The Swift Decline of The Life of a Showgirl

By Amruta Srinivasan

Legend has it that if you whisper ‘Taylor Swift’ three times in front of a mirror at midnight, you’ll be forced to watch an hour long video essay on the morality of a seemingly innocuous song lyric of hers. If you get through that, then comes the 4 minute TikTok on how she raised her eyebrows in an interview, followed by a Reddit thread analyzing a single outfit at an awards ceremony. She seems to be everywhere, injected into all sorts of popular discourse, her spectre looming over pop music as a whole. Newer female pop singers are all ushered under Swift’s umbrella, and their enthusiasm at being named a “Taydaughter” is suspect at best. There is always an opinion to be found on Taylor Swift, and I doubt a day

has gone by in the past few years without someone publishing yet another half-baked Substack essay on her. There are the Swifties, there are the ardent Swifties, there are the anti-Taylors, and there are those who claim to be ambivalent about her and still think about her for a parasocial amount of time. There’s even an entire genre of videos where ‘manly’ men react to her music and discover that, shock of all shocks, it’s actually good? Taylor Swift discourse never dies—it merely lays dormant until some catalyst comes to push it into our front pages. Her newest album, The Life of A Showgirl, rekindled all the discourse on Swift—on her morality, her songwriting skills, her status as a billionaire, and so much more. Swift generates an amount of frenzied vitriol unlike any other celebrity. Entire subreddits and Twitter accounts and Instagram pages are dedicated to hating on her, following her every move and unnecessarily criticizing all of her actions. It’s parasocial and needlessly cruel. It’s important, however, to not conflate valid criticism of Swift’s music with unnecessary jabs at her character and appearance. In fact, in the wake of her new album, strange accusations have been made about Swift getting fillers. And to that I say: for the love of God, let the woman get fillers! Discourse on her appearance is deeply misogynistic, and belongs in the gossip rags and tabloids of the early 2000s. Do we have nothing better to do than criticize a female celebrity for how she looks? A critique of Taylor Swift’s discography that devolves into an attack on her appearance is simply pathetic. There are also critiques of her discography as a whole that claim that she has never made good music in her life. Whenever I hear something like that, I assume that the speaker has heard 5 songs of hers, and is simply tired of hearing about her. Objectively, Swift is a talented and prolific songwriter. It’s incorrect and, quite frankly, plain ignorant to claim that she isn’t. Her lush storytelling and songwriting created masterpieces like Reputation and Folklore, albums that have cemented her position as one of the defining singer-songwriters of our generation. A critique and analysis of The Life of a Showgirl would be amiss without mentioning that. Still, Showgirl deserves, even needs, criticism, and has several failings and weaknesses that weigh down the joyful and dreamy exterior of the album. What is the most painful about The Life of a Showgirl is Swift’s inability to release her victimhood. 

She clings to this narrative like a lifeboat, and lets it seep into nearly every track. This underdog mentality may have made sense in the melancholic Tortured Poets Department, but it lacks depth and substance in The Life of a Showgirl. She has just exited one of the most profitable and record-breaking tours (a fact she is wont to mention), made oodles of money, has bought back her masters, and yet, Swift falls back into the same path and is once again the scrappy underdog. Who is she fighting now? Her fame? Unkind social media posts? In “Eldest Daughter”, a vaunted Track 5, Swift carps about everybody being “cutthroat in the comments” and “trolling and memes”—complaints that are horrifyingly online and gratuitous. To hear the word meme in a Taylor Swift song is akin to seeing someone post an Instagram story in a Robert Eggers movie. It’s unnatural! Her outrage is questionable as well. For every ounce of hatred she faces, she has two pounds of adulation from her dedicated fans. That is a simply stellar place for a popstar to be at. She’s created a loving and expansive community of fans who create countless friendship bracelets and fanworks in her honor. To then sing about being attacked and the constant criticism that comes her way is petty and deeply unrelatable. “Eldest Daughter” mainly focuses on online hate, an unfortunate byproduct of her fame and celebrity. Showgirl also focuses on another important part of Swift’s persona—her want to be perceived as different. An admitted “terminal uniqueness”, so to speak. This has been present in her music from the very beginning of her career. In her classic “You Belong With Me”, Swift tells the object of her affections that the other girl “is cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers”. She announces that she is different from all the other girls, and that sentiment has seeped into her most recent music as well. In her song “Wi$h Li$t”, she claims that her peers want “those Balenci’ shades”, a “critical smash Palme d’Or”, and “those three dogs that they call their kids”.

These are, according to Swift, materialistic and vapid wants that she is far away from. In this song, all Swift wants is her fiancé and to raise a family with him. When I listened to these lyrics for the first time, I had to pause for a moment and wonder if I had entered a parallel universe where Taylor Swift didn’t want critical acclaim and was perfectly content with her man. Was this the same Taylor who wrote “The Man”? “Wi$h Li$t” is frighteningly misogynistic, and puts down women who want something beyond a homesteading fantasy. It’s also quite ironic and hypocritical for Swift to denounce these women for chasing material gains when she herself is a shrewd and successful businesswoman—a billionaire businesswoman at that. That’s perfectly respectable, even admirable, and it’s confusing to see Swift run from that label in “Wi$h Li$t”. The song is completely unrelatable to her audience, and needlessly puts down other women. Of course, Swift is simply singing about her life and lived experiences, as she always has. Her songs are not relatable to the common man because she does not live the life of a common man. She’s a self-proclaimed showgirl, and a very wealthy one at that. It makes sense for her to then sing about friends “cloaked in Gucci”. Justifications aside, it’s still tasteless and slightly ignorant for her to sing about such excesses and then promptly crawl under the cloak of victimhood right after. It is all deeply unrelatable, and if Swift is not relatable, then who is she? The very allure of Taylor Swift lies in seeing your heart etched into the lyrics of her songs. That aspect is barely present in Showgirl. It is a self indulgent album that only she connects deeply to. The Life of a Showgirl is an album created mainly for Taylor Swift by Taylor Swift. She is the target audience for her own words, and she revels in them. Showgirl was a disappointment to me, but I still hold out hope for her and her music. Swift has proven her artistry again and again, and even if it was missing in The Life of a Showgirl, it will hopefully reappear in TS13, an album that would ideally not be as rushed and would back up her purported title of an English teacher. Fingers crossed.