One year later, I think I understand The Life of a Showgirl

I remember the leadup to Taylor Swift’s 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl like I remember the leadup to a war. It began with her return to superstardom after releasing the universally acclaimed Folklore and its sister album Evermore, then her master recordings being acquired by music manager Scooter Braun. This led to her re-recording much of her back catalogue, which tied in wonderfully to her Eras Tour. That tour was one of the greatest flexes an artist could have- a well-earned celebration of their entire catalogue from front-to-back. That return to acclaim, her having one of the only feuds where it seemed everyone was on her side, and one of the most successful tours of all time turned Taylor Swift into the biggest pop star working- perhaps the most famous person on the planet. Topping it all off was her highly publicized relationship with football star Travis Kelce, the two announcing their engagement in late August, just over a month before the album’s release. The metaphorical invasion of Poland came the night before the album’s release, as fans at pre-release events leaked details about one specific song on the album, “Actually Romantic”.

I remember seeing the lyrics on a reddit post that very night and thinking “this cannot be real.” On “Actually Romantic”, Taylor Swift fired shots at fellow pop star Charli XCX, and all of them landed on her own feet. For one, Charli XCX did not '“write a song about how [she’s] sick to see [Swift’s] face” as Taylor states, Charli wrote “Sympathy is a Knife”, a song about her complicated relationships to dating a member of the 1975 while the band’s lead singer was dating Swift. Charli seems to have no actual problem with Swift herself, writing, “this one girl taps my insecurities/don’t know if its real or if I’m spiraling”. There were some issues people had when Taylor released a flurry of alternate versions of her album The Tortured Poets Department in a bid to remain at number one on the album charts when Charli’s album brat threatened to take its spot, but when Charli’s fans started a “fuck Taylor Swift” chant at a show, Charli shut it down and begged for unity. This fits with an idea Charli plays with elsewhere on brat, as on “Girl, So Confusing” she writes about an arbitrary feud she had with fellow artist Lorde, upset that the two were scrapping for no real reason while the public pushed them into pointless competition. When the two worked it out on the remix, it resulted in one of the year’s musical highlights.

Taylor Swift, however, had no interest in burying the hatchet (despite rumors that she’d appear on the brat remix album). The very first line, “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brace” fuels the rumor mills, and the song’s overall message is ripped straight from Regina George, asking, “why are you so obsessed with me?” The Mean Girls-esque tone also comes with Regina George’s homophobia, as the song mocks Charli’s alleged obsession with Swift as flirting. Saying it’s mocking, though, is a poor descriptor. Listening to “Actually Romantic” feels like you’re watching a Swift attempt to embarrass someone in a BDSM scene where she’s the only one into it. On that alone the song can’t find the camp appeal some get from “Look What You Made Me Do”, and as an actual diss the song is pathetic. This is a feud Swift is picking for no reason with an artist well below her level of stardom for no good reason, and her writing as awful. Charli supposedly calling Swift “Boring Barbie” is funnier and more creative than anything Swift has in return. I hear Swift compare Charli to a “toy chihuahua barking at [her] from a fancy purse” and I think “a toy chihuahua in a purse is so brat”. Swift revealing that her ex ghosted her also just makes her sound pathetic- Taylor fucking Swift got dumped by the frontman of a band whose highest-charting song reached number 80. The most baffling self-own is Swift singing, “no man has ever loved me like you do” when she’s just announced her marriage.

Even the music fails to push Swift’s agenda. The song feels like a bizarro-world version of The Pixies’ “Where is my Mind?” where the song has everything good about it removed. There’s none of the rawness in the production, none of the ethereal background vocals, and none of the harsh guitars cutting through it all. What’s left is a great deal of space for you to focus on Swift’s lyrics- the worst of which comes in the bridge where she sings that Charli’s jabs are, “kinda making me… weeeeet”. When I said the song felt like a bad BDSM scene, this is why. This feud isn’t something Swift is laughing off, it’s something that’s turning her on. Frankly, I find it disgusting. On brat Charli XCX said a great deal about her complicated feelings, and Taylor Swift’s response feels like bullying.

While “Actually Romantic” was an immediate blight on the album, I wasn’t sure if I believed the immediate and overwhelming hatred people responded to the album with. Surely it wasn’t that bad, right?

I would spend the rest of that October with an obsession that has never truly left me- how the hell was the album that bad?

The limited defenses I’ve seen of The Life of a Showgirl begin with the album’s first three songs. All are clearly written to be singles; they have catchy choruses, and they’re all clean love songs. They are perfectly radio-ready. In truth, that’s my problem with them. These three songs, “The Fate of Ophelia”, “Elizabeth Taylor”, and “Opalite” all feel generic. They all have some Taylor-Swift-y details, but if Taylor gave them away to a singer without a strong persona the songs would lose very little.

When Taylor Swift returned to superstardom, it wasn’t off the back of radio singles. The songs off Folklore certainly charted well, but its singles (“Cardigan”, “Exile”, and “Betty”) were not pop songs. Similar songs on her previous albums weren’t singles, they were the deep cuts, and with Swift’s music spending time off the top 40 stations, fans and the broader public had grown a greater appreciation for these songs. When Red first released, the highlight “All Too Well” wasn’t even a single. When Swift re-recorded the album as “Taylor’s Version”, “All Too Well” was acclaimed as the greatest song she ever wrote (rightfully, in my opinion), and debuted at number one on the Hot 100.

Still, despite the appreciation for her deep cuts, people still loved the singles. With The Life of a Showgirl, part of Swift’s goals was to release an album of hook-infested bops. Her previous two albums had been lengthy and unfocused. Fans were tired of meandering songs over gloopy synths, so Swift committed to writing hits and traded producer Jack Antonoff for Max Martin.

If you’re unaware, Max Martin practically reinvented pop music in the late 90s, and continues to make hits to this day. He pioneered the modern pop music formula alongside the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and many others. Martin has written or produced over thirty number one hits, four of which were alongside Taylor Swift. The first time Swift entered the pop sphere from her country origins, it was alongside Max Martin, so it makes sense to return to the pop maestro to find the sort of hits that made her music’s main character.

We can find a flaw in that plan by looking back at the hits they collaborated on. The best of them unite Swift’s storytelling with Martin’s oomph for songs that hit a solid middle-ground between catchiness and depth (namely “Wildest Dreams”, “Style”, “Blank Space”, and Taylor’s first number one hit, “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together”). The worst of their collaborations drown out Taylor’s personality. “I Knew You Were Trouble” is a fine song, but outside her dates-a-lot-of-men metanarrative, there isn’t much Swift brings to it that couldn’t be brought by someone like Demi Lovato or Selena Gomez.

I have similar feelings about those first songs on The Life of a Showgirl. If it wasn’t the mega-star you know everything about singing them, they would just be mildly catchy radio-filler with some peculiar lyrics. My biggest issue with them is that they don’t tell a story. “The Fate of Ophelia” can be summarized as “I was very sad, but then you came along and now I feel great!” There’s no contrast like there is in “Style” or “Wildest Dreams”, the song just hikes forward at a steady rate with no twists or turns (the video is good, at least).

“Elizabeth Taylor” contrasts its verses and chorus better, but only because its verses are boring and its chorus is grating. There is an idea here- evoking old Hollywood and its cigarette-smoke feel, but outside a few references the song has nothing to do with Elizabeth Taylor. The connection makes sense- both Taylor and Swift are public figures who’ve had troubles with men, but there’s no elaboration. Elizabeth Taylor was infamous for her messy relationships, especially her turbulent marriage to Richard Burton, which makes Swift bringing up this woman who had seven husbands in a song about how she thinks she’s found a true love a complete mismatch. There’s certainly nothing that earns the power of the chorus’s thudding, vaguely hip-hop beat. Swift singing “tell me for real, do you think its forever?” like she’s your aunt who only half-understands the slang the youth are using these days is just a cherry on top.

Of those first three songs, “Opalite” is the best and most nondescript. It’s fine. It sounds like a pop song.

When Taylor Swift is at her best, you hang onto her every word. You listen to her sing about her lover taking off his coat in “Style” and you gasp at the sensual scandal. You hear about the preppy girl she competes with on “You Belong With Me” and can imagine her just from the descriptions. Throughout The Life of a Showgirl there’s next to none of these small details that create a big picture. I can only speculate as to why.

The problem might be that Swift is (persona-wise) a messy woman, but she’s not a messy artist. In the early 2010s, when pop stars sang about parties, it sounded like Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” or Ke$ha’s “We R Who We R”. Taylor Swift’s party song was “22”. Most party songs sounded like the parties were filled with drugs and booze, but “22” sounds like a party that doesn’t even have wine. It’s telling that both it and Red’s lead single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” reference the fact that Taylor Swift (or at least liking Taylor Swift) is not cool. Taylor Swift became the main character of popular music, but the main character in Mean Girls is not Regina George, its Cady Heron. Swift is not the imposing presence with the funny lines and badass demeanor, she’s the leading lady you empathize with.

Normally, that isn’t a problem, but it is when Taylor is trying to be villainous. I simply cannot take the woman who wrote “Mine”, or “ME!” seriously when she’s trying to pose likeL a bad bitch. That’s a core problem on the album’s second-worst song, “Cancelled”… sorry, “CANCELED!” because it’s clearly a song that’s so edgy and messed up it needs to be titled in all caps and with an exclamation point.

The song’s chorus of, “good thing I like my friends cancelled” is both eye-roll-inducing and blatantly untrue. Swift isn’t going to bat for Tory Lanes or Louis C.K., she’s upset that people are mad at her on twitter. She’s written about this topic multiple times, and it’s only worked on “Anti-Hero” and “But Daddy I Love Him”. That’s because on both those songs she’s clearly affected by it. On “Anti-Hero” that leads to compelling self-reflection, and on “But Daddy” it leads to defensive self-righteousness. Both feel a million times more honest than her pretending that she doesn’t care.

But even though “Shake it Off” makes me think, “yeah right”, it’s still a catchy and well-written song. On “CANCELLED!”, there’s lines that are meant to be humorous, like her asking, “did you girlboss too close to the sun?” but they’re completely dissonant with the song’s dead-serious demeanor. It’d be like if Kiss joked about how silly their makeup looked- it wrecks the narrative. In the picture Swift wants to paint, she did not “girlboss too close to the sun”, she did nothing wrong and the mob came for her anyways. The songs biggest sin is how bad it sounds- its filled with a big Imagine Dragons bombast people don’t even want from Imagine Dragons.

At her core, Swift is not a pop artist who can anonymously flex into different roles and styles, she’s a country-adjacent singer-songwriter. On The Life of a Showgirl, she either plays against her strengths or she sands off everything that makes her interesting. There’s none of the specific, romantic details that define her love songs- the only thing you about Swift’s relationship with Kelce beyond them being in love is that he has a big dick.

“Wood” is very close to being a good song. I don’t know why the song so closely resembles The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”, but that’s a good song so I won’t complain about hearing something similar. The song’s primary premise of Swift not needing all the superstitions- picking petals off flowers, catching a bouquet, knocking on wood- because she’s found love is solid. The issue comes in the back half of the chorus, where she claims “he ah-matized me and opened my eyes/ redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see, his love was the key to open my thighs”. Those lines on their own are bad enough to ruin the song. It reads like she’s a high schooler describing a fake boyfriend who goes to another school.

This is another case of Swift playing against her strengths and attempting to be someone she isn’t- Sabrina Carpenter. Carpenter can pull off lyrics this explicit because she’s much more loose than Swift. While Swift is honest like a diary, Carpenter is honest like a Cosmopolitan article. Her sexual details are about a man being so hot it ties her tongue, her getting turned on by her man building an Ikea chair, or wanting her man to knock her up. That all feels honest and adult. “His love was the key to open my thighs” sounds like a 12 year old writing about sex on Wattpad.

The album’s many failures are especially baffling because they’re problems Swift doesn’t usually have. Even when I find her boring, I usually don’t find her bland. She’s drawn clear inspiration from other artists (especially on 1989), but she’s never felt like she was trying to be someone else. She’s always been the sort of artist ladies love and their boyfriends roll their eyes at, but she’s never done emotional ballads as bad as “Eldest Daughter”. The immediate attention went to the lyric, “every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter/ so we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire”, but that just distracts from how the song doesn’t have anything to do with its titular idea (side note, the line “every joke’s just trolling and memes” drives me insane. She uses those words like they’re all clearly, distinct things when they’re not.). Most baffling is that Swift also has a song on here with none of the album’s other issues- the genuinely great “Ruin the Friendship”. It makes me think that everything that makes this album bad wasn’t an accident but a deliberate choice.

How this all happened we’ll likely never know. Maybe Travis Kelce is such a boring man that he doesn’t inspire music for Swift (maybe that’s a good thing for her). Maybe Swift had a chip on her shoulder from the backlash to Tortured Poets Department and was trying to write pop songs when her heart wasn’t in it. Maybe the issue is Max Martin.

A large part of the backlash to Swift’s previous albums, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department, were due to the production. The songs were drenched in dreamy synths that mainly served to put listeners to sleep. It gave space for Swift’s voice and lyrics, but her writing wasn’t her best and her singing has never been her primary appeal. That was the main reason for Swift to ditch longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, but The Life of a Showgirl makes it clear that whatever the problem was, it wasn’t him. The last time Swift and Max Martin worked together was nearly 10 years before Showgirl, and in that time Swift’s voice changed, namely getting deeper. That lower register brought out a smokey quality that gave her songs a real maturity. While Swift is not an artist you listen to specifically for her vocal performances, the Taylor’s Versions showed that she had grown into a fantastic singer. Some fans complained about the production on the re-recording of 1989, and while “Style” in particular lacks some of the original’s force, I think the Taylor’s Versions almost all sound better than the originals because of how great a singer Swift has become.

Knowing how good Swift can sound, it makes The Life of a Showgirl sound awful. Pitchfork’s review of the album’s deluxe’s bonus track “Cleveland!” compared its sound to the musical Dear Evan Hansen, but that’s wrong, Dear Evan Hansen is very well-produced. The singers sound great, and the instrumentation feels organic. The other comparison it has is to a Kohl’s holiday soundtrack, but I would imagine those at least try to make the artists singing on them sound like good singers. The issues in production are most startling on the album’s closer and title track, where Sabrina Carpenter features. Her coming in makes you immediately remember what good vocals sound like. There’s so much warmth and nuance captured in her performance that Swift sounds like an AI vocal by comparison. And I have to reiterate- the issue isn’t that Taylow Swift is a bad or uninteresting singer. Taylor’s Version of “Blank Space” captures a wonderful performance, with lyrics far clearer than the original and a gorgeous lilt. She didn’t lose that ability either- after Showgirl she released the single “I Knew It, I Knew You” (produced by Antonoff), where she sounds wonderful. She can sound amazing, and that makes her sounding this bad all the worse.

In the wake of Showgirl and its recent deluxe, there’s been a new wave of hate for Swift. I’m not going to tell you the hate isn’t deserved, but I will say that about half of it feels like bullshit. I’ve seen posts and comments get thousands of likes claiming that the main reason she wrote good music in the past was because of her longtime partner Joe Alwyn, including the almost certainly bullshit rumor that he wrote some of her songs. I call bullshit on that having looked into it not-at-all because Joe Alwyn has not done any music or poetry, and Swift was a great songwriter long before she dated him. Maybe Joe Alwyn gave an idea or said something that made Swift change a lyric on Folklore, he definitely didn’t write “Dear John”.

To actually understand what makes The Life of a Showgirl bad, you have to understand that Taylor Swift is a good artist. There’s been some pushback on the idea that she is a capital-A Artist, and frankly it all reads like misogyny to me. It’s agonizing, because listening to Swift’s catalogue it’s obvious that she’s an incredible talent who redefined what pop stardom meant. Swift became famous alongside a critical movement called poptimism, that sought to challenge the music world’s bias towards heavily masculine rock and against queer or feminine styles like disco, dance music, and pop. While Swift has far more pre-poptimism-style cred than her peers, she’s still considered a pop star, not a rock star as she might’ve been called had she debuted just five-to-ten years earlier. In bringing that style of singer-songwriter music to the label of “pop” she set a new course for music broadly. To call Swift bland, to say she lacks personality, to say she isn’t a good songwriter is denying both the fantastic music she made and the obvious, direct influence she’s had on music. Without Taylor Swift, you wouldn’t get Carly Rae Jepsen, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, or Phoebe Bridgers.

The biggest tragedy around The Life of a Showgirl is that there’s no reason for it to be bad. She isn’t out of step with the times- she’s a cornerstone of the times. She isn’t taking risks that don’t work- she’s either aiming directly for the middle of the road or attempting ideas she already tried on Reputation. She isn’t a bad artist. The closest thing to a reason I can find is an idea that this album and the two preceding it are a mid-life crisis for Swift. She’s reached a point where the bright lights of 1989 have grown dull, and the results are Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department, where she acknowledges and attempts to live with her getting older in a world that still moves at the same pace it did when she was 18. The Life of a Showgirl is, in effect, Swift’s equivalent of buying a sports car. Rather than accept the changes- that she either can’t or doesn’t want to write the pop songs she did a decade ago- she forces herself through them and makes uninspired music as a result. She asserts a power and relevance on “CANCELLED!” and “Actually Romantic” to try and relive her beefs with Katy Perry and Kim Kardashian.

That idea isn’t one I’m completely behind, but it at least is an explanation for how desperate the album feels. You can see it particularly in the marketing, where Swift looks ridiculous. She attempts to look like Roxy in Chicago, and she simply cannot pull it off. Most of Swift’s album covers are pictures of her, and in them she looks great- and great in a way that fits the music. She looks effortlessly intriguing, contemplative, and beautiful. The Life of a Showgirl’s album art looks like they put Swift in a skimpy outfit, had her put herself most of the way in a pool, and then when photoshop glitched out and made the background look weird they just left it that way. The vaudeville style outfits she’s in on the album cover and in much of the album’s promo makes the album look like it’s an Irving Berlin-written vocal jazz album, or at least an album that’s much more loose and messy than it is (I think of St. Vincent’s album Daddy’s Home).

Ultimately, The Life of a Showgirl is a disaster on nearly every front. Despite this, I know Taylor Swift will be back in people’s good graces and will almost certainly do it by making good music. Swift did not lose her talents, but something did get lost. Whenever that gets found, she’ll release something good, and when she loses it again everyone will act like they never liked her at all. Part of that is an internet phenomenon I call Taylor’s Law: the larger something is (be it a celebrity, tv show, event, or anything else) the less likely you are to see a normal opinion about it online. It’s nothing new, the public has always amped each other up to exaggeration, but it’s amplified by website algorithms that push inflammatory ideas. Showgirl is bad, but it leading to people saying that Swift isn’t a worthwhile artist is just absurd. Whenever she puts out another good album she’ll have a comeback because the people loudest about her awfulness will quiet down, the people who still like her are dedicated enough that she’ll never fully disappear, and the people in the middle will get won over by the music.

Even if Swift doesn’t come back, or if she comes back and flops again, I think The Life of a Showgirl will stand out as a career low for Swift. She’s put out other bad albums, but if someone told me they really liked Reputation or Tortured Poets Department I’d be interested in why. There are ideas that pique my interest even if I don’t think they work. Showgirl, by contrast, feels like AI music- it’s tasteless but not bold and bland but not competent. It’s the sort of bad album that can only be made by a truly great artist, but also makes their greatness a permanent question. Swift isn’t the first person in this spot; Bob Dylan was there after Self Portrait, Eminem was there after Encore, and Weezer were there after they reunited in the 00s, but there’s something especially sad about it for Swift. Knowing what she can do, it makes me wonder if I’d be happier with her releasing uninteresting singer-songwriter records only her diehard fans cared about. I wonder if she’d be happier doing that.

Who can say. I don’t know the life of a showgirl.