In the time between the release of Midnights, her October 2022 mega-blockbuster, and Dec. 8, 2024, when the “Eras Tour” closed in Vancouver, Taylor Swift achieved a level of success beyond what nearly any sane human mind could process. Just as anyone with a normative experience of reality cannot not know what it’s like to free-climb El Capitan or thread a payload of bunker-busters into an Iranian nuclear mountain lair, the inner life of the last great American megastar is necessarily something distant and mysterious, the province of a unique subset of the human race consisting of but one single member.
What must the world look like to these wondrous freaks? Luckily, the loneliness of singular experience is one of the most consistent themes in art. The rest of us can get a taste of their freakdom, so as to better understand the freak that lies within us all. “What do I fear? Myself?” Shakespeare’s Richard III wonders in horror on the eve of his defeat and death. “I am a god; hurry up with my damn croissants,” bellowed rapper Kanye West a few centuries later, channeling much the same self-alienated sense of cosmic isolation.
The challenge confronting Swift on the newly released The Life of A Showgirl, her 12th full-length album, reaches Shakespearean and even Westian proportions. Swift is a one-woman monoculture in a post-monocultural age. She just won back ownership of her albums after a decadelong legal struggle and has been big enough for long enough to see West, her chief foil, slink away into insanity. She’s marrying a football legend and grosses $13 million a night on the road. She is looked to, with both awe and nervousness, as a national barometer and exemplar, a tendency that extends even to the president of the United States, who, during the stretch run of the 2024 election, magnified Swift’s already near-metaphysical power by declaring his “HATE” for the singer.
Any Paul Simon fan will tell you it’s possible to make great albums about your success and happiness, though Swift’s artistic predicament goes beyond mere personal contentment. There is a lot she could say about her ascension to godhood: that it’s awesome or empty; that it feels weird or is weird; that it strikes her as temporary, or maybe as a bit much; that success casts a dark inward shadow, or maybe that it doesn’t cast any shadow at all. Her tedious 2024 project, THE TORTURED POET’S DEPARTMENT, and its second part, THE ANTHOLOGY, contained ominous hints that she already dwells in heights so Olympian that she’s lost touch with whatever second self screams from within the great artists. This former source of uniqueness is now buried deeper inside of her than ever: The uneven Showgirl marks the third album in a row in which Swift has drifted further away from the core of her artistic being, a streak that began after the twin triumphs of folklore and evermore in 2020.
Showgirl is, for starters, the most Swedish album Swift has made in over a decade, “Swedish” in this case referring to the heavily sanitized synth-and-snare electro-funk that migrated eastward from Detroit and Minneapolis, forming the basis of much of 21st-century pop. Max Martin and Shellback, credited as coproducers on Showgirl with Swift, created and perfected the robot R&B of Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and Maroon 5. They were also Swift’s producers in the early 2010s, when she nailed the shift from country music to mass-market radio pop.
Today, the most Swedish music on Earth is being made in South Korea, K-pop being heavier and slightly cheekier Swedish pop with costumes. K-pop is also as massively popular as its forbearer, and on Showgirl Swift doesn’t so much return to an earlier sound as try to catch up with the latest permutations of a pop sensibility that she seemed to have left behind a half-dozen albums ago. The result is an exhausted sonic mash. Swift’s voice has never sounded so over-produced, its natural dynamics smoothed out beyond the recognizably human. Even the album’s best moments, such as the melancholic rise and fall of set opener “The Fate of Ophelia,” float on top of lamely softened synthesizers, which, along with the tinny computer vocals, make for a package so insubstantial that it often verges on cloud-like. On the title track, a duet with Eras Tour opener and fellow pop star Sabrina Carpenter, you can barely tell the singers’ voices apart.
The times when Swift’s real gifts shine through — her narrative skills, her unmatched talent for dramatic reversals within the compressed spaces of a pop song, and her genius for revealing just enough humanity at exactly the right moment — are enough to make you wish she’d made some other album entirely. “Ruin the Friendship,” Showgirl’s best song, is a 35-year-old woman’s pained memory of a youth burning ever fainter, with themes heavier than the dull Scandinavian bassline and a huge chorus that stops pointedly short of ecstasy. I don’t think the story she tells there, of regretting a quarter-century-old decision to pass on a high school hookup with a now-deceased friend, is strictly autobiographical. But it is a song where she isn’t crouched behind a lame persona. Unlike most of the rest of Life of a Showgirl, it at least seems like it could be about the life of someone.
It is an insult to Swift to go hunting around for future Hall-of-Famer and future Mr. Swift Travis Kelce on the album, but Swift knows that we are all only human, and I think she expects us to hunt. “Eldest Daughter” seems the best candidate for a hidden Kelce ballad, with its cringey lines about hot takes and internet trolling, or maybe “CANCELLED!” is a winking reference to the hyper-scrutiny of Kelce. I think the real Kelce number is “The Fate of Ophilia.” If Swift’s fans read — and I think Swift hopes they do — they’d learn that this song’s titular outcome is madness followed by suicide. “I sat alone in my tower,” Swift sings, and then a fire-lighting bad-boy comes along to save her from self-destruction. “Ophelia lived in fantasy,” Swift continues, namely the lethal dream of unpoisoned love. Kelce is her urgently needed shot of reality. He is an anti-Hamlet, the greatest of all chill and normal dudes.
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It wasn’t that long ago that Swift could sustain this level of insight, reflection, and cleverness for an entire album. In fact, she did it for two whole albums: It is now clear that Swift’s artistic height was folklore and evermore. The albums were genuine departures and culminations, two whole hours of meditative and defiantly downtempo rainy day guitar and piano music, a kind of millennial Astral Weeks where she makes it deepest into a recognizably Swiftian self. She wasn’t dating Kelce yet, but she could already describe the special torture and happiness of finding your soulmate in public: “All these people think love’s for show,” she sings on “peace,” “but I would die for you in secret.” She wasn’t a solar system-devouring supernova yet, but she could look around the mansion she’d bought in Westerly, Rhode Island, and openly and honestly wonder what makes her so special, both in this time and on a larger historical scale: “There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen,” she sings on “the last great american dynasty,” “I had a marvelous time ruining everything.”
Then came Midnights, $1,500 upper deck concert tickets, a hit duet with Post Malone, back-to-back Kansas City Super Bowl championships, and enough expectations and attendant general weirdness to keep an artist of her talents busy for the rest of her life. She is now having a marvelous time not ruining anything whatsoever, even if the music has suffered. Now comes the key question for the next era of Swift’s life and career: How long can it all last?
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet Magazine.
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