Upon first listen, this Swiftie – Taylor Swift fan – was underwhelmed and frankly disappointed in the singer’s twelfth studio album.
When Swift dropped her two previous albums “Midnights” and “The Tortured Poet’s Department,” the feeling she manufactured for her fans was euphoric, jaw-dropping and emotional in all the right ways. Much like her sixth studio album “Reputation,” “The Life of a Showgirl” may take longer to be fully understood.
Swift is unfiltered in the song “Father Figure.” The phrase “Cause my dick’s bigger,” is repeated throughout the track, causing many fans to double take. Beyond the shocking word choice though, “Father Figure” empowers Swift to be her own mentor.
Always experimenting with new genres and new sounds, Swift often makes social commentary through playing into stereotypes and shattering them. The sensual, bubblegum pop album that was advertised has more content than meets the eye.
In “Elizabeth Taylor,” Swift compares herself to the late actress infamous for her seven husbands. The lyric “All the right guys / Promised they’d stay / Under bright lights / They withered away / But you bloom” is a beautiful love letter to Swift’s fiancé, Travis Kelce. The beat drop in the chorus is reminiscent of “Reputation,” the other album Swift, Shellback and Max Martin produced together.
Swift’s branding has always been focused on her storytelling ability. Although this album does not look like it fits that bill on the surface, when you dive deeper you may find that it actually does. The inclusion of words and phrases that were cool in previous years such as “Cause I’m not a bad b*tch / And this isn’t savage” and “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?” feel out of place for someone who normally writes with such poetic lyricism. Rather, these are intentional jabs at what it means to sound cool and how easy it is to sound out of date in doing so.
While making these jabs, Swift’s newest album also overflows with lines that meet Swift’s lyrical precedent, such as “You wanna take a skate on the ice inside my veins” and the imagery of “Glowing like the end of a cigarette” – a line which perfectly encapsulates the aura of a showgirl. As the title would suggest, this album highlights the idea of being a showgirl, and, as Swift stated on Apple Music’s “The Zane Lowe Show,” “Showgirls are mischievous, fun, scandalous, sexy, flirty, fun and hilarious.”
Swift uses one of the last lines in the closing track, “The Life of a Showgirl,” to make peace with her fame, directly addressing the concerns she expressed in “The Prophecy,” a track from “The Tortured Poet’s Department” – in which she begs for both a lover and a mundane life. Now, Swift sings “Oh, wouldn’t have it any other way … Now I make my money being pretty and witty.” This showgirl no longer needs to hide away from bright lights to sustain her relationship.
While my initial review of the album was less than flattering, after further analysis, I now love “The Life of a Showgirl.” All the doubts I had evaporated once I understood the point of the album: to create a satire of what it is to be happy and juxtapose it with what it actually means to be happy. The lyrics of “The Fate of Ophelia,” particularly, “Tis locked inside my memory / And only you possess the key / No longer drowning and deceived / All because you came for me,” tell of a happy love story that could have gone horribly wrong and completely rewrites Ophelia’s fate in “Hamlet” and of Swift’s fate in all her previous relationships. With songs like these, Swift has managed to change the prophecy.
