Taylor Swift’s "The Life of a Showgirl": The Rise and Fall of a Pop Princess

Taylor Swift and I go way back. Well, on my part anyway. Growing up as a girl in the early 2000s meant that much of my joyous, frivolous memories happened to the sound of iconic hits like Love Story or You Belong with Me. I remember vividly how, around the age of nine, I was bluetoothing a recording of I Knew You Were Trouble from my sister’s Nokia that had a specific crunchiness only a shady Youtube-to-mp3 site could render.

Despite my disappointment with The Tortured Poets Department I waited patiently for October to roll around, with its promise of The Life of a Showgirl (TLOAS). And roll around it did, along with 41 minutes of aghastment that washed away any of my foolish optimism.

I got to listen to the album’s (many) criticisms before actually listening to it myself, so when I hit play on the first track, The Fate of Ophelia, I thought to myself, in true Swiftie fashion, “haters gonna hate”, because it’s not bad at all. The track starts off the album strong, with an incredibly infectious melody that drags you in and keeps you hooked. The upbeat production feels entrancingly pop and the lyrics follow an extended metaphor referencing Shakespeare’s work all throughout the song’s storytelling narrative, which suits Taylor’s country genre origins very well. While there has been some criticism towards Swift’s interpretation of Ophelia’s story, this is not glaring to me.

The following track, Elizabeth Taylor, once again stays true to Taylor’s songwriting style, but it listens like a worse sister to Cornelia Street. It introduces the figure of Elizabeth Taylor, a 20th century actress who was highly criticized for her dating life – drawing the analogy between the celebrities’ lives. The song inspires great confusion, specifically in its message, which cannot decide whether it is about the life of a star, “You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby”, or about the feared tragedy of losing her fiance, “And if you ever leave me high and dry, I’d cry my eyes violet”. The narrative gets even more confuddled when she says “I would trade the Cartier for someone to trust” immediately followed by a chuckled “Just kidding!”. So which is it? Are we asking a lover to stay, begging for trust in a ruthless industry, or unrepentantly chasing fame?

Opalite offers no new insight into the teased life of a showgirl, and is a simple love song with little substance. The last track before the storm, Father Figure, is the promised thesis of the album, detailing the exploitative relationship of fresh-faced Taylor with various male producers who kept her from owning the rights to her masters and inspired the unprecedented series of Taylor’s Version re-recordings (Grady, 2023). This is the only song which delivers on the commitment to take you to the promised backstage of the music industry and explicate artist exploitation, by offering a story of power and misguided, entrapping loyalty. Because, despite being called The Life of a Showgirl, the album does little to present the core narrative it so sweetly nudged us toward with its promotional release. The burlesque aesthetics, leotards, glitter, and sequins all make promises of revealing the dark side of show business. Especially after the record-breaking Eras Tour, fans’ curiosity was piqued – they waited to learn about the intimate details of the life of a generational star behind the scenes of costumes and media training. It seems as though this sentiment was misunderstood, because we have learned much too little about the after-show feelings and dating as a celebrity, and way too much about the size of Kelce’s… ahem, wood.

While the dissonance between the imagery of the album and its lyrical delivery is the work’s biggest crime, the felonies do not stop there. The Life of a Showgirl had been described by Taylor on the New Heights Podcast as having folklore storytelling with 1989 production, setting a high standard for the new release which was then undershot by a mile. Uncomparable to Swift’s career high’s on folklore such as “You showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else” or “Cursing my name, wishing I stayed, you turned into your worst fears”, TLOAS presents us with some incredibly interesting verses, if I may euphemize.

With Taylor having a tradition of placing her most devastating songs as track five of an album release, fans – including myself – expected a lyrically profound delivery from Eldest Daughter. You can only imagine the sour scrunch on my face when I first heard “Every eldest daughter // Was the first lamb to the slaughter // So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire” immediately followed by a second gut-punch of “But I’m not a bad bitch // And this isn’t savage”, lyrics I reckon are akin to what would be written by Shakespeare had he been given unrestricted TikTok access as a child.

The sinful juxtaposition of potentially fine lyrics being abruptly interrupted by internet slang continues on many songs in this album. CANCELLED!’s “Did you girl-boss too close to the sun?” or The Fate of Ophelia’s “Pledge allegiance to your hands // your team, your vibes” beg one simple question – why?

Further, the writing offers little novelty. Swift repeats the same grammatical structures and phrasing on multiple songs of the album. This becomes particularly apparent when you listen to the album in its entirety, and hear Opalite’s “Life is a song, it ends when it ends” right before Eldest Daughter’s “Everyone’s unbothered ‘til they’re not”. Similarly, the same phrases and words – eldest daughter, scandal, etc – are reiterated from track to track. While presumably aimed to “state the obvious”, their adamant repetition instead gives the impression of not having anything deeper to say, once again leaving the listener with a superficial account of the life of a showgirl. Much of this disaster could have been avoided if the songwriter would have put her wealth to good use and hired an editor, and I rue the fact that everyone on her production team seems to “yes man” all of her creative decisions.

Unfortunately, the production fails further. The most notable take-away from my first TLOAS listen was, where is the bridge? Throughout her career, Taylor Swift has blessed us with many structurally sound bridges, solidifying her pop songwriter status with the bridge of All Too Well from Red, Illicit Affairs from folklore, You’re on Your Own Kid from Midnights… and the list continues. The lack of a memorable bridge stuck in your head after finishing her newest release goes in direct antithesis to her carefully cultivated image and mythology.

And this, I believe, is where the album comes apart at the seams. We have come to know Taylor Swift as a pop princess who does not sacrifice crafted lyricism and storytelling depth, a singer who despite unfair backlash for being harassed by Kanye West and for writing songs about being a woman who, **gasp**, had boyfriends before settling down, still punched up instead of down. This all crumbles down spectacularly in TLOAS.

When she succumbs to the misogyny she herself had been subjected to by now repeatedly calling women ‘bitches’ – “And all the headshots on the walls // of the dance hall are of the bitches // who wish I’d hurry up and die” in The Life of a Showgirl ft. Sabrina Carpenter, “And the bitch was telling me to back off // Cause her man had looked at me wrong” in Honey – and fuelling a gossip war with her former opener and author of brat, Charli XCX, in Actually Romantic, she effectively places herself in the same position of power she used to be punching up to in Father Figure. But this time, the villain in the story is much less clear.

When she commits out-of-place writing sins and distances herself from her established ‘think about it’ lyricism with playful production style in favor of crude irony (as seen extensively on Wood), she steps away from a carefully cultivated image decades in the making. The recent successes of such writing seen by the rise to fame of Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter seem to have inspired her to do the same, potentially in an attempt to appeal to a different audience and not be left behind in a rapidly changing industry. Yet, in doing so she falls into her own hamartia of succumbing to deep-rooted insecurity. She ends up pandering to public opinion and lets criticism mold how she chooses to present herself to the world; spoken about on folklore, “I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try” and “I’m a mirrorball // I can change everything about me to fit in” now read like an ill-fated prophecy. In the end, Taylor playing it safe by conforming to what she thinks people expect her writing to be, produced an unoriginal album that keeps you scanning your brain for where you’ve heard this song before.

I can only wish that she had listened to her own writing – “a friend to all is a friend to none”, before allowing a desire to be liked and praised by the media and masses to shape her songwriting so distinctly. Each concession replaces pieces of a style she has become known for with something more artificial, more predictable – until, like Theseus’ ship, there is little of the original elements remaining, and you’re left wondering if this is the same thing you loved so dearly in the first place.

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