Time was, posting anything negative about Taylor Swift would be personally dangerous, given the famous passion, obsessiveness and sheer numbers of the Swiftie fandom. In recent years, the great and the good have also piled into Swiftiedom. Her 2024 Eras tour was a must-attend photo opp for royals, senators and prime ministers’ wives (recall Victoria Starmer’s free tickets to two concerts at Wembley).
The V&A hired a curator for Taylor Swift ephemera. Academics have lauded her: Harvard poetry professor Stephanie Burt taught a class on Swift last year and has a forthcoming book out called The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift.
But with the release of her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, the once-impermeable barricades defending Taytay’s honour and brilliance have developed cracks. Indeed, there is a growing consensus among fans that the album kinda maybe sucks. This is huge.
‘The life of a showgirl is as if Dubai, matcha, pistachio chocolate, Colleen Hoover books and labubus all had a baby with AI,’ wrote one Swiftie on X (139,000 likes). Another put it just as succinctly: ‘I said Taylor Swift’s new album sucks and I didn’t even get a single death threat from a Swiftie. That’s how bad it is.’
There are two main problems with this album, apart from its uninspired sound. One is the way Swift now comes across as a person: bored, self-pitying and mean, rehashing old gripes about friends and powerful music-industry executives, and taking merciless potshots at what is thought to be sub-rival singer charli XCX in ‘Actually Romantic’. The song opens, ‘I heard you call me “Boring Barbie” when the coke’s got you brave,’ and only gets worse from there.
Then there is the gross, non-lyrical way she sings about her fiancé Travis Kelce and his anatomy. She refers, to the horror of critics and fans, to his ‘redwood’, making sexual puns about Kelce’s podcast, and topping it all off with what might be the worst line not just in Swift’s canon but the whole pop canon: ‘His love was the key that opened my thighs.’
While some critics still appeared to feel an obligation to swoon, others let rip. ‘She doesn’t sound like she’s having fun,’ snarked the Atlantic. ‘She has the team captain, the cushion-cut diamond, the fans who will shell out for yet another branded cardigan – but Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, and the life it seems to portray, is a charmless chore.’ The Cut, a usually pro-Swift section of New York Magazine, noted: ‘Even now, during the most commercially successful period of her life, when she is the most universally liked she’s ever been and seemingly in the happiest, most healthy relationship of her life, she still thinks she’s the victim. It’s evident in so many of these songs, and that story line is t-i-r-e-d.’
The New Yorker noted the album’s ‘weak lyricism’ and that, rather than being about happiness and love, it is about ‘resentment – of basically everyone besides Kelce – [that] is present throughout the songs. She’s got enemies in Hollywood, in the music industry, and all over the internet.’
Swift’s soul is surely reflected in her fans, many of whom seem to see the world in the hostile, memetic cadences that her Very Online generation have made their own
For those of us who have never understood the appeal of this hard-nosed American-as-apple-pie pop star, despite listening on repeat to the most lauded songs, this is all very satisfying. It’s not just that she has done a bad album. It’s not that she has indulged in experimentation gone wrong, as sometimes happens with Madonna. Rather, what we have here is the slippage of a mask of fine-tuned girlish authenticity, revealing an algorithmically boastful, horny, aggrieved, spoiled woman.
The question of whether Swift has a real, human heart seems a fair one. After all, Swift’s soul is surely reflected in her fans, many of whom seem to see the world in the hostile, memetic cadences that her Very Online generation have made their own. Their traditionally brutal – and feared – approach to those who so much as criticise the work of their queen speaks volumes about their sensibilities and worldview, as well as the weirdly humourless, totalising nature of candy-floss feminist fandom today.
One song of Swift’s that I have listened to a few times (and quite like) sticks with me: ‘Bad Blood’, from her 2014 album 1989. Musically it soars, but I find the way it uses the language of clan warfare for a fallout with a mate quite unsettling. ‘Now we got bad blood,’ she roars menacingly. ‘Now we got problems / And I don’t think we can solve ’em… I was thinking that you could be trusted / Did you have to ruin / What was shiny?’
Swift has got millions of young women of all shapes and sizes stepping into sequins. She’s got them behind a dazzlingly standard fairytale ending with a huge football-playing hunk. But what it seems she can’t get them behind this time is derivative, unpleasant music – and the emerging implication that their beloved may not be so worthy of their love any more.
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