https://northerntransmissions.com/taylor-swift-the-life-of-a-showgirl/
found this review and it is so detailed that even for a non listener like me i understood how disappointed swifties are
Taylor Swift is #Blessed, y’all! She is #BossedUp with her new boo, the smexy hunk Travis Kelce, and when they’re not giving #CoupleGoals on the football field, their sex life (teehee!) is totally bangin’. Did someone say nine inches? She still has time after her blockbuster tour (yup, the richest woman of all time can sing!) to get out some much-needed female rage on her new trap-pop-rock record, the edgy yet simple, fearless yet safe The Life of a Showgirl. Ahh, us eldest daughters needed this!
Or at least, this is Taylor Swift’s preferred mindset for the listener of her newest record, The Life of a Showgirl, an album littered with so many been-there stunts and basic melodies it makes one wonder if the superstar has been replaced by a placated, tone-deaf version of herself.
Not only is Showgirl Swift’s worst album, it is a bizarre listening experience, decimated by a basement-dwelling taste level that makes one wonder if she’s suffering from long Covid, a lack of drive resulting from her years at the top, or an incessant urge to stay there, releasing albums full of bland content just to give fans a yearly experience.
Swift’s writing, which for the entirety of her career has been her foremost talent, has reached such a nadir on Showgirl that it often feels like a prank gone wrong.
On its opening track, the “Love Story” redux (and lead single) “The Fate of Ophelia,” her simplistic vision of a hero’s journey is confusingly bad: “All that time, I sat alone in my tower / You were just honing your powers.”
The image of dancing beside the lightning strikes, as her mother tells her on “Opalite,” is no match to rain-soaked love affair on “Fearless”; and she sounds convinced of its downgrade. She’ll “pledge allegiance to your hand, your team, your vibes,” which is only a little more romantic than her admission, “You can call me ‘honey’ if you want / Because I’m the one you want.” What poetry.
Indeed, Showgirl is stuffed with internet-scraped memes, quips, and faux badassery so baffling it makes her masterful twin albums folklore and evermore seem like delusions from a parallel reality.
“Eldest Daughter” recycles dated Twitter jokes into horrid poetry: “I’m not a bad bitch, and this isn’t savage” she sings sincerely. “It’s a good thing I like my friends cancelled,” she drawls on a pathetic reputation callback, later asking, “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?”
The woefully out-of-touch “Wi$h Li$t” lists off the exorbitant, glamorous desires of her peers (Oscars, yachts, “Balenci’ shades”), only to heroically decline: “I just want… you!” she sings, ever the humble star (she’s just like us!).
“Boss up, settle down,” she advises, as if it’s 2016. The album’s purported concept — “Oftentimes it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me” — could have been better received without the elementary, presumptuous framing. “Be my NY when Hollywood hates me,” the trillionaire sings. “Welcome to my underworld,” the trillionaire sings. Eyeroll.
But a showgirl makes time for romance, too; she might sing about her own dick on “Father Figure,” but turns to someone else’s on “Wood.” Taylor Swift is not a sexual icon by any means, but she uncovered an erotic side on surprising songs like “False God,” “Dress,” or “ivy.” She goes for broke here, but when she sings of Kelce being the key that “opened my thighs,” it reads like a parody of a Sabrina Carpenter song, sex for the sake of it.
It’s devoid of sensuality and nuance — if you didn’t already get it from the title, she’ll sing about his “magic wand,” “Redwood tree,” or how he “ah-matized” her, a self-censor on the internet parlance “dick-matized” over the tepid funk. It’s unbearable.
But the worst offender, by far, is the pathetic “Actually Romantic,” a diss track in the vein of “Mean” or “Better Than Revenge” that misinterprets Charli XCX’s earnest reckoning with female competitiveness and lashes out.
“I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” she opens on a dreary guitar riff, not only punching down, but punching randomly, at a long-squashed beef unearthed so her record will have something of substance. It’s a funny idea — being desired professionally so much it borders on homerotic (“It’s kind of making me wet,” she moans) — but ultimately it’s childish, like a toddler who just learned a curse word and is repeating it because the adults will react.
It’s petty, unbecoming, and a simplistic reading of a situation that Swift could have explored with much more depth — imagine if she had made a “Girl, so confusing” situation regarding it, exploring her own complicity (if there is any) with Charli’s feelings. Maybe five years ago she had the depth to tackle it.
Ever since the album’s announcement, Swift has been touting that its production team was Max Martin and Shellback, the pair responsible for her pop smashes 1989 and reputation, but their work here is abysmal and dull.
Jack Antonoff’s sleepy synths would be preferable to the pizzicato handclaps and stomping strings on the title track, the narcoleptic soft rock on “Opalite” or “The Fate of Ophelia,” play-by-numbers funk on “Wood” or sticky trap on “Honey.”
The too-cool-for-you guitars on “Actually Romantic” are undercut by its lyrics, and the thudding piano on “Elizabeth Taylor” tries hard to make a moment.
This is background music at its finest — not terrible enough to turn off, but docile enough to not care about. If previous album folklore commanded attention through its stillness, Showgirl does so by the basic fact of her notoriety. You’ll listen either way, so who cares if it’s interesting?
If the depravity of stardom was intentionally investigated through shallow lyricism that’s as dull and obnoxious as the ubiquity and mass appeal as being in the #1 position would suggest, then Swift is a genius, and this is a masterwork, but after 12 blandly-written songs, it becomes devastatingly clear that Showgirl isn’t a joke, Swift is serious, and her skills have, for whatever reason, deteriorated such that her songcraft is virtually unrecognizable from when she was a starry-eyed teenager penning cleverly devastatingly tales born out of high school romance.
One look from a boy could inspire a whole album. Now with the world at her fingertips, a new love, and a world dominance no contemporary pop star has ever seen, she resorts to immature disses, weak cultural commentary, and songs that suggest her relationship’s banality. The disappointment is immeasurable.
