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(Father Figure Slaps Though)

As always this is a rant. If you disagree that’s chill I’m just a rando on the internet

I’ve been a casual listener of Taylor Swift since 1989 which opened with the track “Welcome to New York” that premiered the same year I moved to New York. Since this move Taylor Swift has dropped Reputation, Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights, Tortured Poets Department and now The Life of the Showgirl and I’m sorry but it’s mid and now that the albums been out for 72 hours it appears that’s a more charitable review than anyone else was willing to give.

I don’t think this album is a complete unsalvageable mess. I actually really rocked with Opalite, Ruin the Friendship, Father Figure and Actually Romantic (Controversial I know). Maybe I’m being unfair here, maybe we’ve all just grown accustomed to every TS drop being culture defining, maybe it was impossible to replicate success on par with the success she’s had from the Eras tour. Maybe she is finally so in love that she’s lost that well of sadness that’s so easy to pull from when creating (been there queen I get it). But I’m not really too interested in the parasocial craze of going line by line of each song searching for dog whistles, or potential nods to leaning into trad wife aesthetics. Little of that matters to me because the cardinal sin of The Life of A Showgirl is that when stripped of its accompanying aesthetics, it doesn’t give Showgirl.

I know that Swift’s intention is to use Showgirl as a sort of catchall metaphor for women in entertainment. I read that she wrote it while on The Eras Tour about what was happening in her life during this period. But I’m sorry even within the entertainment industry a “showgirl” is something incredibly specific that Taylor doesn’t embody and is never delivered on this album because on an existential level I’m unsure Taylor is capable of it.

I’ve worked with plenty a showgirl, and I mean real showgirls, in burlesque, cabaret and yes on Broadway.

And the first sin out the gate is there’s not a single song on this album that I could see being incorporated in any of these spaces without some massive changes in arrangement and execution. No one wanted a musical theatre album but it is a pretty cardinal sin that I cannot picture choreographing a burlesque act to any of these and I can’t picture them being covered in Cabaret spaces.

The lack of real differentiation from this album’s sound and the rest of her body of work is frustrating. The heightened aesthetic attached to this album’s roll out only highlighted its weaknesses. The lack of theatricality, the absence of melodrama, the absence of anything I could actually relate to as a woman who works in entertainment was actually staggering.

Because the reality of actual showgirls is something wildly different from Taylor’s lived experiences (atleast the public ones). Every working showgirl I know masks a world of sacrifice, blistered feet, brushes with exploitation and rejection. Lots of rejection. It’s not all tragedy, but most showgirls you encounter in real life live in one bedroom apartments or with roommates and whether or not they’re insured/married/have life planned out beyond this career is immensely hit or miss and the vast majority have multiple secondary streams of income. There’s tragedy inherently packaged into the shelf lives of women who hold to this title. Looks are a depleting asset for everyone and the entertainment industry is notorious for valuing artists for this and little else. There have been whole films and musicals written about the temporary nature of those who make a living in this field how there’s nothing more euphoric than telling stories for a living and nothing worse than the inevitable comedown once you near 50 or 40 or 30 depending how well you age. This is why songs about show business tend to skew between overly optimistic excitement about the glitz, glamour and escapism, or deeply sad ballads about the pain and sacrifice and what you give up in order to pursue the art form you love.

I’m not trying to make light of Taylor’s experiences. I cannot imagine being such a publicly scrutinized figure constantly held to a standard no one can realistically meet, and now not being able to fill the expectations you inadvertently set yourself (but chill with the private jet maybe babes). But Taylor Swift came from a fairly affluent family who essentially launched her career.

She hasn’t had to stand outside Pearl Studios at 5 in the morning for a nonequity tour of a show she hates. She didn’t have to self promote to clubs to get stage time at a mid tier NY club primarily looking for burlesque. She didn’t have to stand in a line with other girls who look exactly like her to get turned away because she’s an inch too tall. She didn’t even go through the child stardom ringer that counterparts like Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo (whose career she has repeatedly attempted to sabatoge). This combined with the squeaky clean all American girl next door persona she embodies, makes her a bit of an “anti showgirl”. Maybe she just wanted to play dress up.

Which is why this album falls so flat. Taylor doesn’t have the well of experience one would need to pull from to discuss what being a showgirl is like in actuality, and the content she does pull from comes off as out of touch or is about Kelce’s penis. It’s just impossible to not roll your eyes at a billionaire artist on top of the world telling the listener at their 9-5 that “You don’t know the life of a showgirl” when it sounds like she doesn’t really either, and if she does she doesn’t have anything to say about it.

There’s nothing here about the inherent sacrifice tinted world you enter when undertaking a career in the performing arts. There’s nothing here about the joy that comes from getting to perform for money or about what a blessing it is to even have this opportunity. All that is to say divorced from this weird dress up moment that did lowkey eat, there’s nothing in this album about show business.

If Swift wanted to write an album about how excited she was to be in love, about agitation she has with being in the public eye, and about tensions with her less famous counterparts…idk maybe don’t attach it to a well-trodden archetype associated with disenfranchisement as much as it is glamour.