Artiste: Taylor Swift
Album: The Life of a Showgirl
Rating: ***
There’s something refreshing about Taylor Swift’s insistence that she belongs in exactly the same place she’s been for almost two decades — at the forefront of mainstream pop — and something majestic about her steady refusal to do the kind of things every other established singer does: Release a greatest hits compilation, sit on a stool with an acoustic guitar, or fall back on songs she grew up on. Her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, is a reminder that she can come up with songs made entirely on her own terms.
At the same time, there’s nothing majestic about making a feeble bid for the youth vote by churning out numbers for another album about feeling blah and vengeful. That feeling of “heard that, heard that again” runs through the album’s 12 tracks that last almost 42 minutes.
There’s her usual strategy of straightening out rivals: Actually Romantic disembowels a nameless pop competitor (who could that be but Charli XCX because of her Brat song Sympathy Is a Knife), a nameless former couple in Cancelled! (Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were a pair when Swift had to face the rapper), and Father Figure (about her former label boss Scott Borchetta). Swift manages to dig in with a few funny lines about chihuahuas and cocaine in Actually Romantic, but given her stature in the pop scene, she does a disservice to her reputation by calling out rivals. To become a colossus in the music world, like Madonna, Swift needs to rise above pettiness.
The 35-year-old does a far better job when she revels in her newfound joy of being with her engaged boyfriend, the American football star Travis Kelce. She wants the world to know about him: “Dancing through the lightning strikes” in Opalite, rescuing her from “the melancholy” in The Fate of Ophelia, and breaking her single status with his “magic wand” in Wood.
Swift tries to do justice to the depth Shakespeare lent Ophelia in Hamlet (consider how the Shakespearean line “Lord, we know what we are, but not what we may be” conjures up a mood that suggests possibility and holds open a small door of promise to Swift’s “Late one night, you dug me out of my grave and saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia”) in a way that’s palatable to teenagers. The song plays out to a simple piano intro that merges into an upbeat bassline, reminding listeners of Ophelia’s original fate.
Opalite, too, has a contrasting structure — guitar jangle and a disco refrain. Swift’s love for Easter eggs comes through in the title track. “And he can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor” was a reference to Elizabeth Taylor in the 2017 single …Ready for It? The actress indirectly gets to live her life again, but through the eyes of a seasoned musician. The song uses a mellowed version of the boom-clap beat from 1989’s Shake It Off. But the feeling of Broadway pastiche is hard to shake off, even with a guest appearance on the track from Sabrina Carpenter.
That brings us to the problem with the album. It sounds slick, full of pop flourish, but there is very little in terms of earworm hooks Swift is known for, especially when she works with Swedish super producers Max Martin (who worked with Swift on 1989 and Reputation) and his colleague Karl Johan Schuster (aka Shellback).
First-week sales cannot give a clue about an album’s longevity in people’s minds. On The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift is too busy dealing with the insecurities of Taylor Swift. What the album needed was more songs like Ruin the Friendship, a gentle pop number about what could have been a teen romance. Instead, listeners get a set of songs that are either intimate or irritating, depending on where Swift fits in your life.