There’s a 1976 Eve Babitz essay about a magazine reporter who noses into a scoop while watching Elizabeth Taylor eat room-service caviar with onion, right in front of the used car salesman whom she’s supposedly dating. Surely, the reporter thinks, the one and only Elizabeth Taylor would not subject a lover to onion breath? Indeed not—the telltale allium portends that at this very moment, dear Liz is deep in secret negotiations to remarry Richard Burton! That’s world-historic gossip. I don’t usually go as far out of my way to think about Taylor Swift’s upcoming wedding to Travis Kelce, but then she announced her new album on his podcast, and one track on it is a song-length dick joke. At least everyone’s having a giggle—I don’t even know what happened to the poor used car salesman.
What’s the harm in a little fun, I thought, as I headed off to a screening of The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, a music video premiere and behind-the-scenes documentary that played at all 540 AMCs in the country this past weekend. “I didn’t realize we were coming here for one music video,” said the woman behind me on the out escalator, with no appreciation for the other 85 minutes’ worth of making-of clips, artist commentary, and lyric visualizers (the clean versions). Taylor Swift fans are eating, catered by Target exclusives, TikTok effects, a “content capture activation” at the Century City mall in Los Angeles, and “Showgirl Era”-inspired cupcakes that come in “orange vanilla” and “teal vanilla,” which are the same flavor.
New Swift songs are prized commodities, and we’re insatiable. “You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby,” she warns in the new song called “Elizabeth Taylor,” pondering fame, exposure, and the ever-tenuous nature of celebrity marriage. But, like most ordinary rules of pop music stardom, this one doesn’t fully apply to Swift: Her 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, had a big hit in the Post Malone adult-contemporary duet “Fortnight,” but in the same year, the Eras Tour and savvy marketing sent her 2019 song “Cruel Summer” to the top of the charts, too. More than any other pop singer, Swift has the luxury of setting her own agenda. Even before it came out, The Life of a Showgirl was already the biggest pop album of the year.
This is music for Taylor Swift fans and I am one! I like the Swift of “Leaving like a father/Running like water” and “I have this dream my daughter-in-law kills me for the money” and “I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time” and the Swift who dissed John Mayer and who is never ever getting back together and who wrote about her house in Rhode Island, and I will especially always love her collaborations with Swedish pop superproducers Max Martin and Shellback at the firework highs of 1989 (2014). When I am sick and tired of Taylor Swift, “Wildest Dreams” wins me back.
Lately I notice, though, that my favorite pop-loving Pilates instructor is putting dance remixes of “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Cruel Summer,” and, yes, “Wildest Dreams” on his playlist—that is, nothing later than Lover (2019). Though the Eras Tour was an explosion, in recent years the mood on record has felt more restrained. In The Official Release Party, Swift describes The Life of a Showgirl as inspired by that tour—the glitz, the hard work, the thrill of the crowd. With a bold shift from black and white photography to tangerine glitter and rhinestones, the album’s presentation seemed to herald the return of big, fun pop bangers with a retro twist. The original record, released October 3, is a classic 12 tracks (compared to 31 on Tortured Poets’ Anthology Edition) and Jack Antonoff is nowhere in sight. Shellback back? I said, Max Martin on deck? Sign me up. But now we got prob-lems.
The Life of a Showgirl is not really a new musical or thematic direction for Swift in the sense that Reputation (2017) or Folklore (2020) were. In most ways, it is a predictable continuation of her catalog: There’s personal memoir with a veneer of poetic license, a pretty obvious diss track, an extended meditation on memories from high school, a touch of Shakespearean drama, and a singular focus on romantic love and a happily-ever-after that’s happily ever closer. But it is simply untrue to claim, as Rolling Stone did on Friday, that Showgirl represents “new, exciting sonic turns.” Granted, there’s never been another Taylor Swift song that sounds so much like the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” (“Wood,” with the spiritual energy of bachelorette-party penis décor), or so uncannily like both Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” and Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So” (“Actually Romantic,” allegedly alleging that Charli XCX calls her “Boring Barbie,” which might stick).
These aren’t obscure soundalikes—they are several of the most famous songs already ever made, now recreated in the genre of “Taylor Swift song.” Whatever vision Martin and Shellback set out to realize here is not really serving her strengths and, intentionally or not, appears to signal a disinterest in evolution. “Father Figure” has some of the album’s strongest writing, with the signature Swiftian heel turn at the bridge, and I could not be less excited about how the production sounds, which is unremarkable compared to its inspiration, the 1987 George Michael song that’s still so hot you remember it from Babygirl. It’s not worth being mad about “CANCELLED!,” a swagless “Look What You Made Me Do,” even when Swift hits us with, “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?”
I can sort of recommend “Opalite,” a better-days-ahead anthem for gemstone lovers that sounds like a stage adaptation of Post Malone’s “Circles,” or maybe it’s Maroon 5’s “Sugar”? “Honey” is quite sweet—a simple hip-hop beat flecked with bass, clarinet, and banjo, it finds room in the spotlight for the extensive live instrumentation that’s sometimes overshadowed on other songs. The same is true of Swift’s charming detour back to country-pop alongside Sabrina Carpenter on the closing title track, which ties a bow on the theme of A-list drama and glamour with lines like, “They ripped me off like false lashes” and a Swedish guy playing pedal steel guitar. (He’s Anders Pettersson and he also appears on “The Fate of Ophelia,” far and away the most convincing song overall, and normie dream house “Wi$h Li$t,” in which Swift imagines a future where, apparently, everyone looks just like Travis Kelce.)
“The Life of a Showgirl” is a little schmaltzy, but it’s proactive about introducing an independent personality with a story to tell, and Carpenter is a real asset. It’s one of the moments when, musically, The Life of a Showgirl brushes up against a much better idea—a big, glorious pageant that inspires organic passion and camaraderie; a concept album with the ambition to do something familiar like it’s never been seen before. The rest of the time, Showgirl sounds like much of the pop music you have heard over the past 10 years and throughout your lifetime; it asks that this time, you listen more closely, because this is Taylor Swift, with the enormity of commercial power and cultural significance and algorithmic rank that implies. “In my industry, attention is affection,” Swift says in her video commentary introducing “Actually Romantic.” That’s the showgirl’s job: making you pay attention. It’s working, and if this is the only pop album you hear this year, maybe it’s good enough.
