Taylor Swift’s next album was always going to be the biggest one of the year.
After officially announcing The Life of a Showgirl, Swifties everywhere started their sleuthing. There were hints to decode and connections to be drawn between her earlier work and recent engagement to her famous football player fiancé (Travis Kelce, for the two folks on the planet who might’ve missed it).
Release day arrived, and the album went on to crush the U.S. opening-day release record for sales. With it, Swift made an accompanying 85-minute movie that’s half-music video, half behind-the-scenes exposé slyly titled, The Official Release Party of a Showgirl.
The haunting image of a showgirl looms large over this album. As does William Shakespeare. And football. Same with high school love, a harsh diss track, and the fleeting feeling of finding happily ever after.
Swift does not really explore new musical paths or reinvent her image as she’s done with past albums. Rather, The Life of a Showgirl is a connective piece between who she used to be, who she is now and who she’s always been: an entertainer.
This musical pageant makes good on the promise Swift’s hinted at in previous work. If she ever did find true love, her audience would know. Now, she has seemingly found it in the most unlikely of places—with a football player who admits he doesn’t really know how to read.
Yet in unearthing her love, Swift’s passion fully welcomes the mature and troubling adult themes she has previously danced around.
In tempering her characteristic poetic angst, Swift’s attention shifts to revealing admissions of what romance looks like now that she’s found “the one.” This largely gives way to crude descriptions of how the two lovers carry out their romance behind closed doors.
Swift’s romantic worldview has fully devolved into the explicit and profane, and in its reflection it’s easy to see what should evolve out of true love is the exact opposite.
As commercial success gave way to cultural dominance, Taylor Swift’s career couldn’t help but veer towards the core message within The Life of a Showgirl.
And to Swift that message is “attention is affection.”
Both attention and affection are noble ingredients of healthy relationships on their own. To her credit, Swift sprinkles brief glimpses of wholesome relationships in the vein of earlier songs focused on teen love, heartbreak and love again.
“Opalite” sees Swift realize that, much like the transparent gem used in this song’s title, her relationships can endure pressure to produce beauty. She sings, “This life will beat you up/This is just a temporary speed bump/But failure brings you freedom/And I can bring you love.”
Through “The Fate of Ophelia,” Swift draws comparisons between herself and the ill-fated lover featured in the classic drama Hamlet. (Shakespeare fans be warned. Swift takes her fair share of liberties with Ophelia’s characterization). She worries that she might “have drowned in the melancholy/I swore loyalty to me, myself, and I …” But Swift was eventually saved from Ophelia’s fate because that was all “Right before you lit up my sky.”
On “Honey,” Swift revitalizes what once felt like a passive-aggressive and condescending phrase (Oh, honey) into a symbol of redemption. She sings, “But you touch my face/Redefine all those blues/When you say/You can call me ‘Honey’ if you want.” The song is a quiet breath of true adoration and solace amidst an album otherwise filled with vitriol.
Unfortunately, in an attempt to gather attention, Showgirl’s central message contains little worth emulating beyond these moments.
In fashioning herself as a showgirl, Swift selected a fitting symbol to pair with her glaring desire to entertain audiences. On this uncharacteristically brisk 12-song album, Swift unabashedly displays explicit relational details and sexually charged language.
Multiple albums in a row have confirmed that Swift is long past casual swearing. Profanity is as much part of the main message as it is the subtext in her music.
With The Life of a Showgirl, Swift also continues a common trend of releasing “clean” versions of her music alongside the “normal” album (and it’s that “clean” album that was featured in Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl). It’s not a stretch to say the irony here is approaching Shakespearean levels.
In this album, the profanity totals tally up to 10 f-words and nearly the same amount of uses of “b–ch” throughout the songs. Other swearing includes “d–n,” “d–k,” and “h—” on numerous tracks.
“Wood” easily enters Swift’s canon as the most explicitly sexualized song of her career. Innuendos abound under the guise of being swept off her feet by love when in fact she’s simply glorifying her partner’s physical attributes above anything else.
“Actually Romantic” can be read as a barbed attack at one primary Swift hater (read: Charli XCX) or the general public. Either way, lines such as “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave” or “But it’s precious, adorable/Like a toy Chihuahua barking at me…” go beyond passive-aggressive and are simply aggressive. Throughout the song, we also hear a sexual phrase not worth repeating here.
“Father Figure” confoundingly positions Swift as both recipient of father figures in her past and claiming to be a new version worth following. A possible diss track aimed at her former manager, the track slides Swift from victim to judge. She troublingly sings, “I’ll be your father figure/I drink that brown liquor/I can make deals with the devil, my d–k’s bigger.”
On “WI$H LI$T” Swift repeats dominating images of wealth and success as items she wants on her wish list. Though her purpose is murky, it does quickly reveal the emptiness in chasing this lifestyle. She sings, “Boss up, settle down, got a wish list/I just want you.”
“CANCELLED!” is Taylor’s attempt to reclaim the credibility of her celebrity friends who’ve come under fire from the internet’s attempts to cancel them. Yet, the direction she takes mirrors a similar hate and judgement. She sings, “Welcome to my underworld, where it’s quite dark … soon you’ll learn the art/of never getting caught.”
“Ruin the Friendship” takes Taylor back to her high school era where she bemoans not kissing a friend while “your girlfriend was away.” Her regret leads her to claim, “Staying friends is safe, doesn’t mean you should.”
“The Fate of Ophelia” dances around complicated motivations for death and suicide while also making reference to purgatory and what happens in the afterlife.
The album’s closing track is also its most thematically fitting. Titled “The Life of a Showgirl,” Swift joins Sabrina Carpenter, a pop star made in Swift’s own image, to recount the rise and fall of a showgirl in all of her unholy detail.
Swift and Carpenter’s end destination reveals a broken, hopeless life marred by seeking attention above else. In their own words, they sing back to each other, “You don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe/And you’re never gonna wanna.”
The problem is that their audiences clearly communicate they “wanna.”
Perhaps Swift genuinely attempts to point to the entertainment industry’s tendency to consume young women and profit from their artistic gifts until they no longer garner enough attention anymore. But what’s more evident throughout this album is Swift’s doubling down on an increasingly sexualized perspective of relationships and true love.
Not only does she maintain an ironclad grip on the music and (to a lesser extent) movie industries, but she demands the attention of teenagers, first-time parents and the entertainment culture at large. Push past the harsh profanity of The Life of Showgirl and you’ll discover Swift’s sexualized fantasies finally realized in a committed partner.
To her, romantic love has always been the pinnacle of a young girl and young boy’s journey in life. Now that she’s claimed to finally find it, you’d be forgiven to think she might finally be done with her forlorn poems about heartbreak or the vulgar diss tracks aimed at ex-boyfriends and rival popstars.
But clearly not.
Her pettiness and fixation with controlling the romantic narratives of her life continue to define even the very relationship that’s taken her to engagement and fueled the development of this album.
Until Swift’s lyrics and music reveal a change in direction, our parental critiques and watchful eyes are needed to help our children discern what’s worth taking and leaving from Taylor Swift’s music.
Jackson Greer is a High School English Teacher in the suburbs of Texas. He lives in Coppell, Texas with his wife, Clara. They love debating whether or not to get another cat and reading poetry together. Also, he is a former employee of Focus on the Family’s Parenting Department.
