REVIEW: 'The Life of a Showgirl' finds Taylor Swift at a distance
Taylor Swift is many things to different people, but she’s always someone who listens. “A pathological people pleaser” is how she described herself in the harrowing anthem You’re Losing Me a couple of albums ago—and people-please she did on her latest record, The Life of a Showgirl, out Oct. 3.
During her last two albums, fans and critics alike have echoed online that there are simply too many songs—The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology has 31—that compromising quality is inevitable, especially when she collaborates with the same people. So Swift reunited with Max Martin and Shellback, the producers behind her biggest hits like Style and I Knew You Were Trouble, who she hasn’t worked with in eight years. She constantly reiterated that The Life of a Showgirl is a tight, 12-track album of carefully curated, infectious pop songs; no bonus tracks, no deluxe edition. It also promised to pull back the curtain, having been written during the European leg of the record-breaking Eras tour.
The output, as is often the case, tells a different story. This doesn’t mean it’s all bad, only that it did not align with expectations. The widely shared visuals of this album cycle evoke the jazzy flapper culture of the 1920s, especially after Swift referenced actress Clara Bow in her previous record. But Showgirl is soft rock, more edge than pop, and more minimalist than what we thought would be 1989 part 2.
Lead single The Fate of Ophelia bears more similarities with Fleetwood Mac than, say, Blank Space, but it’s an exciting first track. This is an under-explored sound for Swift, and it continues to prove her longstanding skill of opening up new sonic terrains without losing her signature. Other standouts are the songs that follow this pattern: Actually Romantic’s spare instrumentation and cheeky vocals call to mind rock bands of the ‘80s and ‘90s—a bit of Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus, and Where Is My Mind? by Pixies. Wood is chippy and Jackson 5-esque, with lyrics that wink at the listeners. While the album has less radio-ready, hooky choruses, it’s chock-full of playful, surprising moments; the crescendo before Opalite’s final chorus is especially infectious.
Perhaps a first for Swift, the writing is the weakest part of Showgirl. There’s always a sense of awkwardness when she uses internet lingo, and it hits a fever-pitch here: “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?” she sings in CANCELLED!, about her and her friends’ “matching scars.” This is not the first time she’s written about her frustrations with the court of public opinion, but it’s among her wobbliest attempts. Eldest Daughter, the fifth track, settles for “I’m not a bad bitch, this isn’t savage,” resulting in something honest but uncharacteristic of Swift’s writing. It’s relatively impersonal and thus generic, when her claim to fame has always been specificity; she’s at her best when she lingers in smaller, mundane moments and draws bigger meanings out of them. (The track that follows, Ruin the Friendship, with its gut-punch of a plot twist, has a fully-realized emotional core more apt for Track 5.)
In Honey, she swoons over her lover giving pet names “a different meaning,” after she’d become accustomed to being called “honey” passive-aggressively. Genuinely sweet, but the storytelling is elementary and coarsely on-the-nose for Swift. The closing track with Sabrina Carpenter, The Life of a Showgirl, boasts a grander production and dishes an avowal of fame’s darker underbelly; yet, it barely fulfills the album’s promise of a glimpse behind the scenes. Like CANCELLED!, the song’s themes are better explored in earlier work, like the aforementioned Clara Bow, The Lucky One from 2010’s Speak Now, or even the vault track Nothing New from Red (Taylor’s Version).
I think it’s worth mentioning, at this point, that I grew up with Swift’s music. For years, I patterned not just my writing, but my life, to hers—that’s how seen her music makes you feel. When you listen to her, it’s like she’s listening to you, too. During every release day including this one, I would stop whatever I was doing once the clock struck 12 and spend the next hour closely reading her lyrics. It’s strange to realize that Showgirl, supposedly a peek behind the curtain, is perhaps her most nebulous work, as if she’s suddenly putting herself at arm’s length. I almost miss the messy info-dump of Tortured Poets, if only because she had something more interesting to say.
Frankly, there are people who will say Showgirl is a bad album for the sake of being detractors, and there are others who will say it’s perfect for the sake of not unleashing the vitriol of one of the world’s biggest fan bases. Who the songs are about often takes precedence in conversations over the quality of the work (especially when she makes it painfully apparent, like in Actually Romantic). This, in a nutshell, touches on what Swift wants to express: When you’re this famous, it will never just be about the music. “I would trade the Cartier for someone to trust,” she sings in Elizabeth Taylor.
One wonders whether the album would have fared better had it not been released under the pretense that it’s the pop perfection we’ve been asking of Swift since the release of 1989 in 2014. Perhaps the spectacle of the rollout made it bigger, the expectations higher, than it was supposed to be. It’s also possible the spectacle is part of the point. Surely, Swift—a writer before she is a singer—would disagree, but she has also proven over the years that she’s a smart businesswoman. Maybe such is simply the reality of life as a showgirl.
