Taylor Swift gives us our first taste of authoritarian pop.
2.0
Credit: Republic/Taylor Swift
The Life of a Showgirl doesn’t need burlesque razzle-dazzle when its conservatism is a calculated business move.
Taylor Swift has always been a commercialist. In her own words, she treats her albums as “mirrors”, successfully reflecting what the mainstream has wanted for two decades straight. She bets on the winning horse and, save for the handful of occasions where she has struck out on her own, her back catalogue makes for a barometer of the tastes of the time.
When the 2010s demanded pop bangers, she gave us pop bangers. When the pandemic demanded reflective and introspective music, she delivered just that. And now, in our era of engagement statistics and capital-C-‘Content’, she has followed suit by becoming increasingly self-serving. Dropping new variants of albums to prevent others from taking #1 on the charts, wheedling writing credits out of other artists, and happily shelving musical quality in pursuit of streaming numbers.
To that end, her last outing, The Tortured Poets Department, achieved extraordinary sales numbers despite being an incoherent mess. Apparently the numbers weren’t enough, however, as she’s now decided she ought to appease the conservative attitudes defining both sides of the Atlantic. If you’d posted on Tumblr back in 2015 that Swift was going to become as bitter and sexist as many of her critics were at the time, you’d have been hounded off the site.
On The Life of a Showgirl, any quasi-liberalism associated with her past image is gone, as Swift bets that conservative values sell better in 2025. Entitled and acrimonious lyrics, always punching down, are housed in safe, unchallenging songwriting. Its sexual content is written through the language of purity. Inordinate amounts of time are spent degrading other women. Despicable racial undertones are present on a number of tracks. The Las Vegas razzle-dazzle of its title is non-existent in its music; it is a laboriously boring listen.
“To watch the artist whose extensive feud with Kanye West over the word “bitch” repeatedly use it against other women is flooring.”
To compliment the conservative turn in her songwriting, we have an album rollout so commercial that it almost becomes predatory to contend with. A wet dream of wealth extraction more akin to an EA game, complete with Day Zero releases and microtransaction-esque limited editions. 29 versions* of the album have already been released, 8 of which have arrived in the time since I started writing this review. Extra features in each version prevent you from having the full experience without having collected them all. A cinematic release of the album’s YouTube visualisers came alongside it. It’s evident too that favourable coverage has been bought from the publications happy to let her paycheck outweigh their integrity.
*Correct at the time of writing. Who knows how many there’ll be by the end of the month.
Trying to come to terms with this as someone who does enjoy her earlier material has made for a wild week. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve tried listening to a Swift album on release day. Bad mistake – I spent the proceeding weekend coming to terms with my sheer disappointment in who she’s become. Long-gone is the energy and abundance of her material from a decade back. In its place comes cheap instrumentation that, on some tracks, genuinely sounds like stock music from a Yamaha keyboard.
To watch the artist whose extensive feud with Kanye West over the word “bitch” repeatedly use it against other women is flooring. But more astonishing are those aforementioned racial undertones. On ‘Eldest Daughter’, she derides African-American Vernacular English via an ‘I’m not like those other girls’ device. ‘Opalite’, meanwhile, is fixated on the skin colour of her fiancé Travis Kelce’s exes, running on imagery that contrasts black with white. This is a man notable for making his love of black women public. ‘Wi$h Li$t’, which sees everyone and their mother catching strays**, takes time to posit all-white suburban living as her “dream”, with the “whole block” looking like her and her future husbands white children.
**On the same song, she also goes after those who want to have “three dogs that they call their kids”. This is the same artist who wanted to be perceived as a ‘cat lady’ within living memory.
“My boyfriend articulated it bluntly: everything about The Life of a Showgirl is a cynical and commercial decision…”
It’s a fruitless exercise, however, to mourn what she once was. My boyfriend articulated it bluntly: everything about The Life of a Showgirl is a cynical and commercial decision, he stated. Whether or not its conservatism reflects Swift’s worldview is irrelevant, because the album itself is a bet that conservative ideas sell better than liberal ones. Swift makes a product to sell, and she’s decided that prudish, all-American safety is what sells best right now.
I, having borne witness to the many battles her diehard fans have fought over the years, posited that this was about getting all of us to drop to their level and reduce our metric for music to sales numbers. Not so, he reckons. If Showgirl gets panned but still sells, Swift will call that a success regardless.
It’s much like our present political landscape, he went on. It’s easy to critique the credibility and truthfulness of right-wing arguments, but the right don’t care. They still get votes whether you think they’re telling the truth or not. The left has taken too long to catch up and still can’t go toe-to-toe. It’s why offering rigorous critique of this album feels like a Joe.com video entitled “Ian Hislop eviscerates Nigel Farage”. Obviously, he can do that. Anyone could. But who is listening that doesn’t already agree?
We always win on our terms, but Swift’s team aren’t playing that game anymore. They’re treating music as customer relationship management, cultivating brand loyalty and creating a guaranteed customer base. Nothing would change the mind of a diehard Swiftie because all they want is ‘something’. Their relationship with her has become a content one, not an artistic one. “I’m going to use all this” I say to my boyfriend, having taken notes like I was in a lecture.
“Our great pop reflector has made the leap her fellow billionaires have, betting that appeasing the right guarantees more safety than the disorganisation of the left.”
Music as a solely money-making endeavour should always be criticised to the Nth degree. The likes of Stock Aitken Waterman, Scooter Braun and Simon Cowell have rightly been lambasted for raking profits out of chart success and, in hindsight, we usually take pity on the artists exploited along the way.
Under Scooter Braun, Swift was one such artist, and she took her fight against him public with the re-recording of her earlier albums. After she bought back her masters earlier this year, one would imagine she’d have come out the other side determined not to imitate someone she once called an “incessant, manipulative bully”. Not even slightly. Her determination to acquire as much capital as humanly possible appears dead set. One wonders how long it’ll be before she tries turning herself into a subscription service.
Were The Life of a Showgirl just 42 minutes of profit-driven tripe, we could all move on. But, at present, we will end this year with what will likely be one of its most popular albums extolling conservative values. Our great pop reflector has made the leap her fellow billionaires have, betting that appeasing the right guarantees more safety than the disorganisation of the left.
Some will claim it’s the influence of her fiancé Travis Kelce and his crowd. Others will see it as jealousy that last summer was dominated by something other than her – namely Brat, the messiness, edginess and honesty of which is Swift’s polar opposite. No wonder she thought Charli was worthy of being given a whole diss track on this thing. Why bother to create a cultural phenomenon on Brat’s scale when you can wish this silly pretender away with an ‘ABCDEFU’ style clap-back?
“We’ve reached the logical endpoint: the biggest artist on earth is a complete cynic, so self-interested that she is happy to forgo her image as a feminine icon…”
What will always astonish me though is that Swift intended this to convey what it was like to be on The Era’s Tour. Created in the downtime between its numerous shows, she claims Showgirl “comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place [I had ever been] in my life”. Either she has lost the plot, and genuinely believes that this extraordinarily dull, incongruously conservative album somehow conveys the enormous highs of performing the biggest tour in recorded history. Or, she was just so happy raking in millions in profit that it was only right that her next album should add a couple more zeroes to her balance.
My despair remains, though. In an alternative universe, she caps off The Era’s Tour with a bold double LP, packed with huge tunes that convey the enormity of the retrospective tour to end all retrospective tours. It would have solemn reflections on how much she has changed, make peace with the dramas associated with her career, and show her emerging as the artist she has always wanted to be. But we didn’t get that, and we never will, despite the fact that she is more than capable. Earnest music doesn’t make *quite* as much money, and we wouldn’t want well-intended spirit challenging our authoritarian times.
The rot began on 2017’s reputation. When confronted with an industry-scale controversy, she decided that the high road wouldn’t drive as many clicks. Instead, she stooped to what would fuel angry tweets, working to cultivate a fanbase that would never say no to her, and devising the biggest profit machine in musical history. We’ve reached the logical endpoint: the biggest artist on earth is a complete cynic, so self-interested that she is happy to forgo her image as a feminine icon to appease the very people working to reverse the progress of feminism, amongst other endeavours.
“[Showgirl is] Music made for the purpose of extracting wealth, cultureless and appeasing the national message. “
The Life of a Showgirl is our first taste of pop in the world of American authoritarianism. Music made for the purpose of extracting wealth, cultureless and appeasing the national message. Artistic intention is a side thought when you replace a fanbase with a customer base, whilst the rest of us have to watch the biggest act on earth wield pop’s powers for conservative ends in offence to the freedom and expression it should be associated with.
The greatest test to come, therefore, is whether this is a winning horse too. The authoritarians may be on top politically, but never in her career has Swift sounded more out of step with her contemporaries. The album arrives smack in the middle of an enormous Pop revival, with talent old and new releasing seminal work that is queerer and more feminine than ever. If she finds genuine success, get ready to eat up your trad slop piggies, because the labels will start pouring this puritanical shite into every chart single they can, less they dare to upset the far-right snowflakes running the ship.
Let’s hope, in that light, that she’s out of step. Given how rattled she seemed in that bizarre Zane Lowe interview earlier this week, perhaps her once infallible strength has faltered.
Score: 2.0/10
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