The Life of a Showgirl reveals Taylor Swift's delusion
In an increasingly unhinged analysis, I discuss what we can learn about Taylor's psyche from her latest album.
Today Taylor Swift released her much-anticipated, 17 millionth album, The Life of a Showgirl. And while Rolling Stone awarded it 5 stars, with a similarly sycophantic review from the BBC, the response from other critics has been more mixed.
And rightly so. Sonically, it’s fairly boring. Perhaps I just can’t get on board with so many love songs about Travis Kelce, the most successful slab of ham ever given sentience. Plus, some of the lyrics are genuinely atrocious, especially given Taylor’s reputation as a master songwriter. Remember when she lashed out at Damon Albarn when he suggested she didn’t really write her own songs? Well, she wrote every track on Showgirl, and we can tell.
But this is not the place to go through all the lyrical clangers on the album, although they’re more abundant than usual. Instead, I’d like to highlight how this album represents just how out-of-touch Taylor Swift has become.
Surprise, surprise, the billionaire popstar isn’t in tune with reality! Not even her own. This was already pretty clear from the ultra-capitalist album rollout, where the number of vinyl variants and exclusive merch drops had even diehard Swifties feeling a little used. One friend from university, who used to have a Taylor Swift ‘shrine’ (his chosen description, not mine) on his bedroom wall, described these marketing tactics as ‘predatory and fake’. ‘She’s a product at this point, not an artist,’ he added. A sad change of heart from a once-happy Taylor consumer, who paid more than £250 for VIP Eras Tour tickets at Wembley Stadium.
Other fans have expressed disappointment that the album’s name doesn’t align with what most of the songs are about. For all the promotional images of Taylor flouncing around in headdresses and glitter, she spends most of the twelve songs rambling about Travis and her ongoing celebrity feuds rather than peeling back the curtain to discuss her impressive career, record-breaking tour, or the difference between her performances and reality. Inexplicably, the title track does tackle these themes in a way that feels totally disconnected from the rest of the album, topped off with a random Sabrina Carpenter feature.
But what if the title was nothing but the honest truth? What Taylor reveals in the album is the real ‘life of a showgirl’ as she knows it: a grey mirage of petty drama and vindictive self-righteousness.
Delusion #1: Taylor Swift’s perception of herself ‘as a songwriter’
Swifties love to point out that Taylor is over-hated simply because she’s a female public figure. They’re probably right. But at the same time, Taylor has made her personal life her brand. From the beginning she has emphasised the intense diaristic connection she has with her music, with song after song discussing her sad quest for love and inner peace.
She openly acknowledges the theatre she has made of her suffering: in an interview with Greg James to promote Life of a Showgirl, she says she feared she would get writer’s block if she ever became truly happy. Greg laughs, but it’s actually quite an unsettling admission
Taylor’s refusal to write beyond the scope of her own experience is her principal creative limitation. She can do it, as Folklore and Evermore proved, and those albums were much stronger as a result. Taylor Swift has always been most interesting when she is not writing about Taylor Swift. But her mining of her personal life is a trend that’s poisoned the rest of pop music . The Oasis revival this summer was a painful reminder that good music can thrive on the oblique. Tuning into pop radio these days, I sometimes get sick of all the stars singing their hearts out like I’m being forced to listen to their therapy sessions. And many of these musicians are better at this schtick than Taylor, including her former protégés Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter.
Taylor herself makes much of her lyrical abilities. She called her last album The Tortured Poets Department, for God’s sake, and referred to herself as ‘your English teacher’ in her Instagram post announcing her engagement to Travis Kelce. And on Showgirl she tries her hand at multiple literary and cultural references, referring to herself alternately as Elizabeth Taylor and Ophelia from Hamlet. They don’t really work and it seems like she’s just namedropping them to seem more intellectual, especially the Ophelia one. In what world does Ophelia drowning herself because her dad was murdered by her lover have parallels with Taylor getting ghosted by Matty Healy?
In another interview on Magic FM with Gok Wan, of all people, Taylor discusses her songwriting preferences. Talking about the song ‘Father Figure’ from Life of a Showgirl, she mentions how proud she is of the line ‘I pay the check before it hits the mahogany grain’ (...). The part she is proud of is the fact that she uses ‘mahogany grain’ in place of ‘table’.
It’s somewhat shocking to hear her talk about this kind of nonsense as if it has any meaning. Taylor’s songwriting has always been flowery (to the point of being annoying, for me personally), but on TLOS it’s flowery and shallow. And listening to the kind of shallow thoughts that occupy Taylor’s mind at the moment is dispiriting to say the least.
Taylor is one of the most successful artists ever. Her Eras Tour is by many metrics the biggest music tour in history. She is now a billionaire. Her cultural impact is so great that Time named her, rather than, say, the Dalai Lama, Person of the Year in 2023. So why is she still so depressingly thin-skinned?
Delusion #2: Taylor Swift is not conscious that she is Taylor Swift
One of the most talked-about songs on the album so far is ‘Actually Romantic’, which appears to be about fellow pop star Charli XCX. In the track, Taylor makes fun of Charli’s song ‘Sympathy is a knife’ — widely believed to be about Taylor and how her staggering success makes Charli feel insecure — and claims Charli calls her ‘Boring Barbie’ behind her back.
I listen to Taylor complaining about this and I just think: you’re the most famous woman alive, and this is what you choose to write about? She plays it off as if she doesn’t care what Charli says about her, comparing her to a yapping chihuahua. But if you care so little, why are YOU singing for three minutes about it ????
For all her success, Taylor has always been chronically insecure. Her 2014 hit ‘Shake It Off’, where she ‘laughs’ about what all the haters say about her, is probably the most unconfident projection of confidence ever set to music. In 2019’s ‘You Need To Calm Down’, she equates people making mean comments about her online to the systemic oppression of the LGBT community. And it’s clear that even now, as the biggest pop star possibly of all time, she is obsessed with what people say about her — and those close to her. On ‘Eldest Daughter’, she calls out people online making jokes that are ‘just trolling and memes’. In ‘CANCELLED!’, another low point on the record that sounds like the first draft of a bad Disney villain song, she declares, ‘I like my friends cancelled/Cloaked in Gucci and in scandal’.
This is the tenth song of twelve, and by this point I was pretty done with the whole album. Then it really hit home that no, the title of this album is not inappropriate. More than smeared lipstick or ripped tights, this is the real life of a showgirl: a life defined by insecurity and a lack of self-awareness that you can sell to your fans and they’ll call it vulnerability.
The choice to ‘clap back’ at Charli in ‘Actually Romantic’ is particularly depressing when you remember how Charli’s other song about her mixed feelings towards a fellow female artist, ‘Girl, so confusing’, turned out. On that track, Charli wondered whether New Zealander popstar Lorde really liked her or not. Then Lorde got in touch and they remixed the song with a Lorde verse on it explaining her side of the story. The result is a quite incredible piece of music where two women overcome their mutual unreasonable suspicions of each other and build something better.
But rather than do anything similar, Taylor chooses to make snarky comments about Charli and put them on an album so her millions of fans can laugh. Perhaps she only cares about ‘trolling and memes’ when they’re targeted at her.
Delusion #3: Travis Kelce
If Travis Kelce makes Taylor happy, then that’s fine. But the way she presents their romance on this album had me scratching my head.
On ‘Wi$h Li$t’ she sings about how all the money and the fame means nothing to her, and that she would trade it all in for a ‘driveway with a basketball hoop’.
I simply don’t believe you, Taylor. In all the other songs on the album, she’s singing about Cartier and booths in expensive restaurants (and don’t forget all her #cancelled girlboss friends in their killer Gucci outfits!!!). And while in my more cynical moments I believe she and Travis are only together for PR, they are at the very least not opposed to using their relationship for commercial advantage.
Why has the NFL earned nearly US$1 billion in publicity since Taylor started showing up to Travis’s matches? Why did she choose to announce this new album on Travis’s podcast, New Heights, for maximum cross-publicity? Why in their engagement photoshoot are they both dressed head-to-toe in co-ordinated Ralph Lauren?
To pretend she’d rather be popping out kids in the suburbs of America seems pretty disingenuous given the amount of stuff she’s sold in the run-up to Showgirl. Taylor has so much money, and I find her constant pursuit of more a bit grotesque sometimes. But I’d much rather she owned up to it than pretended otherwise.
Delusion #4: Taylor Swift has never grown up
On ‘Ruin The Friendship’, Taylor ponders an old high school romance that never was. Internationally famous before she’d even reached her Senior Year, Taylor has an obsession with teenagerhood and a youthful, borderline naïve mindset that has endeared her to many young fans. In her previous album, her love story with Travis ‘honey roasted’ Kelce was described as ‘so high school’, signposting the beginning of a dangerous nostalgia.
‘Ruin The Friendship’ continues her romanticisation of high school iconography, remembering a world of corsages and football games. The song ends with Taylor learning that her old crush from the past has died unexpectedly. Then she sings about her regrets while standing over his grave. Keep in mind that the main regret expressed in this song is that she didn’t kiss him when she should’ve — while his girlfriend was away. If I were that man’s parents, I’d be kind of fuming that Taylor had made this song about how she was sad their son was dead because she never had the chance to cheat with him.
It’s moments like this that remind you how self-centred and detached from reality celebrities really are. I’m not saying Taylor Swift is unique in this, not at all. Only that she shares so much of her personal life through her songs that she makes herself a much easier target for criticism.
On her last album, she had a song called ‘Peter’, a Peter Pan-inspired track about a boyish man who said he’d come back for her, but never would. Listening to Showgirl, with all its girlish talk of shimmering skies, fairy-tale towers, and high-school crushes, you can’t help but wonder if maybe Taylor is the real Peter Pan, if Taylor Swift’s mind has been frozen at the age it was when she became famous: sixteen. It would certainly explain why she got so defensive over one Charli XCX song.
Conclusion: Is there anything else to say?
At the end of the day, column inches make Taylor stronger. I’m only pouring more petrol on the flames with this article, though I’ve exhibited restraint and not written about the awful song where she compares Travis’s penis to a magic wand. (It sounds like a joke, but it’s unfortunately 100% real.)
Maybe I’m the one suffering from psychosis after writing such a long article about her. I’ll be back once I’ve touched some grass. Regardless, for her own benefit more than anything else, I hope I don’t hear from Taylor Swift in a long time. Plus, it will give her fans more time to line their wallets ready for the next 5,000 vinyl releases.
Update 08/10: The significant reaction (positive and negative) to this post has led me to write a follow-up offering a few clarifications. Click here for more thoughts.
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As a diehard, basically-from-birth Taylor Swift fan.... yeah. I've been increasingly critical of her for the past couple of years (including the declining quality of lyricism of her last couple of records), but this album really broke the seal of disillusionment for me. It feels like a last-ditch grab for relevance, attention, or money, without any real authenticity or vulnerability to back it up. In a sad, meta way, it really DOES illustrate the life of a showgirl, but without the self-awareness of the price and privileges of fame that have made some of her previous records great. While I will always love the Taylor that I listened to in my youth, I hope that she takes this as her cue to step away from the spotlight for a couple of years, do some reflection, and come back with a truly great album like she did with Rep and folklore.
Yes, I simply don’t believe her “wish list” either. Someone in another review pointed out her obvious filler in a recent BBC interview while going after others for their cosmetic surgeries in her lyrics.
If all you did fame for was to find a husband, that’s really disappointing. It’s also boring that all you want is a man and a white picket fence life. There’s nothing wrong with wanting love, or kids, but please tell me you have other ambitions too. That’s a reason we felt like she was a heroine all this time. She never stopped wanted marriage — it’s in her lyrics — but that she seemed to push back against the idea that’s all she was good for. Now she’s seemingly surrendered herself over to it because she’s dickmatized? I do hope she takes a break after this though because she needs time and perspective.
I couldn’t even finish Ruin The Friendship the first time through. I thought I don’t know why a 36 year old keeps singing about high school. This sounds like a vault track. Then later on, I learned it was about someone who had died by suicide. It’s weird to make someone else’s mental health struggles about yourself.