Appearing on her fiancé’s podcast earlier this year, Taylor Swift claimed that what’s written about her on the internet is “none of [her] business.” The Life Of A Showgirl, her 12th album, quickly reveals that, among other things, was a lie. “Eldest Daughter,” an album low point, proves she knows exactly what goes down online with people’s ice-cold hot takes, “cutthroat comments,” and ironic memes. She’s always been a reactive artist, but on this album something quintessentially Swiftian is missing as she contorts herself to clap back or leans into bravado.The Life Of A Showgirl is perfunctorily solid, but the lyrical and thematic contradictions belie a pop star in identity crisis.
Take “Wood,” for instance, which is perhaps the album’s most jaw-dropping track and sure to be one of the most discussed. A meme posted to Twitter in 2021 made fun of Swifties for getting flustered when Ariana Grande “sings about sex and doesn’t write it like ‘he stuck his long wood into my redwood forest and let his sap ferment my roots.'” Here Swift throws the accusation right back in the face of her online critics by writing her most sexually explicit song ever. She punctuates it by repeated references to the meme from four years ago: “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see/His love was the key that opened my thighs.” But “Wood” isn’t just a response to the online crowd who think she’s a square—it also feels like an attempt to imitate her friend and collaborator Sabrina Carpenter. The track borrows heavily from Carpenter’s cheeky-sexy shtick, laden with puns and innuendo spun out of superstitions. The result is passable, if far less charming and convincing than Carpenter’s work. It comes across as though Swift looked across the pop landscape and decided to try out what works for other artists, just to prove that she can.
In that regard, it’s unsurprising that Swift also tries to have her brat moment. On the blockbuster album of 2024, Charli XCX found success by making allusions to other women in the industry. Swift tests this strategy for herself by swinging the target back to Charli for “Actually Romantic,” the title of which is a not-so-veiled reference to Charli’s “Everything Is Romantic” and the content of which is a direct response to Charli’s “Sympathy Is A Knife.” Swift’s song is gleefully catty, posing their artistic conversation as a psychosexual cat-and-mouse game. It’s a different mode than we’ve ever seen from Swift and a lot of fun, though the very existence of the song itself somewhat undercuts her insistence that “I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke” the attacks of her rival. On “Actually Romantic,” she seems to enjoy the attention she claims to eschew.
“Father Figure,” an album highlight, similarly revels in the fact that her “dick’s bigger” than anybody else’s in the music industry. In it, she warns her “dear protégé” (insert any of the following: Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Phoebe Bridgers, Ice Spice, Camila Cabello, even former Reputation Tour opener Charli XCX) that loyalty will be rewarded, while betrayal will find them “sleeping with the fishes before you know you’re drownin’.” That’s a far cry from the meek character she plays in “Eldest Daughter,” who sings, “I’m not a bad bitch, and this isn’t savage.” Contrary to that confession, anyone on the other side of “Actually Romantic” or “Father Figure” probably finds The Life Of A Showgirl pretty savage.
The thematic confusion bleeds into the album’s love songs, most of which are just fine, though largely forgettable. “Eldest Daughter,” “Elizabeth Taylor,” and the ridiculously titled “Wi$h Li$t” all reject the excess of the material world in the pursuit of the intangible simplicity of true love. “Wi$h Li$t” in particular lays out a fantasy of settling down, pulling away from public life, and retreating into the white-picket-fence version of marriage and kids. It’s a completely different fantasy than the one she creates on the title track, which closes out the album. On “Life Of A Showgirl,” Swift is warned away from the “magnificent life” by an old veteran, yet she pursues it anyway. “I’m married to the hustle,” she declares, and “wouldn’t have it any other way.” The song echoes previous Swift tracks like “The Lucky One” or “Clara Bow,” which grapple with the negative aspects of fame despite ultimately embracing it.
The Life Of A Showgirl is something of an Eras tour, harkening back to musical and lyrical stylings from Reputation to Red to Lover throughout. The Max Martin and Shellback-assisted production is a welcome return (and a break from the previous albums’ overuse of Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner). But while the sound is confident and mature, the trio of producers never achieve an earworm as purely irresistible as they did on 1989. The same can be said for Swift’s songwriting, which continually returns to the same well of themes. “CANCELLED!,” for example, is not a particular improvement on the “I got canceled” songs she’s written over the last eight years (variously: “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Cassandra,” “Long Story Short,” “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?”). The person Swift is competing with most now is herself, and the bulk of The Life Of A Showgirl can’t measure up to the dizzying heights of her previous triumphs.
Perhaps that’s because there isn’t a clear sense of who she is or what she truly wants on The Life Of A Showgirl. The best track is “Ruin The Friendship,” which is Swift in classic mode: A high school-set love story that exists more in fantasy than reality, but with a personal perspective that lends tenderness. Here falls away the hyper-verbal Shakespearean comparisons and the dark, maximalist Hollywood mythology. It’s not reactive, it’s not concerned with reputation or fame. It’s just a simple memory colored with regret, made beautiful by one of our most talented living songwriters. “Ruin The Friendship” recalls the straightforward country storytelling of her early career, the stuff that made her famous in the first place. Compared to such an example of her artistry, the rest of the album is just showgirl’s tricks.
