The Life of a Showgirl – As Reviewed by a Disappointed Swiftie

By Nicholas Davy

Credit: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggot

Taylor Swift’s music soundtracked my adolescence. Therefore, it pains me to admit her new album is bad. For any diehard Taylor anti-stans, The Life of a Showgirl is yet more evidence that Swift is the most overrated artist in history. As a diehard Swiftie, it is evidence of a startling artistic regression. What was promised was the bulletproof pop bangers of 1989 and Reputation, combined with the lyrical profundity of Folklore and Evermore but the result misses both of these targets. How did this happen?

In short, all of the record’s shortcomings can be traced back to a lack of inspiration. Taylor Swift has not experienced much worth writing about and Travis Kelce is a poor muse. He is perhaps the dryest well of creativity that she has ever chosen to drink from. Based solely on this album, one could easily conclude that Kelce’s only salient features are the size of his manhood, and the fact he has a podcast, both of which are referenced on the skin-crawlingly embarrassing Wood. Moreover, it is even more revealing that the album’s most compelling lyrical ideas have little to do with the Kansas City Chiefs Tight End.

The Fate of Ophelia, in addition to the probably catchiest melody she’s written in years also contains the album’s most interesting implication: that Swift views ex-boyfriend Matty Healy as Hamlet, aka one of the most compelling characters in all of literature, so layered that he is and continues to be the subject of entire volumes of literary and psychological analysis. Travis Kelce, on the other hand, has never read Hamlet, and the jury’s still out on whether he can read at all. The Tortured Poets Department is apparently closed and from track 2 onwards, aside from a cringy Macbeth quote in Cancelled!, the literary references dry up considerably. This decline in Swift’s pen game is best illustrated on the song Eldest Daughter. Swift has long reserved the fifth slot on her track lists for the album’s most important song and Eldest Daughter is easily the worst of the lot. Within the first 30 seconds, she mentions trolling, memes and internet comments before rounding out this combo of cringe by rhyming the words ‘bad b*tch’ with ‘savage’. Ew. Swift’s last project, The Tortured Poets Department often strained under the weight of its own verbosity, containing prose so purple it resembles a certain talking dinosaur. On Showgirl, she isn’t even trying.

Showgirl also sees British singer Charli xcx joining the ranks of Olivia Rodrigo and Conan Gray on the list of wasian musicians whom Swift has gone from actively embracing and promoting to completely disowning. Actually Romantic is Swift’s attempt at a response to Charli’s song Sympathy is a Knifes that just does not work on any level. While Charli vulnerably relays how Swift’s presence makes her feel insecure and even suicidal by comparison, Swift takes the almost comedically homophobic approach of implying that Charli’s fixation on her is a result of homoerotic desire and drug use and should therefore be seen as pathetic. As a fan of both, I was left scratching my head as to how she could have ever thought this was a good idea.

Other low points include an apparent justification for her continued friendship with outspoken Trump supporter and fellow WAG Brittany Mahomes on the track Cancelled!, whose instrumental bears a striking resemblance to Lorde’s Yellow Flicker Beat, albeit without any of the Kiwi teen prodigy’s lyrical skill. If there are two things a Taylor Swift song should never ever contain, it’s a Gucci namedrop and the line ‘did you girlboss to close to the sun?’. Similarly tone deaf is the track Wi$h Li$t, which sees Swift exalting the suburban nuclear family as the peak of human existence, without any deeper consideration as to if that lifestyle comes at any cost. In the span of under two years Swift has regressed from the song Fortnight, in which she muses on the downsides of the American dream, to now fulling drinking the tradwife Kool-Aid. 

Underpinning the album’s issues is a distinct vacuum where a concept should be. The album’s marketing and visuals, as seen on the myriad of album cover variants, suggested Swift would be drawing inspiration from Las Vegas’s dazzling tradition of showgirls while relating their experiences of both on and off of the stage. In reality, this concept is relegated almost entirely to the surface level, only manifesting itself in the allusions to Elizabeth Taylor on track 2, well-worn territory for Swift, and the twelfth and title track, The Life of a Showgirl featuring Sabrina Carpenter. If not for the artwork, the showgirl theming would be very easy to ignore.

Credit: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggot

This conceptual emptiness is also evident in the record’s sonic worldbuilding, which features neither the grandiose theatricality that its title might suggest nor the pristine, Scandinavian pop perfection that the trio of Swift alongside producers Max Martin and Shellback were previously known for. The sheer quantity of mushy, midtempo filler tracks means the whole thing sounds disappointingly affordable.

Still, there are some diamonds in this rough (and I’m not just saying this to try and justify my deluxe CD preorder that still hasn’t been shipped yet as of the time of writing). Ruin the Friendship sees Swift ruminate on a friend she lost touch with whom she had a crush on but is robbed of the opportunity to reconnect. Sabrina Carpenter’s appearance on the final track is a pleasant inclusion. Opalite is an uncharacteristically generic love song from Swift but is catchy enough for me to forgive any lyrical shortcomings. Honey is not a good song at all, but it did remind that Honey by Robyn exists and is possibly the greatest song of all time so that was pretty nice. :)

In conclusion, however, I fear my erstwhile GOAT may in fact be washed. Everything about the album is a step backwards for the singer-songwriter and between the references to both metaphorical and actual phalluses, she comes across as a parody of herself. The Tortured Poets Department was not an album I loved on release but that was because of its 31 songs being very difficult to digest on first listen. Over time I grew to appreciate it more. If only I knew what was coming next. In contrast, Showgirl gives the listener nothing to chew on. It is an album devoid of purpose aside from making money and is a clear sign that Swift needs to take a break to recharge from her two year stint on the road during which she got broken up with twice. It’s the result of an artist whose financial success and domestic bliss has left her with nothing interesting to say and the results could not be more disappointing.