Premature Evaluation: Taylor Swift The Life Of A Showgirl

Here's the best advice I can give you: Don't worry about Taylor Swift's conduct. You are not her mom, and you are not her therapist. If she wants to empty both barrels into another pop star, that does not affect you, even if it's a pop star that you like. It's a given that Taylor Swift's personal life and her lyrics are all tangled up with one another in various messy and potentially uncomfortable ways. That's been the case since the very beginning. The Taylor Swift experience is inherently parasocial to one degree or another. You generally know who she's singing about, and she knows that you know. But that doesn't mean you have to approve of her decisions there. Swift is the biggest pop star in generations, so people judge her music based on their mixed feelings about her imaginary private life, not based on whether or not she's making great pop music. Well, she's making pop music. Don't be weird about it. I'll try to follow my own advice in this review. No promises.

Anyway, Taylor Swift does not want to work it out on the remix. Last year, Charli XCX released "Sympathy Is A Knife," a great song about her own neuroses with a few lines that sure seemed to be about Taylor Swift. She sang that this one girl taps her insecurities, that she hopes this girl breaks up with her boyfriend's bandmate real soon, that she couldn't be this girl if she tried. It was a stark, knowing, vulnerable display of jealousy and resentment, and it was more about Charli than about Swift. Charli sang something similar about Lorde, and then Charli and Lorde joined forces for a brilliant, moving remix. People wondered whether Swift would appear on the "Sympathy Is A Knife" remix, but no. Instead, Charli's guest was Ariana Grande, a Swift peer who was discovered and managed by Swift's archenemy Scooter Braun. If Taylor Swift really needed to respond to Charli XCX, she could've come back with something similarly thoughtful. She could've followed Charli's lead and investigated her own complicated feelings about her place in the world. That is not what Taylor Swift did. Swift got bratty instead.

The day before Taylor Swift released her new album The Life Of A Showgirl, her song "Actually Romantic" leaked online -- first the lyrics, then the track itself. It's a crunchy, efficient piece of new wave guitar-pop, and it sounds a bit like the Cars, or maybe Weezer. The track's structure and instrumentation veer so far into Olivia Rodrigo territory that I wondered if maybe it was a diss track aimed at her, not Charli XCX. But no, I'm pretty sure this song is for Charli. It is immature as fuck: "I heard you call me Boring Barbie when the coke's got you brave/ High-fived my ex and then you said you're glad he ghosted me." But Swift isn't mad. Don't put in the newspaper that she's mad. She thinks it's so sweet that you think about her all the time, that your boyfriend is always wondering why you talk about her, that you're obsessed with her. On the song's bridge, Swift pretends to be turned on. When the feedback kicks in, she coos, "It's kind of making me wet." It's textbook bully behavior. Swift went Mean Girls on the girl who sang "Mean Girls."

At least in my corner of the internet, people got mad. We love Charli XCX! We love "Sympathy Is A Knife"! We do not think that song was an invitation for Taylor Swift to talk shit! Taylor Swift is punching down! And hey, you know who else was a real bitch to Taylor Swift? Donald Trump was a bitch to Taylor Swift! What, she doesn't have that energy for him? She must love Donald Trump. That's the shit I've been seeing online. Stop it! Don't do that! It's stupid! Do you really want to hear Taylor Swift singing a song of bitchy Trump put-downs? No. You don't. That would be bad. It would be clumsy and cringey and obnoxious, and it would play right into the stupid endless tedious culture war that we've all been fighting for a decade, or maybe for our entire lives. And anyway, if your big takeaway from the year's biggest pop record is that Taylor Swift should be nicer to Charli XCX, then you don't know The Life Of A Showgirl, babe.

Taylor Swift presents as a normal human being. She's good at that. Millions of people who have never met Swift think of her as if she's their friend. That's one of the reasons that she's as popular as she is. But you don't achieve her level of culture-strangling popularity unless you're a giant freak. Everyone who has ever come close to her level of fame is a giant freak. If you step back and look at Swift's long career -- the tornadoes of pithy disgust directed at her perceived adversaries, the attachment to seismic romantic gestures, the addiction to drama -- then you might find yourself looking at someone who could be quite exhausting if she were part of your personal life. Well, good news! She's not! You don't know her! Furthermore, Swift is an all-time master at translating those possibly-exhausting tendencies into great songs. I love "Sympathy Is A Knife," and I don't think "Actually Romantic" is a better song than that. I do, however, think "Actually Romantic" is a really good song. It's one of many on The Life Of A Showgirl.

Every Taylor Swift album feels like a reaction to the previous one, which is one of the reasons that her various twists and turns have been so much fun to follow. Last year, Swift released The Tortured Poets Department, a sprawling diary-dump that lasted forever and seemed to have no off-switch. That album has tracks, but it gave the sense that Swift had lost all ability to edit herself. Now, she's zagged the other way, reconnecting with Swedish pop alchemists Max Martin and Shellback to make a tight, focused record of imperial pop. That's the elevator pitch, anyway, and it's mostly true. But even when she's working with those hook-warlocks again, Swift stays away from the off-switch. She makes a lot of wild, indulgent decisions on The Life Of A Showgirl. Even more than on Reputation, the last album that Swift recorded with the assistance of Martin and Shellback, the too-muchness is simply part of the package.

The Life Of A Showgirl is not an album about being mad at Charli XCX. It's an album about a lot of freaky shit. Consider: The song before "Actually Romantic" is "Ruin The Friendship," a smooth and synthy yacht-funk ode to a mutual crush who Swift apparently knew back in her fleeting normal-school-kid days. She never kissed this kid because she didn't want to ruin the friendship, and now that kid is dead, and all she can do is regret. Two songs after "Actually Romantic" is a track that evokes the intro from the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back." That one is clearly and explicitly about Travis Kelce's dick. It's called "Wood." These swings in subject matter are wild, but they're no more or less unhinged than what Swift does on every record. She's just very, very good at translating that mania into pop songs. And on The Life Of A Showgirl, she brings a whole lot of focus and energy to those pop songs. The sentiments haven't changed, but she's sharpened and polished the presentation. She's editing herself again.

This thing has hooks, baby! Hooks stacked on top of hooks! Hooks nestled inside hooks! Hooks that don't even register as hooks until you realize that they're still stuck in your head hours later! Every track is an impeccably designed palace entirely built out of ear-candy. The bridges, the key changes, the moments when all the instruments drop away and Swift's voice gets quiet -- they all arrive just when they should. The uptempo tracks are fun. The ballads are pretty, and they're also fun in their way. It's not a grand-statement album in any sense. Swift is messing around with the same sonic ideas and structures that she used on 1989 and Reputation. But she's an expert at deploying those sonic ideas and structures, and so are her collaborators. The mix is full of tiny production touches that brighten and sharpen all the melodies, and all the melodies are huge. But even when she's in pop-anthem mode, Swift has a lyrical sensibility that can be a bit much.

Way back in 2008, Taylor Swift had the utterly ridiculous idea to sing about Romeo and Juliet, except they don't die at the end. They get married, and everyone is happy. That song misses the entire point of Shakespearean tragedy, but that song is "Love Story," and it fucking rules. On the Life Of A Showgirl opener "The Fate Of Ophelia," Swift does something similar. She doesn't change what happened in Hamlet. Ophelia still loses her mind and drowns herself. There but for the grace of Travis Kelce, apparently, goes Taylor Swift. She sings that she didn't go out like Ophelia because you saved her, and that's why she's ready to "pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes." If you haven't yet made your peace with that kind of writerly excess, then "The Fate Of Ophelia" won't convince you. Neither will anything else on The Life Of A Showgirl.

Just like Reputation, The Life Of A Showgirl is mostly about being in love. "Elizabeth Taylor," with its cranked-up chorus and its overstated lines like "be my NY when Hollywood hates me," could almost be a lost track from the Reputation sessions. "Eldest Daughter" is a dazed piano ballad that starts off with a Swift complaining that "everybody's so punk on the internet" and includes one of the most Taylor Swift lines ever written: "I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness/ I've been dying just from trying to seem cool." But that's all a buildup to Swift singing about being comfortable with this guy, finding joy and solace in vulnerability. On "Wi$h Li$t," Swift sings about all the money fame and prestige and acclaim that other people want, but she doesn't, presumably because she already has it. Instead, she finds herself dreaming about a driveway with a basketball hoop, crowing that she's found "a best friend who I think is hot." "Honey," one of the stickiest earworms on an album full of them, is Swift marveling that it finally feels nice, not gross or manipulative or passive-aggressive, when someone calls her pet names.

We've heard Taylor Swift sing domestic-bliss songs before, and we'll probably hear it again. She brings the same mania to those songs that she does to the ones about heartbreaks and resentments and regrets. She can wring drama out of any situation, any stage of life, even if the thing that she captures is inherently undramatic. On The Life Of A Showgirl, she achieves that drama through sheer sparkle, which is what you get when you enlist Max Martin and Shellback for a whole album. Swift recorded The Life Of A Showgirl with those two guys in Stockholm during Eras Tour off-days, and they kept their creative circle extremely small. Shellback and Martin played most of the album's instruments, sometimes bringing in various Swedish orchestral musicians to flesh things out. The three of them wrote every song together, without help. Sabrina Carpenter sounds fantastic on the title track, and she radiates presence all over the place, but she didn't have anything to do with writing the song. The only other writer who gets any credit at all is the late George Michael, thanks to the way "Father Figure" riffs on his classic of the same name.

"Father Figure" is a weird one. It doesn't even use that much of the George Michael song; other allusions on the album are just as obvious. For "Father Figure," Swift takes on the persona of a lecherous, exploitative rich person who takes advantage of someone younger: "I'll be your father figure/ I drink that brown liquor/ I can make deals with the devil because my dick's bigger." "CANCELLED!" seems to be about remaining friends with Blake Lively even when she's in a weird, gossipy legal situation: "Good thing I like my friends cancelled! I like 'em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal!" That's another one that could've easily been on Reputation. I can't relate to any of that shit! It couldn't possibly have less bearing on my life! But banger is a banger. "CANCELLED!" overindulges in Swift's stagey upper-register delivery and in the pulsing, atmospheric production that I don't think fits her very well, but I keep singing that chorus to myself. "Father Figure" does beautiful things with glimmer-twinkle keyboards and stacked harmonies. They're two of the weakest and most alienating songs on The Life Of A Showgirl, and they're still incredibly effective pieces of pop music. Even Taylor Swift's worst ideas have a way of working out.

It's not fair, is it? There's no bigger Taylor Swift fan than Taylor Swift. She's all caught up in the twists and turns of her own public life, to the point where they blot out anything else happening in the world. She'll write from other people's perspectives sometimes, but even then, she's really writing about herself. She flexes her own vocabulary like the most obnoxious student in your AP English class. And it all works. Anytime she seems like she's about to fall off, she miraculously regains her balance. She won't go away, and she'll always be exponentially bigger than your favorite. She might even cruelly put your favorite back in her place when your favoritehas finally reached her career apex. Swift portrayed herself as an underdog for a long time, but she's the biggest overdog we've seen in decades. She is an unstoppable force. It's hard to root for an unstoppable force.

But Taylor Swift is an unstoppable force for a reason. She knows how to do this shit. The songs on The Life Of A Showgirl are mean little pleasure-machines, energetic displays of mathematical force. The record is full of grand-scale endorphin-rush moments, choruses that sound great now and will sound even better when she's got a stadium full of people screaming back at her. There is nobody else on this planet who can write and deliver a bridge like Taylor Swift. You just have to marvel at it. The Life Of A Showgirl isn't a five-star masterpiece, and it's not the best Taylor Swift album, but it's really fucking good. Look, I have never been in the market for a song about Travis Kelce's dick, and I'm especially disinclined to like a song like that in the week after the Chiefs ripped out the Ravens' spinal column and held it up in the air like the alpha zombie in 28 Years Later. But that song goes. The whole album goes. Swift can be petty and self-involved and overexposed and so much bigger than everyone else that it feels like bootlicking to continue heaping praise on her, but she keeps making them hits. She's still just unfathomably good at this pop-star thing! Sorry!

Go with it. I mean it. Let it happen. Taylor Swift backlash is a powerful force. It's easy to get swept away in it. But if you convince yourself that The Life Of A Showgirl is basic-bitch music for the mindless masses, then you are cheating yourself out of some serious pleasure. It's like rooting against Michael Jordan in 1998. You're witnessing greatness in action, an absolutely historic run that refuses to end. You should let yourself appreciate it. That's my other best advice. Respect motherfucking craft when you hear it.

Taylor Swift - The Life Of A Showgirl [Sweat & Vanilla Perfume Orange Glitter Vinyl]

36.98

Amazon

The Life Of A Showgirl is out now on Republic.