On Oct. 3, pop juggernaut Taylor Swift released her 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” capping off an era of her career unmatched in sales, content and popularity by any of her contemporaries. Teased relentlessly since the lukewarm discography B-sides project “Midnights,” the album was expected to be a return of prime pop Taylor a la “1989” or “Red,” as she began to work with producers Max Martin and Shellback once again.
Now that the album has been released and out for a few weeks, the dust has settled and public opinion is still divided. In this review, I am forgoing all preconceived notions of a critical analysis and instead opt for the facts. Here is everything you should know about “The Life of a Showgirl”.
Pros: For starters, Taylor Swift is, in the business sense, an absolute boss. Within its first week, “Showgirl” sold in total four million units, by a large margin one of, if not the most, successful album drops in music history. It seems that with this release, Swift has fully drawn a line in the sand with her listeners; this time, her album is more of a product than a piece of living and breathing art. With 38 different vinyl variants to boost streams and purchases (a business tactic that many modern artists have stepped away from due to waste and environmental concerns), it is clear Taylor is looking for numbers as opposed to critical acclaim.
Additionally, this time around, the music is not half as bad as the naysayers may argue. Though more muted and acoustic than her previous pop LPs like “1989” or “Lover,” Swift remains adept at a spotless song and a good hook. To hear the soaring chorus of “The Fate of Ophelia” or the staccato kiss-offs of “Father Figure” once is to hear them forever looping in your head. Even the album’s lyricism, which loses its grasp on the concept of audience and slips into millennial-coded roasts with lines like, “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?” or “Good thing I like my friends cancelled / I like ‘em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal,” seems built for attention and clicks. On “Showgirl,” Taylor uses cringe as a life force for her success. Remember: she’s looking for numbers, not truth or beauty.
If this review seems too charitable, that is because it is. Here are the cons: Swift’s use of generative AI for the video advertising and, allegedly, visuals for this album is blatantly obvious and highly condescending to her audience, who look to Taylor for a whole album experience as opposed to just a set of new tracks. Swift has also doubled down on flat-out censoring negative discourse about the album, removing it from cumulative review lists like Metacritic and copyright striking YouTube thinkpieces about it (i.e. penguinzO’s video). These moves are a strange and dictatorial way to control her own narrative that reads more dystopian than savvy.
To counter this authoritarianism and garner more sales, the release of her in-studio voice memos has rubbed many listeners the wrong way during this era, with some of the clips featuring obviously faked laughing and Swift’s quick dismissal of any attempts by Martin or Shellback to correct her quickly aging lyrical style. “Actually Romantic” is a track that corroborates this, a response to Charli XCX’s 2024 ego-gutting “Sympathy is a Knife” that reads as one of the most shallow and careless responses an artist of Swift’s size could be making; somehow, she makes the “beef” about herself instead of the state of women working alongside each other in a critically misogynist entertainment industry.
This perhaps leads this review to its ultimate crux: Taylor Swift is now the biggest music star in the entire world. Her voice is louder than an entire industry of western pop music engineered by teams of songwriters and advertisers to catch fire and sell millions. Capping off her massive Eras Tour, she has finally reached the summit of success. After all of this, what does Ms. Swift have to say? “The Life of a Showgirl” is her message, for better or for worse. I would say this record lands in the latter.
