From getting engaged to Travis Kelce to releasing a brand new album, Taylor Swift has been in the limelight even more than usual in the past few months.
Swift announced her new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” on her fiance’s Podcast – “New Heights,” on Aug. 13, and then officially released her album on Oct. 3.
Along with this announcement, she posted the album cover and the track titles on her Instagram. Despite writing this album during the European leg of The Era’s Tour, Swift explained that it “isn’t really about what happened to her [me] on stage. It’s about what she [I] was going through offstage.”
Themes of love, lust, abandoning enemies and fame emerge throughout this upbeat pop album.
Upon first listening to the album, I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, when I opened social media, I found that there were many mixed opinions on it. While her albums generally have mixed opinions from the public at first, fans are pretty consistent in liking her albums from the beginning. This one, however, seemed to have some huge Taylor Swift fans questioning whether they liked it.
Personally, I have been a fan of Taylor Swift since 2020, right before she released her “Folklore” Album. Since then, she has been my most listened to artist on Spotify every single year. I have seen her style change from more lyrical and melancholy albums like “Evermore” and “Folklore,” to an album that played with a more traditional pop music style, “Midnights,” and eventually back to another poetic and soulful album, “The Tortured Poets Department.”
This new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” was produced by Max Martin and Shellback who also helped Swift produce some of her catchiest songs from her “Red” and “1989” albums, including “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “Shake it Off.” This is the first album in a while that Jack Antonoff did not help Swift produce. He was known for helping Swift produce some of her more soulful albums, like “Evermore,” “Folklore,” and “The Tortured Poets Department.”
While I went in knowing the album cover, the names of the tracks on the album and the shift in producers, the rest of the album was a complete surprise to me.
When the clock struck midnight on Oct. 3, people across the country refreshed their Spotify and Apple Music pages, and track one, “The Fate of Ophelia,” filled their ears.
“The Fate of Ophelia,” flips the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on its head, and rewrites a story in which Ophelia is saved. The song’s catchy and upbeat lyrics make it fun to dance to, and the hidden meaning behind it makes it all the more unique.
Track two, “Elizabeth Taylor,” also has a special story behind it. “Elizabeth Taylor” was a famous actress, and she became the world’s highest paid movie star in the 1960s. In addition to her fame in show business, Elizabeth Taylor was known for her beauty, her seven husbands, and her “violet eyes.” She also had an immensely successful perfume line. In this song, Swift pays tribute to Elizabeth Taylor. She also compares parts of her life to Elizabeth Taylor, like how they both often made headlines for the men they dated. In including lyrics like “cry my eyes violet” and “white diamonds” (the name of one of Elizabeth Taylor’s best selling perfumes), Swift reveals her talent at incorporating true and meaningful lyrics.
Having listened to the first two songs from this album, I was excited at the catchy and upbeat vibe of “The Life of a Showgirl.” More than this, the songs had deeper meanings, illustrating that Swift’s lyrics aren’t as surface level as some people may often think.
The next song in the album, “Opalite,” originally had me smiling and jumping up and down, with fun and memorable lyrics. This song seems to be about Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce, as not only is his birthstone an opal, but he mentions on his podcast that this is his favorite song on the album.
Despite having a good beat and seeming playful and happy, this song did receive some controversy. Creators on social media began to dissect the lyrics of not only this song, but also of others on this album. These critics began to acknowledge that some of Swift’s lyrics appeared to have anti-black themes. Specifically, in this song, “Opalite,” Swift sings “Sleepless in the onyx night, but now the sky is opalite.” Critics think that this may be referring to the black women that Kelce dated in the past like Kayla Nicole, implying that they are “the onyx night” and swift is the “opalite.” While not all of the songs on this album hint at anti-black themes, this song and some of the others do and it is important to acknowledge how this was received in order to hold Swift accountable.
“Father Figure,” the next song in the album, pays homage to another celebrity, George Michael, who released his song “Father Figure,” in 1987. George Michael even received writing credit for this song. Swift’s “Father Figure” comments on power dynamics and some fans speculate that it is about Swift’s former mentor, Big Machines Record CEO Scott Borchetta.
While the first few songs are mostly just catchy pop songs, and most of them aren’t controversial, aside from “Opalite,” this next song had myself and other fans questioning her lyrics more.
“Eldest Daughter,” contains lyrics that differ strongly from Swift’s other albums. At first, I didn’t mind these lyrics, but upon discussing them with other people, and listening to this song more, I find these lyrics take away from the strong potential of this song, rendering it cringe.
I remember first hearing the start of this song and feeling a little shocked. The song begins with “everybody’s so punk on the internet, everyone’s unbothered til they’re not, every joke’s just trolling and memes.” The Gen Z language in these lyrics is offputting, especially when it is compared to the lyrical beauty of Swift’s “Folklore” and “Evermore” albums.
In addition to the cringe lyrics on “Eldest Daughter,” a lot of people were upset with part of the chorus of this song: “I’m not a bad b*h and this isn’t savage.” This line resembles the lyrics of a lot of other black artists like Meghan Thee Stallion’s “Savage.” In adopting similar lyrics to black artists, Swift can be seen as taking from a culture that isn’t hers. While we can’t know whether the anti-black sentiments in Swift’s lyrics are intentional, as one journalist notes, “even unintentional microaggressions carry weight when you’re one of the most influential women in the world.”
The next song, however, isn’t as controversial, and songs like this one work to make up for the few, but still present, poorly written songs in the album. “Ruin the Friendship,” is a lighthearted song about telling a crush that you want to be more than friends. While containing a lighthearted message, however, this song may have been inspired by a tragedy; it is rumored to be about Swift’s high school crush, who passed away in 2010.
“Actually Romantic,” created a stir of speculation among fans, who thought this song was a diss track about pop singer Charlie XCX. Charlie XCX’s song “Sympathy is a Knife” was at first believed to be a diss track about Swift, so Swift fans thought this was Swift getting back at her. Neither artist said that these songs were about the other one, however, so this remains but a supposition. Personally, I like this song for what it is, which is, as Swift herself says, “a love letter to someone who hates you.” It’s about telling this person that the fact that they spent so much time hating you, and thinking about you so much, is actually kind of romantic. After all, you’re always on their mind.
This is followed by “Wi$h L$st,” a great song for the Holidays about people wanting all sorts of materialistic things, when you just want to be with someone. The last couple of lyrics of the chorus emphasize this, with the lines, “Boss up, settle down, got a wish(Wish) list(List)/ I just want you.” While I enjoyed this song, I felt like it belonged in more of a Christmas album, than in an album titled “The Life of a Showgirl.”
Despite most of the album being solid up until this point, this next song made the album lose some points with me. “Wood,” deviated from Swift’s generally more innocent songs. Lyrics like “redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see/ His love was the key that opened my thighs,” made this song more sexually explicit. Other songs like “Dress” from her “Reputation” album also have sexual lyrics, but this one, in having a more telling sensual name, made it differ from most of Swift’s discography. It made me miss her more hopeless romantic songs like “Fifteen” from her “Fearless” album.
The next track also lowers the ranking of this album for me. “Cancelled,” which I originally loved, and still enjoy listening to because of its catchiness, is, like “Eldest Daughter,” cringeworthy at times. Specifically, the Gen z-ified lyric “did you girl-boss too close to the sun?” and the line about how Swift likes her friends “cloaked in Gucci and in scandal,” have me missing the more lyrical songs of some of Taylor’s previous albums. I was hoping for this song to be more like Swift’s other screamable angry songs like “Mean” and “Better Than Revenge,” but these lyrics, as well as some of the other lyrics in this song, took away from that.
The second to last track on the album, “Honey,” is said to be about Swift’s view on “pet names” switching from feeling condescending to feeling sweet. Personally, I enjoy this song and find it to be playful and endearing.
The final song of the album, and the title track, “The Life of a Showgirl (feat. Sabrina Carpenter),” is about how being famous isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I think this is an awesome final track and is cohesive with the album’s other catchy pop songs. Sabrina’s voice and vibe add to the lively lyrics, and have me singing the song aloud. The final lyrics of this song, “Give it up for the band/ And the dancers/ And of course, Sabrina/ I love you, Taylor/ That’s our show/ We Love you so much/ Goodnight!” makes the album feel like a show itself.
Overall, while I grappled with some of the cringier lyrics on this album, and find the anti-black sentiments hard to ignore, I enjoyed a lot of the less controversial songs, and I shuffle the album multiple times throughout the day, even now (though I do skip a few songs). While it’s definitely controversial, with several mixed reviews, I mostly enjoyed it. However, if I were to rank Taylor’s albums, this one would probably land near the lower end.
