heart: high school romance. She laments on never making any romantic advances on a friend/crush, breathily repeating “should’ve kissed you anyway” in the chorus. The song, while endearing and sweet in a vacuum, loses its impact when you remember this woman is 35 years old and recently engaged. Her maladaptive daydreaming feels like a last minute “what-if” before she’s bound by contracts and prenups. Undoubtedly, The Life of a Showgirl will be looked back on as a glaring misstep and stain on Swift’s career. She spends 42 painstaking minutes jacking the stylings of pop hits throughout history with none of the exigence that made those songs hits in the first place. In the words of the great Mike Ehrmantraut, “We had a good thing you stupid son of a bitch! It was perfect, but no, you had to blow it up! You, and your pride and your ego.”
Disappointing / Average / Good / Great / Phenomenal
The Life of a Showgirl is out now.
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Leah
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