{"id":280747,"date":"2025-10-06T02:11:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T02:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/280747\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T02:11:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T02:11:09","slug":"taylor-swifts-fairy-tale-is-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/280747\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift\u2019s Fairy Tale Is Over"},"content":{"rendered":"

She doesn\u2019t sound like she\u2019s having fun. She has the team captain<\/a>, the cushion-cut diamond<\/a>, the fans who will shell out for yet another branded cardigan\u2014but Taylor Swift\u2019s The Life of a Showgirl, and the life it seems to portray, is a charmless chore. Swift spends her 12th album pondering familiar bummers: rivalries, regrets, the countdown clock of her own mortality. What\u2019s new, narratively<\/a>, is her football-player fianc\u00e9 and the happily ever after he represents. But she can\u2019t quite convince herself, or the listener, that she\u2019s getting what she\u2019s always said she wants. She\u2019s become too cynical to sell a fairy tale.<\/p>\n

Theoretically this is an interesting place for Swift, that ever-striving Sagittarius, to be: at the end of a checklist of goals and still unsatisfied. Her economies-quaking Eras Tour<\/a> flaunted the power earned by years of hard work; her engagement to Travis Kelce appeared to fulfill the romantic quest she has long sung about<\/a>. Success certainly puts her under no obligation to fake a smile and hide her anxieties. Unfortunately, Showgirl is the sound of an overworked and overexposed entertainer reaching the mountaintop to find something worse than disappointment: burnout.<\/p>\n

From the moment it was announced in August, Showgirl was sold as a bedazzled return to pure pop. Swift recorded it on tour, using free days to fly to Sweden to work with the legendary producer Max Martin and his collaborator Shellback. Their methods\u2014ruthless melodic math<\/a>, brazenly artificial production, and an odd soft spot for reggae rhythms\u2014helped define the world-conquering sound of Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys. When Martin first teamed up with Swift for 2012\u2019s Red, their partnership propelled her from country-music fame into the echelon of megastardom where she still resides.<\/p>\n

Ever since 2019\u2019s Lover, though, she\u2019s preferred to work<\/a> with indie-rock dudes<\/a> (chiefly Jack Antonoff<\/a>) who draw out her arty side. Her fascinating but unwieldy 2024 release, The Tortured Poets Department<\/a>, seemed to push that phase of her career as far as it could go<\/a>. That album prioritized emotional and narrative complexity over catchy sing-alongs. Showgirl, she said on her fianc\u00e9\u2019s podcast, is a return to \u201cmelodies that are so infectious that you\u2019re almost angry at it, and lyrics that are just as vivid but crisp and focused and completely intentional.\u201d<\/p>\n

The album sometimes does fit that description\u2014especially on the relatively strong, if unexpectedly downcast, opening three songs. \u201cThe Fate of Ophelia\u201d pairs delicate snares with an indelicate bass line as Swift raids Shakespeare to find a synonym for damsel in distress. Next, \u201cElizabeth Taylor\u201d layers reverberating refrains for a smoldering, cinematic effect. (It has some solid scene-setting, too: \u201cWe hit the best booth at Musso & Frank\u2019s \/ They say I\u2019m bad news; I just say, \u2018Thanks.\u2019\u201d) \u201cOpalite\u201d is an inspirational vocabulary lesson whose chorus is delivered with \u201980s-rock pep worthy of Richard Simmons.<\/p>\n

But the difference between effective and great pop is the ingredients missing here: novelty and passion. Swift and Martin\u2019s previous highlights ambushed the ear with dubstep that crashed into country (\u201cI Knew You Were Trouble\u201d), satirical boom-bap (\u201cBlank Space\u201d), and industrial-R&B chaos (Reputation). A molten emotional core\u2014an oh-so-Swedish mixture of glee and gloom\u2014energized the exploration. Showgirl, however, sounds freeze-dried, prepacked, obvious. Though the album\u2019s genres are superficially diverse\u2014you\u2019ll hear flashes of grunge, trap, and, yes, reggae\u2014its arrangements could work fine as royalty-free background music for content creators. The Martin\/Swift touchstone that\u2019s most often recalled is the most simplistic one: \u201cBad Blood,\u201d with its jock-jam drumbeat telling, not showing, the listener that they\u2019re having fun.<\/p>\n

Read: The tortured poet of love gets engaged<\/a><\/p>\n

Swift\u2019s songwriting isn\u2019t pushing ahead either. Old tricks abound: perspectives switching between verses; high harmonies adding drama to a song\u2019s final chorus. Lyrically, she tends to restate familiar themes in crasser terms than ever before. The ballad \u201cEldest Daughter\u201d describes internet toxicity in the same way as an anti-bullying PSA: \u201cEvery joke\u2019s just trolling and memes \/ Sad as it seems, apathy is hot.\u201d And yet she\u2019s very much the troll on \u201cActually Romantic,\u201d which disses another singer with as much sophistication as \u201cI am rubber, you are glue.\u201d \u201cWood\u201d salutes her man\u2019s anatomy in a similarly third-grade manner. Album after album, she\u2019s inched toward more explicit sex talk, but lines like \u201cHis love was the key that opened my thighs\u201d are so uninspired\u2014neither funny nor specific nor even memorably gross\u2014that they feel nihilistic.<\/p>\n

The most interesting thing about Showgirl is the way Swift cops to the all-too-palpable sense that she\u2019s finding it hard to care about anything. \u201cHoney\u201d is a successful bit of self-therapy about why she\u2019s weary of pet names. The George Michael\u2013quoting \u201cFather Figure\u201d seems to revisit the hoary fable of her publishing rights<\/a> in order to portray her as a cruel mob boss. On \u201cOpalite\u201d and \u201cElizabeth Taylor,\u201d she tries to reconcile her excitement over a new relationship with her many, many memories of heartbreak.<\/p>\n

The cover of the album\u2014Swift glaring in what might be a post-concert ice bath\u2014suits the hardened persona she presents here. And the music\u2019s blend of moodiness and poppiness calls to mind 2022\u2019s Midnights<\/a>, which had more staying power than it initially appeared to possess. But that album was barbed with intrigue; it captured a journey inward, as Swift tried to figure out the source of her restlessness during a seemingly settled moment in her life. Showgirl, by contrast, doesn\u2019t raise or answer questions. Well, other than: What\u2019s the point of releasing an album whose music seems so exhausted and on guard?<\/p>\n

Likely answers include money, obligation, and strategy. Charitably, she really needs us to know how enervating her past few years were. On \u201cWi$h Li$t,\u201d she fantasizes about having kids and being left alone, and Showgirl leaves no mystery as to why she\u2019d want to disappear. She does perform one unvarnished act of creative generosity with the title track, which closes the album. On it, Sabrina Carpenter<\/a>\u2014Swift\u2019s favored prot\u00e9g\u00e9\u2014lends a vocal performance whose warmth and playfulness cut like a beam through fog, offering a reminder of how pop is supposed to make you feel. Swift clearly doesn\u2019t want to play the ever-grinning showgirl anymore. That\u2019s valid, but so is the impulse to listen to anything else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She doesn\u2019t sound like she\u2019s having fun. She has the team captain, the cushion-cut diamond, the fans who…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":280748,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[171,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-280747","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115324799194590345","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}