There are few aspects of pop culture that truly dominate anymore, in an age of endless streaming services the idea of monoculture has truly passed. Movies come and go faster than ever before, album releases fall through cracks and TV shows start and finish before we've even had the chance to hear about them. A true water cooler moment is growing harder and harder to come by - unless you’re Taylor Swift.
Swift, whose every move on and off the stage, in and out of the studio is reported on and documented by press and fans alike for years now. Undeniably the biggest star on the planet, Swift announced her 12th album The Life Of A Showgirl a little under two months ago on fiancé Travis Kelce's podcast.
Along with the announcement came word that Swift would be once again teaming up with Swedish pop guru Max Martin and his producing partner Shellbeck.
Martin, the pop music legend behind songs like Hit Me Baby One More Time and Teenage Dream, and Shellbeck had last worked with Swift on her 1989 album, when where she announced herself as a capital 'P' Pop Star, along with Reputation, her once-maligned but now revered response to her haters. Casual fans and die hards could feel the excitement growing; was Swift returning to the stomping pop music that certified her icon status after the stripped bare, meandering piano sounds of (the rather harshly judged, in my opinion) Tortured Poets Department?
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Well… not quite. After all of the hype and anticipation, somehow Showgirl commits the worst crime of all and is just rather boring.
Thematically, the album is almost impressive in its refusal to tackle any new ideas. We’re covering very familiar ground in almost every track. The album opens with Swift rewriting the tragic fate of Shakespeare's Ophelia: "You saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia" she belts, all too reminiscent of her retelling of Romeo & Juliet in Love Story all the way back on Fearless.
She revisits her obsession with Old Hollywood on Elizabeth Taylor (as she previously did on Clara Bow and …Ready For It?) where she sings about finding refuge in Travis and New York when Hollywood starts to hate her and... sorry, but haven’t we done this before?
Skipping forward to the George Michael sampling Father Figure, Swift (presumably) takes aim at former manager Scooter Braun and music managers at large. Her relationship to the men who once controlled her career is ever-present in her output and her confidence in herself remains admirable; ‘I can make deals with devil because my d**k's bigger’ she affirms here, but in spite of that she takes one of the most iconic queer R&B anthems and makes it sound passive.
It also acts as a warning to the pop girls who may come after her - tow the party line and stay in her favour and she’ll "protect the family". The looming threat (presumably to any would-be Olivia Rodrigos) rings hollow here, however, and the song has much less of a bite than previous attempts like Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?. It does nothing to help Swift's would-be feminist image and loses all the sparkle of the song it's trying to emulate.
The album finally kicks it up a gear with Actually Romantic. A slightly distorted electric guitar leads into Swift standing her ground - ‘I heard you call me Boring Barbie when the coke's got you brave' - asserting herself as here and ready to fight. It doesn’t take a detective to suss that the song is clearly a response to Charli XCX's Sympathy Is A Knife and how that track painted Swift. Out of context, the song is the most fun the album has been so far, but when you’re the biggest star in the world it’s hard not to see this as punching down and petulant?
On Wood, we get Swift's ode to Travis Kelce and his ‘hard rock’. It unfortunately reads at an attempt to play on Sabrina Carpenter's modern Mae West schtick and lyrically the song just isn’t fun enough to make me laugh at its barely-there double entendres.
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Listen: Taylor Swift fans share their reaction to the new album on Livelive
CANCELLED! starts with the promise of Swift's attempt at pop-punk before devolving into circa 2012 Twitter-lite feminist tropes about girl bossing and how she likes her friends in designer clothes. Okay, good for you I guess?
Overall, I find this album so frustrating. Swift has positioned herself as the defining pop star of her generation and yet is obsessed with treading water, replaying the same events and circumstances over and over again. While Swifties will fawn over the new takes on old ideas, it's all starting to feel a little stale.
I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Swift produced her most interesting work (Folklore and Evermore) at the height of lockdown, a time where she was forced to remove herself from public perception, a perception that now she and her fans have become singularly focused upon while the rest of the world moves on. I’m less concerned with The Life Of A Showgirl and more excited by the idea of Swift going off and living her life for a while and coming back with new experiences and an album I know she’s capable of making.
The Life Of A Showgirl is out now
