Taylor Swift is so big, so public, so discussed, and so inescapable that it’s nigh impossible to separate her music from all of the other discourse surrounding her. However, I’ma try to do it anyway for a few reasons:
- I don’t need to like a musician to love their music. For example, Brandy is in my top five and I find her personality really off-putting.
- There are a lot of things that Taylor Swift does that she’s being unfairly maligned for doing when other artists are doing the exact same thing. How you receive it is dependent upon whether you like her or not, and that’s fair. It’s human.
- I love music. At the end of the day, I just want the music to be good.
The music is just okay.
Taylor Swift only has a few truly terrible songs. She has a nice bag of excellent music, be it due to the lyrics, the production, or a combination of both, and an enormous swath of songs between those extremes that are truly decent. Her career has been dissected six ways from Sunday, yet what I see missing most of the time is the fact that the lady is mad prolific. She has so much music and seems to want to release any and everything she’s ever put to wax, and most of it is Just Okay. That’s not shade. The vast majority of music is just decent. If you are hitting it out of the park every time you put pen to paper, you are Mariah Carey. If you are giving the best performance of your life every time you step into the booth, you are Whitney Houston. Taylor Swift is neither of those things and a big chunk of her fanbase likes her because the music is easy enough to sing along to.
The Life Of a Showgirl has one thing seriously working in its favor, and that’s brevity. She edited the tracklist down to 12 songs so we don’t have to listen to an additional 60 minutes of filler. Because it’s only 12 songs, each moment feels like she had something to say, even if thematically the whole project is “I’m in love, I’m happy, and I’ma say whatever I want,” whether she’s saying
- my man saved me from madness (“The Fate of Ophelia”) or
- I want my man to knock me up (“Wi$h Li$t”) or
- I’m better than my man’s exes (“Opalite”) or
- my man is better than my exes (“Elizabeth Taylor”) or
- I like the way my man talks to me (“Honey”) or
- I like my man’s big fat cock (“Wood” which cheekily clocks in at 230 seconds…..google how many inches there are in 230 mm).
Mama we get it! Travis is knocking the Sonic coins out of that hedgehog six ways from Sunday.
The music itself is forgettable though. The showgirl in the title is nowhere to be seen and the whole project instead feels like a mid-aughts indie band doing their best Karen Carpenter simulation. The showgirl is Taylor Swift, so the album is The Life of Taylor Swift, but there isn’t a showgirl she can reference who would fit this late-70s soft rock muted sound palette. To me, Taylor Swift does not make great pop music so much as she makes easily digestible, highly referential pop music that you notice for its familiarity, not it’s ingenuity. “Wood” is just the Jackson 5. “Actually Romantic” is just Weezer. “Cancelled” is just Fiona Apple.
When Taylor swings big and succeeds, it’s exceptional. “The Fate of Ophelia” is quickly climbing my rankings of her best songs not just because of the performance (it’s the best vocal she’s ever done) but for how much care is in the production. Few people would sneak a fifth bar into the verse structure to mimic Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter.
I heard you calling
on the megaphone
You wanna see me
all alone
(fifth bar — space)
The title track with Sabrina Carpenter is forgettable, but the key change when Sabrina enters the song should be utilized more! A new vocalist appears? Let’s pitch it into their key for both ease of performance and a clear line of demarcation from one storyteller to the next.
For the most part, it’s a background album to something more interesting you could be doing. There’s nothing outright offensive on it, but there’s nothing that makes you press “replay” as soon as the song ends either. For better or worse, the Max Martin that last appeared with Taylor on Reputation has gone into hiding and been replaced by a neutered version of himself making soundtrack music for shopping at Belk’s. Reputation was polarizing because it was a poor match of sound and artist. The Life of a Showgirl is similarly polarizing, but for the opposite reason — it’s a perfect match between an Okay Popstar and an Okay Sound.
Score 2.5 / 5
It’s not a great look for Taylor Swift, the person.
Music is up for interpretation, so you are likely to give a more forgiving reading of what the lyrics mean if you are a firm member of or very adjacent to her cult of Swifties. If you already do not like that lady, you will read negativity into all of the lyrics to the point where so many people are saying she’s racist for using onyx and opalite as metaphors for darkness and light when Travis’s ex is a Black woman.
I’m in the middle. I think that assertion is ludicrous, but I also think she takes very pointed shots at people and then shies away from admitting what she did. “Actually Romantic” is a song in very poor taste. She is directly calling out Charli XCX for referencing Taylor on brat. Charli was exploring her own insecurities and included some lyrics about not wanting to see Taylor Swift backstage (they were dating two guys in the same band) because she would never be her. Taylor Swift decides to write a diss track about Charli. Of all the people who dragged you last year, including Donald Trump who called you everything but a child of god, you decide to take a swipe at an artist who was not swiping at you, but referring to you in the context of her own insecurities.
Not a good look. And if you ask her directly, she won’t say it’s about Charli. Taylor Swift never says who it’s about, which is why you cannot mention Taylor Swift in the context of other diss tracks. Cardi B. walked BIA down to Hell and back on “Pretty & Petty” but there was no ambiguity about what she was doing — she said the woman’s name three times on the track!
Taylor Swift wants to take her swipes at other women and never confirm her target so she can remain hidden under a thin veil of innocence because she’s been playing victim to The Machine ever since Kanye West ran up on stage to interrupt her VMAs moment. I honestly believe had that not happened she would not be the same magnitude of star that she is because she was able to milk Feminine White Fragility from that point onward.
And speaking of White Fragility…
Yes. She is absolutely taking swipes at two Black women Travis was interested in: Megan Thee Stallion and his ex girlfriend Kayla. When Taylor says she’s not a bad bitch, not a savage on “Eldest Daughter,” not only is that cringy phrasing from an utterly swag-less wealthy white woman, but it’s a direct shot at Megan, who turned Travis down. When she says you were in it for real, she was in her phone and you were just a pose on “Opalite,” that is a direct reference to a public fight Travis and Kayla had when Travis told her to “Get off your phone, get off your phone, you’re not even drinking your wine anymore, can we go?” (x)
Would Taylor ever admit to it? Of course not. She’d rather give vague statements about how she’s referencing lots of different things and is putting herself in the mindset of who gives a fuck. She’s the most powerful woman in music, and she’d rather sub-tweet some women on the periphery of her life than use her platform for anything positive.
And yes, the rollout reeks of capitalist greed. When Taylor Swift released a movie documenting The Eras Tour, it broke records. It was a great way for her fans to relive the magic they felt in those stadiums. When she released a movie to commemorate this latest album, there were no hints about what it would be, but I certainly didn’t think it would be a $20 cash grab by a twice-over billionaire where she gives bland, 90-second “inspirations” behind the songs with lyric videos I could watch on YouTube.
And I refuse to engage with any of the “deluxe” versions of her album that she’s releasing every 6 hours. It has been expected for quite some time now that most artists will in fact release multiple variations of their albums. In this era of streaming, one way to boost your physical copies is to release different versions of them. This will encourage your fans to buy multiple versions (like with Midnights when Taylor released four versions that fit together if you had the entire set) and may inspire a purchase by someone who wasn’t planning to (I hadn’t planned on getting Cardi B’s album on vinyl……until she released those limited edition courtroom variations and I had to get one).
But why does Taylor Swift need to boost her physical albums sales? Is two billion dollars not enough money? Why does she still feel the need to play the game with nothing left to prove?
And that’s part of my distaste for her. Two billion dollars is enough Fuck You money to do whatever you want, but what she wants to do is release mediocre pop music needling other women with her diary of lyrics and milking her fans dry for every last cent they have. With two billion dollars, you could actually put “Fuck You Donald Trump” on a record, but instead you write a song in defense of your friendship with MAGA-ass Brittany Mahomes and then double down on it in your movie. Of course, there was no actual name, but when she said she’s not going to cancel someone just because other people do and she chooses her friends based on who they are, it was the most Conservative Defense of We Can Still Be Friends With Different Politics bullshit that I’d expect from a billionaire NFL wife.
So, if you don’t like Taylor Swift because all of her music is bad, you’re being a little presumptuous and tiny bit obnoxious. She has such a large catalogue of songs, it’s impossible for you to say all of it is bad. If you don’t want to engage with it to find the good, that’s a different story.
If you say you don’t like Taylor Swift because her rollout is annoying, then you need to apply that same standard to Cardi B, Charli XCX, Ariana Grande, Nicki Minaj, and every other high profile album release of the past decade or so.
But if you say you don’t like Taylor Swift because of how she presents herself…..honestly? Valid. I mostly ignore her and just listen to the music, but one of the drawbacks of making friends with Swifties: they force you to pay more attention, and not everything looks better in the light. If Swifties want Gen Pop to stop criticizing her, then they should probably stop talking about her as much.
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