Taylor Swift's ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’ only offers lacklustre mediocrity

I mention this little tidbit because it strikes me as a hilariously on-the-nose metaphor for Swift’s music. The toppings might vary—electro-pop sheen on Midnights, indie-folk on Folklore, the hip-hop imbued Reputation. But at its core, the product remains the same: basic, risk-averse and unfailingly vanilla. Over the years, America’s Sweetheart has transformed into the girl-boss next door, but all these different eras and incarnations cannot hide the essential fact of Swift’s corniness.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Pop music has always held space for music that’s pure cheese—think Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called To Say I Love You, or Celine Deon’s My Heart Will Go On. Swift’s best music comes from the same place of open-hearted, deeply un-cool sincerity, whether she’s writing about teenage love and heartbreak, or about being a wide-eyed small-town girl dealing with the trappings of fame. She has an uncanny knack for taking personal experience and turning it into something universally relatable—an unlucky romantic whose music speaks directly to multiple generations of the everywoman.

But in recent years, this approach has had diminishing creative returns, even if it’s more commercially successful than ever. 2022’s Midnights was strictly so-so, even if pop critics largely responded with adulatory reviews. Last year’s The Tortured Poets Department was a sprawling, over-indulgent mess, more Rupi Kaur than Sylvia Plath. But that record still had some interesting twists and turns, and a sense of tender vulnerability that elevated its overwrought lyricism.

The Life Of A Showgirl lacks even that. It’s a record characterised by lacklustre mediocrity, 12 tracks of department-store muzak whose only saving grace is just how inoffensive they are. Despite the return of Swedish mega-producer Max Martin and Shellback—who helped catapult Swift from country star to pop phenom, and produced some of her most iconic singles—the album is sorely lacking in earworm hooks or undeniable melodies.

Instead, we get breezy, easy-listening soft-rock, occasionally garnished with hip-hop percussion or neo-grunge guitar. The music is as crisp and polished as ever, but it’s also bloodless—lacking both the novelty and intensity that makes pop music so compelling. At its best, the production on here is aggressively banal. At worst, it comes across as tired pastiche—Actually Romantic’s guitar lines sound like they’ve been directly lifted from The Pixies and Weezer’s back-catalogue, while Wood is Jackson 5’s I Want You Back, but stripped of any actual sensuality.

But the bigger problem here is Swift’s songwriting, so much of which re-treads old ground, but less successfully than she’s done before. The George Michael interpolating Father Figure returns to a favourite topic—Swift as the plucky underdog, fighting back against an exploitative music industry. Except she is now a twice-over billionaire, the most powerful figure in pop music, and her opps—record label executives Scooter Braun, Scott Borchetta—have already been resoundingly defeated. Given that context, the track’s triumphalism comes across as petty and immature (and its Mafia-themed heel-turn narrative is more than a little WTF).

Similarly, Eldest Daughter’s complaints about online inauthenticity—“every joke's just trolling and memes/ Sad as it seems, apathy is hot"—come across as trite and clunky, a decade past their sell-by date. CANCELLED! is another low point, as Swift once again re-litigates her 2015 feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian and moans about the “masked crusaders" who apparently tried to cancel her *checks notes* nine years ago. The prickliness is bad enough, but it’s also woefully out of touch to grandstand about ‘cancel culture’ at a time when so many fellow Americans are facing much worse threats to their reputations and freedom of speech for just speaking their minds.

The pettiness finds its apotheosis on Actually Romantic, a vicious takedown of a nameless pop rival (there’s plenty of hints that it’s actually Charli XCX) who hates her so much that it comes across as love. It’s playground bully stuff, Swift punching down on a younger, less successful popstar in response to a song that’s actually more about Charli’s own insecurities than about her at all. But the worst part is that the best put-down on the track—“boring Barbie"—is actually something she alleges Charli called her. Talk about a self-own.

When she’s not being thin-skinned, Swift turns her attention to love songs, with fiance Travis Kelce as her new muse. There’s the Shakespeare-cribbing The Fate Of Ophelia, which credits Kelce as saving her from sharing the Hamlet heroine’s tragic fate. There’s Opalite, a sweet but largely unremarkable track about the joys of finding love and stability after a tumultuous time. They’re fun songs, among the album’s few highlights, alongside the Sabrina Carpenter collab title track, though I will probably forget all about them by next week.

But then there’s Wood, an ode to Kelce’s penis that is deeply unsexy, with its lyrics about redwood trees and magic wands. I could spend another 800 words about just how god-awful this song is, especially coming from someone who’s supposed to be pop music’s premiere essayist and lyricist. But nothing I could come up with can compete with this zinger by Pitchfork’s Anna Gaca, who writes that the song has “the spiritual energy of bachelorette-party penis décor." Ouch.

For a decade and a bit, Taylor Swift has been nigh-on untouchable, thanks to her ability to find new ways to create a sense of parasocial intimacy with her fans, despite the increasing distance between her musical persona and her actual reality. On The Life Of A Showgirl, that gulf finally seems too big to bridge.

Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.