The Life of a Showgirl was meant to be a fresh start for Taylor Swift. Following a string of melancholic releases (folklore and evermore, both 2020; Midnights, 2022; and The Tortured Poets Department, 2024), Showgirl promised to usher in a new era of fun, upbeat pop. And in many ways, Showgirl does turn a new leaf – it’s the first album with NFL superstar (and now fiancé) Travis Kelce as her muse, and it’s her most upbeat record in years. At the same time, it’s also a sharp nosedive in quality.
The return of 1989 collaborators and producers Max Martin and Shellback seemed to guarantee a return to the bombastic pop hits that first brought her fame to unprecedented heights a decade ago. For the fans who had grown tired of her low-spirited (and sometimes bloated) acoustic pop, the promise of a concise, panache-filled album felt like a return to form. But rather than being a spectacle of colour and sound, Showgirl plays like a tired encore to her career thus far.
Showgirl is also peppered with luxury brands and places that cheapen its supposed glamour
Lyrically, this is her weakest work yet, as she blunders her way through crass sexual references, verbose outbursts, and outdated internet slang. Make no mistake, Swift is having good sex, and now she’s shouting about it from the rooftops. But while her protégée, Sabrina Carpenter, has built her image off of double entendres and cheek (an image that works remarkably well for Carpenter), when Swift does it, there’s no playfulness involved. Instead, it comes across as forceful rather than liberated. This problem is particularly noticeable on mid-album stinker, ‘Wood’. Listeners do not need to be privy to Kelce’s “New Heights of manhood” (a reference to his podcast, New Heights, as well as, well, something else), his “hard rock”, or, indeed, to the fact that Swift has been “(ah!)matised” by his “wood”. Even songs that aren’t about Kelce have far too many sex-adjacent terms: “I pay the checks first because my dick’s bigger,” she sings on ‘Father Figure’ or “it’s kind of making me wet”, she moans on ‘Actually Romantic’.
Crass innuendos aside, Showgirl is also peppered with luxury brands and places that cheapen its supposed glamour: “Balenci shades” (‘Wi$h Li$t’), a “Jag” (‘Father Figure’), and the upscale Plaza Athénée hotel in Paris (‘Elizabeth Taylor’) all make an appearance. Given how relentlessly Swift has been criticised online for her wealth since becoming a billionaire in 2023, constant references to it only reinforce claims that she’s out of touch. For an album titled The Life of a Showgirl, the flaunting of brands feels less like spectacle and more like product placement.
There are even more lyrical missteps on the album. ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ misrepresents Hamlet’s Ophelia as a damsel-in-distress who committed suicide because she failed to find the right man (enter Kelce, miraculously saving her from the same fate!). Elsewhere, ‘Actually Romantic’ is a pointlessly vindictive dig at pop star Charli xcx in response to her 2024 track, ‘Sympathy is a Knife’. But while ‘Sympathy’ (rumoured to be about Swift) puts her on an unreachable pedestal (“I couldn’t even be her if I tried”), ‘Actually Romantic’ is nothing but saccharine-coated spite: “I heard you called me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave”. Worse still, the song isn’t good enough to justify her infantile jabs.
Showgirl’s biggest pitfall isn’t that it’s bad; it’s just dull
Sonically, Max Martin and Shellback’s production does nothing to sustain the lyrics. ‘Opalite’ is a Kidz Bop track waiting to happen, the dullness of ‘Eldest Daughter’ does not justify its four-minute runtime, and ‘Honey’ is so bland it barely registers. Ironically, the album sounds its best on the acoustic versions she released digitally. When the production is stripped away, the bridge of ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ reveals full-bodied vocals and newfound dynamism. While the lyrics to ‘Ruin the Friendship’ remain clunky, the piano accompaniment fits the song better than the original’s synths.
Most, if not all, of the tracks on Showgirl sample, or at least are heavily inspired by, greater songs. ‘Wood’ seems to have been written over The Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’, ‘Actually Romantic’ heavily echoes ‘Where Is My Mind?’ by Pixies, and ‘Father Figure’ samples George Michael’s track of the same name (interestingly, it is the only one that actually credits the original songwriter).
Ultimately, however, Showgirl’s biggest pitfall isn’t that it’s bad; it’s just dull. The Sabrina Carpenter feature on the title track hinted at the fun she emphasised in her promotional interviews, but Carpenter’s talents are woefully underused. The resulting track is neither good nor bad, it’s simply… there (that is, unless you choose to listen to the lyrics, in which case, be warned: she rhymes ‘Kitty’, ‘pretty’, ‘witty’, and ‘legitly’ in the first verse alone).
The album’s saving graces are ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ and ‘Elizabeth Taylor’. While ‘Ophelia’ sounds destined for shopping centre soundtracks, it delivers fairly inoffensive and somewhat catchy pop beats. Equally, the plunge into the choruses on ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ adds a dash of the theatricality the album promised, even if the song fails to live up to the grandeur of its subject.
Despite the plummet in quality, it takes less than one complete listen of the album to gather that Swift is, if nothing else, happy. So while Showgirl might end up a blemish on her discography, it might simply signal that she’s too engrossed with other things to care about the quality of her music right now. And if her only preoccupation right now is Travis Kelce’s ‘wood’, then so be it. Whether this is the beginning of the end of Swift’s reign, only future albums will tell.
TrueStyleMusic 