Everyone knows Taylor Swift; she is one of the highest-earning artists of all time, a generational artist, and has one of the craziest cults of personalities in the world. She released “The Tortured Poets Department” last year, receiving mixed critical and audience reception. In that time, she got engaged to Kansas City Chiefs’ tight end, Travis Kelce. Her new album, “Life of a Showgirl,” was announced by her fiancé’s podcast, “New Heights,” in August at 12:12, representing her 12th studio album. After the announcement, I was a bit apprehensive as I found “Poets” completely horrible, with nothing but basic writing, singing, and production from Jack Antonoff (who also produced a pretty mid-album from Sabrina Carpenter). While the bar was low, I was kind of excited for the new release, as it would be my first really big album I was going to review. With that being said, when it came out, it was … definitely an album.
Now, while I found this album very mid, the intro track, “The Fate of Ophelia,” honestly isn’t that bad. It’s catchy and interesting lyrically. Swift uses the fate of Ophelia, the tragic character from Hamlet who goes mad and drowns in a river, as something she relates to in her own love life. In the chorus, she says someone follows and saves her: “You dug me out of my grave and/ saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia,” probably referring to Kelce. As for the song, it’s definitely a pop song. It follows the basic pop structure, basic sound, and nothing really exciting. That being said, it’s at least catchy, and that’s better than nothing.
But, sadly, the fun has to stop with the next track, “Actually Romantic.” This song is Swift responding to Charli xcx’s kind of diss to her on the song, “Sympathy is a Knife,” from last year’s hit album, “brat.” The beef seems to start even before this album, where “brat” was on track to beat out “Tortured Poets Department” for the number one place on Billboard’s Top 100 albums, but Swift released a bunch of pressings of the vinyl and CDs to give her just enough to beat Charli out of the top place. While this may or may not be because of the beef, it is very weird indeed. As for the song, Taylor attacks everything from saying Charli does cocaine to even implying that Charli was obsessed with her. But this isn’t any “Not Like Us”; this is more like “The Heart Pt. 6.” Nothing Taylor says is clever, and even gives off the vibe that she was the one who was obsessed. As for the music, it feels like a lousy ripoff of “abcdefu” by Gayle, but without everything in that song that made it an actual good song.
But, once again, there are some songs I like, such as “Wood.” It is a song about Travis Kelsey… and that’s all I can say without my adviser having to talk to me about “being school-appropriate.” Just know that wood doesn’t mean trees. What I will do is focus on the music part, which is very nice. It has a kind of mix of disco and modern pop with vibes close to “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk or the Jackson 5. I would love to hear something more focused on this sound from Taylor, as she does not do badly with it.
But the good luck ends once again with “CANCELLED!” This song is supposed to be a big middle finger to all the useless nerds that infest Twitter or Reddit by making fun of “cancel culture,” but what it comes off as is super childish. She says things like, “Did you girlboss too close to the sky?” or “Welcome to my underworld where it gets quite dark” to sound cool, but it comes off as more cringe, and “Hey! Look at Me! I said the line guys!” To further dampen the listening experience, Swift has had her fair share of controversy over the years and has shown no remorse. From her serial dating allegations in 2013 to her most recent controversy of producing too many versions of this album to try and suck money out of her fans, her neglect of this controversy, besides saying, “It’s their fault,” makes me wonder how she became popular, and I remembered it was because of Kanye.
The final track of the album (and the last one I liked) is the title track, “Life of a Showgirl,” which features Sabrina Carpenter. The reason I like this song is that it sounds less like a Taylor Swift song and more like a Sabrina Carpenter song (even though when Carpenter started singing, I couldn’t tell it was her.) That aside, it definitely feels like it is being performed for the listener, with percussion that feels like clapping and an audience at the end of the song that gives off the feeling of this is a live show. As for the lyrics, they describe the life of Kitty Finlay becoming a showgirl…and that’s it. Nothing really interesting about this track, and it serves more as an ending to this album.
This album isn’t horrible, but it’s also not that good. I did have a couple of moments that weren’t bad, but this project deserves nothing higher than 4.5 out of 10.
