One Battle After Another: Thoughts on A SHOWGIRL
If there is a single clarity to emerge from the thus-far chaotic 21st century, it is this:
Nobody can talk normally about Taylor Swift.
Since you’re not an obsessed fan of obscure local news like I am, you probably missed the fact that Swift dropped her twelfth album, THE LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL, earlier last month. You may have also noticed that the response to it was…well, you couldn’t even call it mixed. There’s no way to really measure it, but it really did feel overwhelmingly negative. Although TLOAS did pretty well in traditional critical spaces, the only positive online responses of substance to be found in the hours and days after it dropped were mostly from other Swifties, seemingly hanging on for dear life. I know all this because I watched it all play out in real time, as my wife and I were listening to the album right as it dropped.
I found this negative response a little surprising, since TLOAS basically sounded…okay to me? At least, it didn’t seem out of step with the majority of Swift’s discography up to this point, really at all. So, I kind of chalked this up to the internet being the internet; after all, it’s more fun to hate something than to love it. I wondered if there might be some sort of vibe shift after a day or two; people sometimes sleep on things, then feel differently on a second listen. Sometimes, you just need different voices to weigh in on something before a real consensus can be gleaned. But…it’s been well over a month and it feels like the vibes on TLOAS are still, at best, fair or middling.
This is neither good nor bad; not everything can be universally beloved, and we wouldn’t want to be in a world where it was. But I admit this entire album cycle has felt disappointing to me, mostly because, oh my goodness, THE LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL has not been particularly fun to talk or read about. The glee detractors have taken in the scent of blood in the water. The unbecoming defensiveness some fans have fortified themselves with. The slightly sinister bad faith reads into every little thing about it. It just hasn’t been all that enjoyable of an experience.
And I think the reason for that is because, when the conversation turns to Taylor Swift, everyone is actually fighting some other battle, and are merely using one of the last pieces of monoculture we have left as a path to victory.
Battles such as…
THE BATTLE OF EXPECTATIONS: First things first, let me say that, on the whole, I genuinely like THE LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL. I don’t believe it’s perfect, nor do I think it’s a particularly high achievement for Taylor Swift. I haven’t really sat down and put together an actual ranking of her albums, but I suspect this would land somewhere in the bottom middle. And like, look, one of them has to be her ninth-best album or whatever, ya know? But the thing is, for something that was anticipated by the fanbase as a return to the pop-chart glory that the previous Taylor Swift/Max Martin/Shellback collaboration brought with 2014’s 1989, this end result understandably can’t be taken as anything but, at minimum, a slight disappointment.
Then again, I didn’t really expect anything all that monumental much out of TLOAS going in. I have some quibbles about how Swift herself marketed the album (most prominently, the fact that the album is only charitably about the life of a showgirl in any meaningful sense), but one persistent selling point ended up being true: this was going to be twelve quick pop songs and that’s it. No supplementary materials, no secret albums that get dropped at three in the morning. It’s just this 40-minute sonic pop blast and that’s it. And honestly? In that specific context, this is a complete victory. One of the major complaints of her last album THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT was the length and the seeming lack of editing. That this album is a direct response to that criticism, an admission that a change in direction was probably needed, is kinda cool.
Of those twelve songs, the highlights for me were:
“The Fate of Ophelia”: the whole opening track feels like quintessential 2025 Taylor Swift to me. An overly-literary reference? Check! A title phrase that seems like it should be clunky and wordy, but ends up being secretly infectious? Check! A really, really catchy pop song? Check, check, check. Shout out to the music video on this one, as well! It’s a lot of fun, and provides the thematic cohesion that many have complained was lacking from the album at large.
“Opalite”: Mostly for those Swedish-ass “ah-ah-ah-ah-ahhhs”.
“Ruin the Friendship”: Easily the most solid piece of songwriting on the whole album, and one that pairs a nice message (“shoot your shot, or you might regret it”) with a jarring twist at the end that honestly made me laugh out loud.
“Actually Romantic”: I still go back and forth on how necessary a direct attack on Charli XCX was, as it’s not a fight I’m sure Taylor can win (more on that in a bit). But I can’t help but appreciate the 90’s-alt vibes on this, and the overtly sarcastically sapphic sentiment behind it is admittedly pretty funny.
“Wood”: Yep! It’s true, I like this one a lot. No, I don’t think I ever wanted to know this much about Travis Kelce’s dick, but goddamn, is this a fun listen. To people who think the beat is derivative of the Jackson Five: I do not care. I was convinced this was going to be the big hit off this album when I heard it.
“The Life of a Showgirl”: Am I nuts or are people slightly sleeping on this one? It feels like nobody is talking about this song. I think the storytelling is cute, the build is terrific, and Taylor and Sabrina sound great together. Honestly, it’s a shame Taylor’s not going to be touring this album anytime soon, because I get genuine chills imagining this as a show closer.
To be clear, there’s nothing on this album that suggests another massive hit is coming along the lines of “Love Story” or “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, which I think is adding to some fans’ sense of disappointment. You can only hear her evoke her biggest album so many times before you start setting up an expectation in your mind. But…something to consider is that Taylor Swift’s career has already contained an unusual amount of peaks and longevity. I’d argue she’s already enjoyed three primes:
2014, when 1989 hit the pop landscape like a lightning bolt, making “Blank Space” probably her most well-known song even to this day, and earning Swift her second Album of the Year Grammy;
2020, which gave us the dual shotgun blasts of FOLKLORE and EVERMORE, a set of woodsy, folk rock-adjacent albums that expanded the tent of her fanbase in brand new directions and earned Swift her third Album of the Year;
2023-24, as The Eras Tour slowly lurched its way across the world, guaranteeing Taylor Swift’s name as a constant presence in our lives, and wrecking any conceivable concert record you could think of. Somewhere in there, she also got named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year and started talking about horcruxes or something in her interview.
It is entirely possible Taylor Swift will live the rest of her life and never reach any of those heights again. I’ve learned to never bet against her, but…technically speaking, it could be all downhill from here! It happens! Three peaks is more than almost anybody ever gets! TLOAS, then, provides a nice preview of what Taylor’s post-Eras Tour career might look like. People seem high on “The Fate of Ophelia”, and I’ve heard “Opalite” out in the wild a couple of times, but it’s clear there’s nothing on this album that’s going to hit the nation like half the tracks on 1989 did. This is a perfectly okay reality! But, if this is the potential discourse that this reality is going to generate every time, we’re in for a long rest of existence.
THE BATTLE OF COOLNESS: There are several aspects to TLOAS that detractors have pointed to as objective proof that the album sucks. One of them is the predominant usage of millennial and Gen Z slang (bad bitch, savage, fire, girlbossing, that kind of stuff), which has made some people cringe a bit when they listen, including some fans. Another is the aforementioned song-long sideswipe at Charli XCX with “Actually Romantic”, which appears to be a response to Charli’s anxiety-soaked “sympathy is a knife”. Now, the interpersonal feuds that make up a good part of Swift’s oeuvre can sometimes be exhausting to recap and, frankly, not precisely what I show up for*, but it’s safe to say that there’s a fair level of uncomfortability between the two, given their forced interactions during their time dating separate members of The 1975 at the time.
*I can’t imagine sitting there waiting for a Taylor Swift album to drop, thinking to themselves “can’t wait how she goes after [insert celebrity here]!” But, to each their own.
I think it’s also safe to say that “Actually Romantic” pissed a lot of people off, especially given that “sympathy is a knife” isn’t really all that insulting of a song. Responding to a track all about how you’re so fucking famous that another famous person felt small and non-existent in your presence basically by saying “why are you so obsessed with me, you cokehead?” feels like bringing a nuclear weapon to a (sympathy is a) knife fight. I get that this rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
So, here’s the thing. I’ve talked about this before, but Taylor Swift has never been cool. Oh, yes, she’s been popular to different degrees over the last two decades. She’s been awarded and accoladed. She’s been enormously successful, both financially and critically. But cool has eluded her, and probably always will. It’s just not in her DNA. This isn’t necessarily a problem if you can accept it for what it is. Take something like the music video for “Delicate”. I personally find the awkwardness of it all to be purposeful and, frankly, a little charming. If you show that to a non-fan, though? There’s a good chance they’ll see her constantly dancing like a goofball, and just…not be able to deal with it. The complete lack of coolness is just a part of the Taylor Swift experience, and not everyone has the tolerance for that.
I say all this because I think this lack of coolness is why Taylor is getting slammed for the usage of slang, even though I think a lot of it is actually purposeful, if not a touch ironic. Like, I think it’s fairly obvious she’s not singing “this isn’t savage” on “Eldest Daughter” because she’s trying to sound hip and with it*. But it’s also why she’s not going to win any type of feud against Charli XCX, maybe the coolest mainstream artist out there at this particular moment. One listen to “Actually Romantic” will clearly indicate that the wound for Taylor is deeper than just “Charli wrote a song about me”, but it doesn’t matter. Charli is a cool pop artist for cool people. Taylor just isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, but it is what it is and it might not be a bad idea for Taylor to aim her shotgun at better targets.
*That said, even I can’t justify “did you girlboss too close to the sun” in “CANCELLED!”
THE BATTLE AGAINST DOMESTICITY: One of the big things I’ve seen people bump up against in their reaction to TLOAS is its themes of settling down and starting a family. “When I said I didn’t believe in marriage/that was a lie”. “Have a couple kids/got the whole block looking like you”. The album goes on like this. Make no mistake, the next move in Taylor Swift’s life appears to be getting married and having kids with Travis Kelce. Whether this is something to actually care about or feel invested in depends on the individual*. But for those who may have felt connected to her through actions like her signing her Kamala Harris Instagram endorsement as “childless cat lady”, a direct response to Vice President JD Vance’s infuriating attacks on childfree women…this turn of events might feel like a betrayal, or even an active shift towards…*dun dun DUN*...MAGA politics!
*I personally am an overall net neutral on the two of them as a couple. I actually like Travis, and have ever since his SNL turn a couple of years ago. I also think it’s genuinely admirable he’s reached a point in his life where is able to exude a brand of positive masculinity that, frankly, we all could use more of. But his being an intrinsic and possibly permanent part of the Taylor Swift Experience could potentially start to get taxing after a while. I’m glad they’re having a good time, but it’s just not what I’m showing up for, that’s all. I think that averages out to about even.
So, okay. Here’s the obvious thing about all of that, and I’m saying this as someone who is also child-free…we can’t live our lives letting the choices of celebrities serve as some sort of validation for the choices we make ourselves. If you’ve decided that parenthood isn’t for you, then that’s the end of the conversation. It doesn’t matter if Taylor Swift decides she does want kids, something that shouldn't be all that surprising in the first place. It shouldn’t matter. And frankly, if you’re truly a fan of someone, you wouldn’t want them to just not have kids in order to make you personally feel better about not having them. At least I hope you wouldn’t.
But, as so often happens, we make personal decisions in life that we later feel insecure about, especially binary, unchangeable ones (one cannot be both a parent and childfree). We then turn to outside sources to help us cope with the things we sacrifice along the way. And I think the decision to have kids or not is the single biggest one that we get insecure and regretful about from time to time, no matter how good everything else is going on the whole. Your toddler is acting like a little shit, and you cope by reminding yourself of how sad and lonely those without kids secretly are. You start feeling a lack of purpose as a childfree adult, and you have to turn to Reddit to read stories of regretful parents who are miserable and trapped. Neither of those things are universally true, but it’s the way we cope and get through the moments of regret.
So…yes, I suppose having someone as huge as Taylor Swift “on your team” must feel good, and having her “leave your team” has got to be devastating. But…she’s also a human being and gets to make her own choices. What that means to you beyond that is completely in your control. I’d advocate against the notion of “parents” and “non-parents” being “teams” at all, but you do you.
Oh, speaking of that, if your argument is, “she’s in the football world now, they’ve turned her MAGA and THAT’S why she wants kids now!!”...well…listen.
THE BATTLE AGAINST LIARS: If you do nothing else by the end of this article, please let it be you helping me with a cause. We cannot let this “having families = Republican, and not having kids = Democrat” myth stand any longer. You know deep down this isn’t true. Seriously, take stock of all the people you know and keep up with, both in real life and on social media, and this will get revealed as the load of nonsense that it is. I know several dye-in-the-wool leftists with full broods of kids, and I know plenty of lifelong Republican voters with no kids at all. The fact that we’re letting wieners and charlatans codify this bald-faced falsehood into reality is shameful, but we are. Every time we sit there and hand-wring and say stuff like, “Taylor Swift wants to bake and have kids now, she’s trying to be a trad-wife”, we perpetuate this obvious, dangerous lie.
So, this idea that Taylor Swift is now a deep-rooted MAGA Republican because she’s floating the crazy concept of having kids? The same Taylor Swift who, again, publicly endorsed Kamala Harris just last year, and did the same for Joe Biden in 2020? The same Taylor Swift who is engaged to, yes, a football player, and one who (to my knowledge) hasn’t made many declarations politically one way or another, but one who did kneel for the anthem at a time when that was not popular (and got yelled at online, like, two weeks ago for allegedly being “disrespectful” during said anthem), and actively supported getting the COVID-19 vaccine in 2020? She’s now MAGA because she wants to have a family, one of two equally valid life choices when it comes to having kids? No, I do not believe that.
Also, yeah, I know, the whole “she hasn’t spoken up about the current administration!” thing always gets thrown around*, and she admittedly hasn’t shown any real adeptness at meeting the current moment. In a way, though, that’s also why I personally don’t need Taylor Swift to Make A Statement About These Times. Frankly, she’s not that good at it, at least artistically speaking. People sometimes forget she’s tried to do this before, as documented in “Miss Americana”, and the end result was one of her most forgettable and generic anthems, “Only the Young”. I get that it’s nice when celebrities we like advocate for things we believe in, but that’s not a luxury we’re ever guaranteed. “We shouldn’t care this much about what celebrities think” is a thing we all constantly say, but clearly don’t really believe.
*To the point where I’ve seen more than one person state that they wished THE LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL had been a protest album, which, um, I don’t have the words to explain how bad of an idea that would be.
It’s to the point where it really does feel like we often start with “I’ve decided this celebrity is rotten” and work backwards from there. You can be a Rob Schneider or Dennis Quaid and just flat-out voice your support for this current administration of dipshits and people will call you a fascist. You can pull a Chappell Roan and express (admittedly, ineloquently) why you’re withholding support from either major political party, and people will call you a fool. You can pull a Chris Pratt and say nearly nothing at all beyond generic calls for “unity”, and people will call you a Republican (derogatory). Or, you can be Taylor Swift and expressly support exclusively Democratic candidates, and people will still call you MAGA. Honestly, I don’t blame the increasing number of celebrities who are choosing to stay out of it altogether (which, again, is what we all say we want, right?)
To be clear, god knows, I’m not defending the well-being of rich and privileged entertainers. I simply bring this all up to ask: why are we doing this? Why are we torturing ourselves? That’s all.
Oh yeah, anyway, back to the album.
THE BATTLE TO LET IT GO: There’s a famous, much-maligned, webcomic by Adam Ellis that essentially states as its punchline the concept of letting people enjoy the things that they like without butting in specifically to crap all over it. To some degree, it’s a nice message that more people ought to internalize; there’s nothing worse than a purposeful killjoy. The issue (and the reason the webcomic became infamous) is that the “let people enjoy things” panel often gets shared online as a reply to a negative review of a piece of popular culture. Like, someone writing online how much they hated AVENGERS: ENDGAME is probably at risk of being told to “let people enjoy things”. That’s…always felt like a different thing to me than someone purposefully seeking out fans with the direct goal of antagonizing them (which also happens all the time). It should be obvious but…negative reviews are not in and of themselves personal attacks!
This has always led me to preach the flip side of the valid message of “letting people enjoy things” which is that...we have to get comfortable with people not enjoying things, too. Nobody is obligated to like any piece of art, basically period. If someone sends you a message saying you’re an idiot for liking Taylor Swift, then yeah, they’re an asshole. But, if someone publishes an article on their website that says “THE LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL IS THE WORST ALBUM OF THE YEAR, POSSIBLY IN ALL OF MUSIC”, well, I would call that an intense overreaction, but…it’s their website. What value is it to your life to look them up and send them death threats? What if it’s a sincerely held belief on their end? Even if it’s not, does it matter?
This is why I’ve always bristled at the counter-reaction that suggested people who hated LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL were, at best, elitist fuddie-duddies who just hate fun and, at worst, misogynistic bad-faith actors. Sure, there are plenty of those types out there; I somehow doubt that @TrumpMusk2028 on Twitter calling Taylor Swift “woke” was going into the conversation with an open mind in the first place. And I do think there’s been a fair amount of exaggeration regarding the album’s poor quality being perpetuated by folks who smell blood in the water and want to get in on a good pile-on. Like, for those calling any single track on here “the worst song they’ve ever heard”...I mean, you have the right to your opinion, but I then seriously question how many songs you’ve actually listened to in your life.
But..the evidence is fairly clear that there were plenty of others who listened to the album and just didn’t like it. It happens all the time, even to people within a fanbase. This will inevitably happen to you one day. You will eventually listen to an album from an artist you like, and it just won’t hit for you. You’ll share this opinion online because, hey, you like to share thoughts with other fans and you’re curious if others had the same experience. How’s it going to feel when you get told that you only feel that way because you hate women?
I think the single worst thing a fanbase can do, especially built off something or someone that has achieved extraordinary success, is demand compliance. This was the same argument I had with Marvel fans (of which I count myself among) who freaked out when Scorsese expressed an subjective opinion (that superhero movies, to him, aren’t cinema) and made a simple observation (that they’re more like theme park rides). People wanted his head. Bob Iger had to have a meeting with him over it. To fans, being the predominant form of cultural expression in the 2010s wasn’t enough. The movies they loved being enormously relevant and financially successful wasn’t enough. Everyone else had to like them, too.
I think this has been the case for Taylor Swift for a long time. And, to be fair to both Swifties and MCU fans, this isn’t limited just to them (this happens constantly in the sports world; just criticize the Golden State Warriors online sometime and see how long before some psycho freaks out on you). This is just kinda how we talk to each other now. But…we all can be the change we want to be in the world! I’ve heard a lot of criticisms about Taylor over the years that frankly don’t make a lot of sense to me, especially since they’re plenty of legit things to ding her for (as you finish this sentence, another three TLOAS acoustic variants will have been released). But, man, if we’re demanding to let people like what we like, then we gotta give people the space to do the same.
Again, this is all over an album that is kinda just pretty good. In fact, there isn’t much to say or analyze about TLOAS at all. I don’t mean that in a bad way: it’s a set of twelve songs where, for the most part, Taylor Swift is expressing the newfound joy that’s entered her life over the past couple of years. That happiness is expressed a thousand times over. She has succeeded in her mission! There’s maybe not the lyrical depth that you saw in a FOLKLORE or EVERMORE that make those two albums so much fun to revisit and analyze, but that wasn’t the aim here anyway. It accomplishes its mission, no more and no less. But, with Taylor Swift, that’s not good enough, so we still gotta have a bunch of stuff to talk about. So we explore whether she’s a secret Trump supporter, or whether she’s out of touch or whose “team” she’s on, and on and on it goes.
So, yeah, nobody can really talk normally about Taylor Swift, at least not anymore. Hell, I’m aware that I just wrote seven pages worth of stuff in order to say, “the new album…pretty good!” It’s just where we’re at now.
It’s honestly wild, all the effort we’ve put in.