On October 3rd, Taylor Swift released her 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl. Receiving mixed reviews from both critics and loyal fans alike, the album has broken several major streaming records, including becoming the album with the most sales within the first week at 3.5 million. A movie also accompanied the streaming release, which grossed up around $34 million dollars domestically on the weekend of its release.
Swift has been teasing the album for months, first announcing the new release on Jason and Travis Kelce’s podcast New Heights. She described the album as having “1989 beats with Folklore lyrics,” leading many fans to believe Swift was turning over a new leaf with a 12 track album after the long, somber The Tortured Poet’s Department.
While the album was relatively upbeat compared to her more recent works, Swift is facing criticism from many for her lyricism and subject matters of her songs.
The first song on the album, “The Fate of Ophelia,” is a strong start. It introduces the album’s pop style with a fun beat and chorus. The music video, made by Swift, Mandy Moore, and Ethan Tobman, is the only music video for the album and has great cinematography and decent choreography. It stands out as one of the best songs on the album — standing heads and shoulders above other tracks — though its memorability may come from the lack of any later on in the album.
The next track, “Elizabeth Taylor,” is reminiscent of Swift’s Reputation album. Throughout the song, Swift compares herself to Elizabeth Taylor, specifically in terms of numerous heartbreaks and relationship with fame. While the comparison to 60’s icon Elizabeth Taylor is a fun one and the storytelling of the song is decent, the production is missing the same hard-hitting factor of Reputation, which was layered with different beats and vocals. In comparison, “Elizabeth Taylor” sounds kind of flat. However, it isn’t the worst song on the album.
The album begins to slow with track four, “Father Figure,” rumored to be about Swift’s relationship with Olivia Rodrigo. The wider theme of the song is Swift’s attempts to explore different power dynamics within the music industry and how she has gained power and influence. While these events are relevant to Swift’s life and could create a song similar to “The Man,” the lyrics are pretty shallow and don’t tell any cohesive story. The lack of really solid production also makes this song seem slightly mismatched as it attempts to be a song about empowerment, but has a relatively weak beat and vocals.
One of the worst songs on the album is track five, “Eldest Daughter.” Although there are several faults with this song, the main one is the lyricism. Swift writes, “Everybody’s so punk on the internet…Every joke’s just trolling and memes” at the beginning of the song. She later goes on to say, “But I’m not a bad bitch / And this isn’t savage” which does not rhyme and it just sounds off. In the later half of the song, she adds the convoluted line, “You know the last time I laughed this hard was / On the trampoline in somebody’s backyard / I must’ve been about 8 or 9, / That was the night I fell off and broke my arm / Pretty soon I learned cautious discretion” which is very tangential and scattered. These and many more lyrics from the song come off as very dated, discrediting and distracting for the other elements of the song.
Another very controversial song on the new album is “Actually Romantic.” Charli xcx, another popular musician, has had a professional relationship with Swift, performing as a guest and as an opening act on two of Swift’s tours. In June of 2024 Charli released her hit album Brat and the third track on the album, “Sympathy is a Knife,” is suspected to be about Taylor Swift. The song is not adversarial or aggressive in the slightest and describes how Charli is intimidated by working with Swift. Additionally, in a 2019 Interview with Pitchfork, Charli said her experience on Taylor Swift’s tours were like, “getting up on stage and waving to five-year-olds.” These statements clearly meant no harm to Swift but she decided to release “Actually Romantic” because of them.
While Swift is not new to diss-tracks, the quality of “Actually Romantic” is significantly worse than songs like “Look What You Made Me Do.” The lyrics are unnecessarily rude and aggressive towards Charli, saying things like, “Like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse / That’s how much it hurts.” Additionally, the music itself isn’t very good. Many musical elements of it including the use of spoken lyrics resemble an imitation of the artist Olivia Rodrigo.
Continuing the Reputation-like musical themes of “Elizabeth Taylor” and the dated lyricism of “Eldest Daughter” is the tenth and possibly most hated song on the album, “Cancelled!” The lyrics are speculated to be about Blake Lively who is in an ongoing lawsuit that Swift was implicated in. In the song, Swift conflates, “people gossiping about you in your town / negative comments you read on your Instagram,” with cancel culture. She goes on to say, “You can literally feel canceled by any sort of social backlash that you get.” This shows that Swift’s view of “cancel culture” is really just criticism and this reveals more about why the song “Cancelled!” was made. The song is also hated for its worst lyric, “Did you girl boss too close to the sun?” which has become infamous on social media for being so terrible.
The final song, “The Life of a Showgirl” is an interesting end to the album. It features popular musician Sabrina Carpenter, making it the only feature of the album. The song is nowhere near as noteworthy as it should’ve been for being the finale of the album. The lyrics summarize the themes of the album, performance and sacrifice, and outside of certain sections, the music is extremely generic. By far the best part of the song is the bridge, but much like “The Fate of Ophelia,” it may only seem good because of what surrounds it. It may even reach the category of “retail music.”
As for the movie version of the album, it similarly fell flat. The movie opens with the music video for “The Fate of Ophelia,” which was the highlight of the movie. Despite other production errors on the album, this music video was clearly very well produced and thought out, with the central plotline following Swift as she becomes a showgirl in different eras throughout history. With great choreography from Mandy Moore, the music video perfectly captures the energy of the song while still being very polished.
However, the structure of the rest of the movie doesn’t read as very well thought-out, but simply a way to make money. After the music video, the lyric videos for each track are shown, with a repeating visual to go along with it. Swift only interjects to give short explanations as to what inspired each song, oftentimes saying something slightly generic or paraphrasing the lyrics themselves without any more context. This was especially true during the second half of the albums, as the explanations became drier and drier as the songs also decreased in quality.
Every once in a while, behind the scenes footage from “The Fate of Ophelia” music video would show, which was a nice touch. It gave Swift the opportunity to show her personality and cute moments between her and the staff, which was a nice break from the music. The movie ended by showing the music video for a second time, which was nice because you could connect it to the behind the scenes details, but it also felt kind of low effort.
The overarching issue with the movie was its transparency at being a cash grab. While there were a few fun moments like the music video and behind the scenes footage, they weren’t nearly enough to make the movie worthwhile. You could quite literally sit at home and play the lyric videos on your computer and have the same viewing experience. Although this probably was not Swift’s intention, the movie made us dislike the album more. If you’re listening at home, it’s possible to focus on something else, only using the album as background music. However, when you’re at the theater, there is nothing else to focus on besides what is in front of your face (in this case, that’s the lyrics “I like [my friends] cloaked in Gucci and scandal”) with nothing to distract you from it.
Overall, the production of the album and the movie has a few great moments, but mostly poor ones. This may be one of the reasons why opinions on the album are so polarized. The diehard Taylor Swift fans listening to the album may only be focusing on the diamonds in the rough while those going in with a neutral or negative view of Swift see the album for its full picture; an attempt from Swift to recreate the lighting in a bottle that was her older albums.
Another broader problem is that Swift’s music just isn’t relatable anymore. What makes Swift such a prolific artist is her ability to reinvent herself and yet make music many can relate to: from her high school days in Debut to her maturity and growth in albums like Folklore and Evermore. However, an album focused on how it isn’t so glamorous to be famous just reads as off-putting coming from one of the most successful artists in the world, worth two billion dollars. These combined factors come together to create a subpar listening and viewing experience that left us pretty disappointed.
Swifites, please don’t come for us.