The packages arrived square and thin and carefully wrapped on Saturday afternoon. There were three of them, but only one was mine. If I could have rejected my package, sent it back from whence it came and been refunded my $34 plus shipping, I would have. I didn’t want it anymore. The two other identical packages belonged to my neighbors, who didn’t seem to want theirs either, because they sat outside all weekend. Inside was the vinyl record for Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, an album that was released on Friday, but which we had all ordered on her website weeks before.
Eventually I took my package inside, but I haven't opened it. I don't need to, because I have already listened to the album on streaming, and I know that it's not good. I had high hopes for this album, because Swift was finally returning to the producers she used for 1989 and Reputation. I've listened to her music since we were both in high school, and my body remembers the anticipation it felt before some of her better albums, and the ecstasy of having that anticipation rewarded with an LP full of bangers. But despite Swift's meteoric rise in the last five years, the quality of her work has stagnated. No combination of fanfare and publicity blitz and headlines and awards can outweigh an album that you don't want to put on repeat. "Only as hot as your last hit, baby," Swift sings on this album. Unfortunately for her, that phrase feels like a curse.
Despite my hopes, The Life of a Showgirl is the weakest and least interesting album Swift has ever made. It has no heart, no purpose, no emotional core. And it is transparently clear why that is: because Swift clearly cared more about producing something—anything—that could be sold for profit than about making an album worth buying. It's not an album. It's a product for sale, and it sounds like one.
Taylor Swift is a good business person. Her father worked in finance, and she has always understood how to make money as an artist. In her 2016 Vogue interview, when asked what advice she has for young artists, Swift advised them to get a good lawyer. She boycotted Spotify when their rates weren’t good enough for her. She has long-standing advertising gigs with Capital One and Diet Coke. When someone else stood to make profit off her masters, she re-recorded all of the albums and re-sold them to fans. The Eras Tour is estimated to have grossed more than $2 billion. Swift is unbelievably good at making money off music in an era where almost no one is good at that.
As it has been for her past few releases, Swift's business acumen has been on display in full force for the promotion for The Life of a Showgirl. Upon announcing the album, Swift put up a vinyl for pre-order on her site, and then another, and then another. Before the album was even released, she had promoted and sold on her site eight exclusive vinyl variants in different colors with different names ("Sweat And Vanilla Perfume Edition," "Baby, That’s Show Business Edition," etc.), and eight CDs, and one sweater which comes with a CD. The vinyls cost $34. The CDs cost $20. The sweater/CD costs $70. And one of those was a Target exclusive edition! Don’t forget Target! The marketing scheme for each of these releases (which came one after another) was scarcity. They will sell out! You will never have another opportunity! Hurry! Show your love and devotion!
And it worked. Billboard estimated that on the first day of release, from all of these pre-orders, Swift sold 2.7 million copies of this album in physical and digital editions. When she announced this album on the New Heights podcast, she promised that this album wouldn't have any bonus tracks. Historically, Swift has sold her fans the album, and then asked them to buy it again to access extra songs. The Life of a Showgirl, she promised, was fully complete. But then on Saturday night, another countdown appeared on her website, and at the end of it, she announced … four additional CDs of the same album that fans could buy. These versions cost $7.99 apiece and each includes two "exclusive" acoustic versions of songs on the album. That means that in addition to the songs on the album, Swift also recorded eight acoustic versions, but you can only hear them if you purchase each of the four CDs. She didn't lie, technically. There are no new songs on these CDs—just an opportunity for her to make even more money.
And on top of all of this, at the 11th hour before release, Swift announced a “movie.” In theaters across the country this weekend, tickets were sold to an event called The Official Release Party of a Showgirl. The thing people are paying to watch in theaters is not a movie, really. It is a single music video for the lead song of the album, “The Fate of Ophelia” (three minutes and 46 seconds), followed by 85 minutes of Swift providing commentary on the other songs, and lyric videos for those songs. The experience ends by playing the video for “The Fate of Ophelia” again, which, as Heather Schwedel wrote for Slate, “underscores that you really did just pay $12 (plus convenience fees) to watch one short video.” According to Deadline, the gross for a weekend of ticket sales was about $33 million.
Almost all of these purchases were made by fans in anticipation of what the album might be. But now that the album is bad, people are justifiably mad. A billionaire asking her fans to buy several editions of the same exact mediocre album is a little hard to stomach.
All of this greed might be more palatable if the album were good, but it isn’t. It is worth noting that Beyoncé released Lemonade, an album with an accompanying movie that was as beautiful and well-directed and inspired as the album itself, at about the same age. But The Life of a Showgirl isn’t beautiful or smart, or even that catchy. The album is riddled with lazy writing and cliches. “Life is a song, it ends when it ends,” she sings on “Opalite.” “I can make deals with the devil because my dick's bigger,” she sings on “Father Figure.” “His love was the key that opened my thighs,” she sings on “Wood,” which is a song about Travis Kelce’s dick, set over what sounds like a Jackson 5 sample.
Worse is the album’s over-reliance on memes and internet trends. It is very hard to write songs or essays or books about the internet—anything that can’t be composed and published in less than two days—without sounding outdated, because the internet moves at a speed that is so rapid that by the time you’ve captured what was happening, no one's talking about it anymore. What makes a person sound old isn’t using slang; it’s arriving to the slang late, which Swift does repeatedly here. “Keep it one hundred on the land, the sea, the sky,” she sings on “The Fate of Ophelia.” “Girlboss too close to the sun,” she sings on “CANCELLED!” “They gave her the keys to this city / Then they said she didn't do it legitly,” she sings on “The Life of a Showgirl.” Perhaps most egregious is the song titled “Eldest Daughter”—referencing the infinite memes about how hard and terrible it is to be an eldest daughter—where she sings, “Every eldest daughter / Was the first lamb to the slaughter / So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.” This not only uses a cliche, but doesn’t make any damn sense. As an eldest daughter myself, grow up!
Because Swift was on a massive media tour this weekend, I thought maybe her explanations would salvage some of this sloppy, lazy writing. Instead, her appearances made already bad lyrics worse. In a radio interview, she said that her favorite piece of writing in the album is the line “I pay the check before it kisses the mahogany grain” from “Father Figure.” She then goes on to explain that this is her favorite because, “What do those words mean? Oh. Somebody got the bill before it hit the table, but instead you say ‘kisses the mahogany grain.’” Using words that sound nice together, that make a simple sentence slightly more complicated, is not what makes writing good. Swift, in theory, knew this at some point in the past, because the writing on albums like Folklore and Evermore do not suffer from this problem.
A personal gripe I have is that the first song on the album (which seems like it’s meant to be the lead single), “The Fate of Ophelia,” does not seem to have any understanding of Hamlet. Swift admitted in a BBC radio interview with Greg James that she “didn’t really need to reread [Hamlet]. I wanted to sprinkle some references in the bridge, so like the the bridge references kind of some paraphrasing of some lines from Hamlet, so I did like do a little brushup. But I just love the idea that like, ‘You saved me from love driving me mad,’ right? ’Cause that’s what happened to Ophelia. Spoiler alert.”
That is, in fact, not what happened to Ophelia. Ophelia in Hamlet did not kill herself because she wasn't dating an NFL player. Ophelia commits suicide because she has no agency in her own life, because she is being controlled by the men around her. The bridge Swift is referring to in that song is “'Tis locked inside my memory / And only you possess the key / No longer drowning and deceived / All because you came for me.” As far as I can tell, the only Shakespeare reference here is the word "drowning." It's careless to write like this. And good work requires care. If you are going to write a song “about Ophelia” titled “The Fate of Ophelia,” the least you could do is re-read a play which would take you three hours.
All of this is significantly worse from a writing perspective than Swift’s first two albums, which she wrote as a high-schooler. Her fans are trying to cover for this: Pure pop albums don’t have to have good lyrics! They can just be sounds! I have seen online this weekend infinite variations of the idea that if you don’t listen to the words, the songs are bops. First off, no they aren’t. I cannot remember the melody to any of these songs despite listening to the album many times to write this article. But the problem is that Swift has spent so much of her career demanding to be taken seriously as more than a pop star, because she specifically is a songwriter. "I wouldn’t be a singer if I weren’t a songwriter. I have no interest in singing someone else’s words," she told Billboard in 2014. And if we judge The Life of a Showgirl by the standard of songwriting prowess she herself has demanded we view her through, it is an undeniable flop.
How does someone who wrote a line like “You call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest,” or “I should’ve kept every grocery store receipt / Because every scrap of you would be taken from me,” or “Take the words for what they are / A dwindling, mercurial high / A drug that only worked / The first few hundred times” end up writing, “Forgive me, it sounds cocky / He ah-matized me and opened my eyes / Redwood tree, it ain't hard to see / His love was the key that opened my thighs.”
Why is this such a lyrical disaster? Why doesn’t it show any of the intrigue or the artistry she’s managed to display in the past? Is it because Jack Antonoff was the secret sauce the whole time? Is it because she’s so dickmatized (“ah-matized,” as she self-censors it on “Wood”) by Travis Kelce that she forgot how to write? Is it because she’s happier now and she can only write when depressed? Is it because her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn had more of a hand in the writing of Folklore and Evermore than we thought? Is it because Aaron Dessner wasn’t involved?
All of these theories are swirling around Swift fans on TikTok and Twitter, and in person. I think the answer is simpler: Greed will always destroy art, and Swift’s desire for profit—her need to sell product when she already has far more money than any one person could possibly require—has destroyed her ability to create anything of value. “Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man,” Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot. That’s what art becomes when its primary goal is to make money: unoriginal, boring, palatable.
To create something, anything, good, takes time and desire. “A project that takes five years will accumulate those years’ inventions and richnesses. Much of those years’ reading will feed the work,” Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life. Good creative work draws on the well of your experience, on everything that you consumed and felt and saw over a period of time. If you dip into the well constantly without giving it time to refill, you end up with nothing but pieces of mud, nothing that will satiate a thirst for art.
Swift hasn’t given herself time to write anything good in years. Since October 2022, Swift has released three full-length albums: Midnights, The Tortured Poets Department, and now Life of a Showgirl. Each of them was weaker than the last. In addition, she has also re-recorded four of her previous albums and released them (with new bonus tracks) as Taylor’s Version editions. During that same time period, she also spent 18 months on the road performing 149 shows on the Eras Tour.
“The language of creativity has been subsumed by capitalism,” Oli Mould wrote in his book Against Creativity. “Being creative today means seeing the world around you as a resource to fuel your inner entrepreneur.” Art is no longer Swift’s priority, if it ever was. We don’t have to approach and criticize this album as art, because it isn’t art. The Life of a Showgirl is made of Shein quality rip-offs of other people’s songs that are constructed shoddily and sold in ginormous quantities. Art takes time and care. This is profit. It’s content.
There is very rarely money in trying to make something that matters to you. But there is a lot of money in making things that are just good enough to get people to buy them. That's how we end up with Marvel movies, infinite remakes, one thousand books about fucking vampires, and bad paintings reselling for millions of dollars. If you're willing to compromise everything—to have no public morals or beliefs, to make your work palatable to everyone—there is so, so much money to be made. Of course, that compromise is going to be the version of art that corporations want made. An artist is supposed to fight against that, to try to make something good even if it doesn't make them a billion dollars. Greed will always destroy good work, because money and art have drastically different priorities. On The Life of a Showgirl, it's undeniable which path Taylor Swift has decided to value more.
