Taylor Swift has dropped the year’s biggest album with The Life of a Showgirl. It’s also the year’s most polarizing album — but how would it not be? Something about Taylor will always trigger those over-the-top love-or-hate reactions from people. “I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness,” she sings halfway through the album — I love this line because it’s either the best or worst moment on the album, depending on your personal Swiftian chemistry. That’s the showgirl in her.
And make no mistake — that’s how she wants it. As she says in her release-party documentary, “In my industry, attention is affection.” That’s the showgirl’s life, and it really is the only one she knows.
Taylor’s always been obsessed with that life, ever since she was a kid. She was still an ingenue when she wrote “Nothing New,” about her terror of turning 22 and losing her audience. Her songs are full of showgirl heroines like “The Lucky One,” the Hollywood starlet who quits the fame game. The lonely actress in “Dorothea.” The “Mirrorball” trooper who does tricks to make strangers laugh at her because it’s the only validation she has. The frustrated opera singer in “Marjorie.” The “New Romantics” poseur, showing off her scarlet letters. The wife in “Tolerate It,” putting on an act, laying the table with the fancy shit, auditioning for her old role in a dead love story.
Taylor’s always been fascinated with stories about how growing up in America as a girl turns you into a performer in your everyday life, until you can’t tell where the show ends and the girl begins. So her excellent new Showgirl feels like the culmination of so many of her favorite stories. As she sings at the album’s end, in one of her not-quite-kidding mottos, “Sequins are forever.”
That’s why the centerpiece is “Elizabeth Taylor,” the Hollywood legend she calls “the ultimate, quintessential showgirl.” Who else would get engaged to the man of her dreams, then immediately celebrate with a fantasy where she’s the movie queen who got married eight times? The first time Liz Taylor met her two-time husband Richard Burton, he complained, “She was, in short, too bloody much.” But like La Liz, Taylor will never not be that way — she was born too bloody much, and she’ll never change. Baby dolls, she couldn’t if she tried.
Showgirl is even more divisive than the average divisive Taylor album — what, you had her mistaken for somebody who makes non-divisive albums? Are you new here? In her whole career, Fearless and Folklore are the only two that didn’t inspire the wine moms to point out how wrong she’s getting it. She’s been a pro long enough to know how to avoid bugging the people — she just doesn’t want that. She never sounds more sequins-and-glitter than when she plays the gee-whiz bride next door.
There’s something so hilariously flippant about Taylor’s mean streak these days. I absolutely love the moment when a BBC interviewer asked if her marriage meant retirement and she replied, “That’s a shockingly offensive thing to say,” then laughed — not a conciliatory “just kidding” laugh, a condescending “do you kiss your mother with that mouth” laugh. Her lack of piety was a joy to behold. She’s slamming harder than ever against that “1950s shit they want from me,” in case anybody thought this childless cat lady might tone down the female rage.
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All over the album, Taylor sings about her romantic bliss with her new fiance Travis Kelce. She’s due, right? After all those teardrops on her guitar over the years, all her isn’t-it’s and I-didn’t-though’s, it’s righteous to hear her celebrate the power of true love in “The Fate of Ophelia” or “Opalite,” two of the highlights here.
But it also might give you whiplash, since she’s just a couple of years past the song where she snarled, “I wouldn’t marry me either.” Last year she dropped The Tortured Poets Department, or as she dubbed it, Female Rage: The Musical. It was a season in hell that was also an exile in Guyville, her diary of spending a few weeks under the thumb of a careless man — a hot English rock & roll leather boy, no less. Last year, she sang about the sexy-bitchy way he slid a ring onto her wedding-ring finger, and how that made her heart explode. But this year, she sees true love as shooting hoops in the driveway with a guy who gets hit on the head by other men for a living.
Tortured Poets was a defining statement for her — a mess even by her standards. She dreamed up a complex 31-part song cycle in her spare time, in the middle of history’s most lavish tour. The music was full of odd detours and experiments. It was like her White Album — a build-your-own-Taylor kit where she forced you to do the work of fitting it all together. You found songs your friends missed. That was part of the adventure. Critics felt it was selfish, rude, too much homework. The pop audience adored the playful weirdness of it, making it the year’s biggest hit by a country mile. (The critics are now saying the last one was actually better. This will never NOT happen with the new Taylor Swift album. Don’t kid yourself she doesn’t know this.)
But this time, she goes the opposite way. Instead of a White Album, she made an Abbey Road, serving up 12 pop bangers straight down the middle. It’s the briefest album she’s made since her debut — only 72 seconds longer. It’s the first time she’s banged out the whole album with the same collaborators: her Swedish dream team, Max Martin and Shellback. It’s tightly focused — they use the Fleetwood Mac “Dreams” drum intro all over the damn album.
There’s even one skip — because to Taylor, it’s conceptually crucial for every flawless pop statement to have one bloodcurdling gaffe in there somewhere. So just like Abbey Road had the one about the silver hammer, Showgirl has the one called “CANCELLED!” And like the Beatles, she doesn’t believe in going halfway when it’s Dud Time. If she was forced to choose between “did you girlboss too close to the sun,” “did you gatekeep the moon,” or “did you gaslight the four Jovian gas giants of our solar system,” she probably picked the right disastrous line — yet the most of us would rather choose “Mad Woman” or “But Daddy I Love Him.”
“The Fate of Ophelia” is her best Swiftspearean drama yet, rewriting Hamlet the way her teenage self rewrote Romeo and Juliet in “Love Story” — she goes back to rescue a doomed young heroine and breathe new life into her. (“I love Shakespeare!” she explains in a quintessential moment from her release-party movie. “It holds up. It’s actually not overhyped!”) It’s moody, nocturnal, yet soars with that Motown handclap shuffle. The late great Marianne Faithfull, the coolest cinema Ophelia ever in the 1969 version, would approve, as tears go by.
But as you probably know, it’s common for people who get engaged to revisit past traumas, painful secrets, roads not taken. Something about the vertigo of lifelong commitment shakes loose all the toxic sludge you’ve kept buried until now. Your dreams get ugly. So there’s something extra moving about how “Ruin the Friendship” flows into this story, mourning a high school crush over a gorgeouly mellow groove — as my editor Jon Dolan brilliantly calls it, “yachtlore.”
In “Actually Romantic,” she rides that Nineties slack-ass indie guitar riff into her nasty mode. Embarrassingly, it took me a few listens to figure out that this was NOT a love song (“how sweet, she’s calling her boyfriend a toy chihuahua barking in her purse, oh wait”) but rather one of her most lethal celebrity-shade valentines, roasting Charli XCX, who must be proud to inspire her funniest and least self-righteous dis track. In classic Tay style, she publicizes Charli’s “Boring Barbie” joke, which most people never heard of until now — Tay always likes a little self-sabotage with her revenge. Showgirl, so confusing.
She raises the shade stakes higher with “Father Figure,” as she rips into the Big Machine boss who discovered her as a kid. “Scott Borchetta, thank you for believing in me since I was 14 and still trying to straighten my hair,” she gushed on the Fearless CD credits. “You’re family.” “Father Figure” flips that image with mobster talk straight from The Godfather, like “I protect the family,” “All I ask is your loyalty,” and “You’ll be sleeping with the fishes.” As Don Corleone would say, today she settles all family business.
“Father Figure” has nothing to do with the George Michael song it doesn’t quite interpolate, beyond the title. But it has plenty to do with his relationship to Tommy Mottola, his Sony label boss — in court, George’s lawyer called him “a scary guy” and added, “I mean, we’ve all seen The Godfather.” George hated Mottola so much he went on strike for most of the Nineties, refusing to make new music until he got out of his contract. Taylor chose a different — and more effective — style of vengeance with her Taylor’s Version project. (And maybe there’s also a hint of another male enemy she buried years ago — “Mistake my kindness for weakness” comes from the 2014 hit “FourFiveSeconds,” by the odd trio of Rihanna, Paul McCarntey, and a rapper there’s no need to mention.)
“Wood” has a Chic-via-Motown groove — as much “I Can’t Get Next To You” as “I Want You Back,” but more “I’m Coming Out” than either — and a lot more info about Travis Kelce’s corpora cavernosa than anyone asked. At the release-party movie, the audience laughed merrily at Taylor’s explanation that it’s about superstitions. (“And that’s what the song’s about!,” with a straight face.) It’s like the old Onion article where Britney Spears explains her new song “Take Me From Behind” is about “love sneaking up on you.”
In “Honey,” she takes one of her favorite words and gives it a song of its own, after years of singing it with romance (“Lover”), desperation (“Delicate”), pity (“Getaway Car”), desire (“False God”), defiance (“Look What You Made Me Do”), or just a side-eye sneer down the ladies’ room (“New Romantics”). But “Honey” is a whole new word now — because she’s finally heard it said to her in the voice of someone who loves her. “Opalite” is a heartfelt Sixties girl-group surge with a Ronnie Spector “whoa oh oh oh.”A friend going through a divorce texted me the entire “failure brings you freedom” bridge on release day, and I knew exactly what she meant.
Sabrina Carpenter is her perfect foil in the title anthem, a tribute to the showgirl’s code, starring Taylor as a fictional dance-hall trooper named Kitty, hiding her pain behind lipstick and lace. But as a great showgirl once said, “There’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you,” and Sabrina comes on like the adoring protegee who might be hiding a switchblade up her sleeve. Kitty knew she was trouble when she walked in. (Elizabeth Taylor never played a “Kitty,” but the closest Old Hollywood inspiration might be Liz’s idol Ava Gardner, whose starmaking role was the femme-fatale razor girl Kitty, in the 1946 noir classic The Killers.) The crowd noise comes from an actual show, the final night of the Eras Tour in Vancouver last December — I was in the crowd, which means it’s my vocal debut on a Taylor record, but also means that you’re hearing 55,000 shocked fans suddenly realizing she’s not announcing Debutation TV tonight.
“Eldest Daughter” is the most painfully beautiful moment on the album — but in perfect Showgirl fashion, it’s also the surest argument-starter, her most divisive Track 5 ever. It’s a piano ballad where she tries to figure out her stereotypical oldest-child baggage, with her obsessive try-try-try energy. It starts out as a lyrical mess — the first verse is all cliches, complaining about the internet yet again — talk about eating out of the trash. (Paul McCartney once said you could always tell the Beatles had writers’ block by when they rhymed “rings” and “things,” and the Swift equivalent is “trolling and memes.”) But then the story starts spilling out of her, so awkward, clumsy, full of evasions, it takes her somewhere new.
In so many ways, Showgirl is Taylor’s version of Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love — a meditation on how terrifying it is to fall into love as a wary adult who knows better, wondering if this is real or just a brilliant disguise. “Eldest Daughter” is her version of “Cautious Man,” never a hit but one of my favorites, the ballad of a hyper-vigilant control freak, trying hard to learn how to stop try-try-trying and just surrender. Like Bruce’s cautious man, “Eldest Daughter” is about a restless heart with LOVE and FEAR knuckle tattoos, or as Tay would put it, a flight risk with a fear of falling. We’ve heard this in her voice before, in the very young Taylor who sang “you learn my secrets and you figure out why I’m guarded,” or “you don’t know why I’m coming off a little shy, but I do.” But in this song, she sounds like a very confused lover, scared to trust this good thing she’s fallen into — “surprised by joy,” as her boy Wordsworth would say. But all the rough edges just make it more powerful, like the moment in “The Prophecy” where she lets her voice stumble over the line “I look unsssstable.”
“Eldest Daughter” has something else weird going on: Taylor almost never gives her characters any siblings at all, unless they’re scarf-hoarding sisters. She quotes her brother in “Opalite,” while Sabrina’s showgirl is the baby of her family. These are tiny plot points, but they stick out just because siblings are always so glaringly absent in her stories.
When she quotes Ophelia with a near-verbatim couplet from Hamlet, it’s the intensely moving scene where Ophelia is confiding in her brother, the only man she can trust, telling him, “Tis in my memory locked/And you yourself shall keep the key in it.” Laertes has just warned her that Hamlet will trifle with her and throw her away like false lashes, because his passion for her is just “a fashion and a toy in blood.” Ophelia promises she’ll remember his secret words. Nobody else will ever know.
Showgirl doesn’t have any songs about the emotional battles of love versus fear, and why should it — Taylor’s entitled to a breezy, carefree, going-to-the-chapel album if anyone is. It’s a whole 41 minutes of This Love Changed the Prophecy. If you crave her introspective side, or if you weep for the deafening silence of Aaron Dessner’s banjo, you have plenty of other Swiftian options, including the 31 songs she released last year. This isn’t one of those well-rounded albums like Lover or Red — it’s one where she goes to extremes, doing for sequins and glitter what Folklore/Evermore did for fuzzy cardigans.
Taylor famously divided her songwriting styles into Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, and Glitter Gel Pen. Quill Pen Taylor mostly sits out the album, playing the role of the silently supportive bridesmaid, lettering the invitations alone by candlelight. Glitter Gel Pen Taylor spins like a girl in a brand new dress, while Fountain Pen Taylor yells at caterers. But they sound thrilled to have each other for company. Too bloody much? Hey, that’s business as usual for Taylor. And on Showgirl, she’s the kind of too bloody much who leaves you wanting even more.
From Rolling Stone US
