new writing: showgirl, reviewed

at the substack post

At The Substack Post, I have reviewed a recent album from niche Pennsylvanian indie artist Taylor Swift:

You wouldn’t be here for someone else

tl;dr: My verdict is that The Life of a Showgirl is a fun album, but it’s not a great album. I would rank it with Lover and Midnights. It’s probably one of the only Taylor Swift albums where there’s no song I skip the moment it starts… but there’s not a song I feel compelled to listen to over and over either. Sticking to album cuts: there’s no “London Boy,” but there’s also no “I Think He Knows.” No “Vigilante Shit,” but no “Maroon.”¹ Though I also find that while if I like something I tend to continue to like it, stuff I don’t like can change up on me. In general, not just with Taylor.

Other notes: Two old posts, not by me, on Taylor’s use of language that I recommend are “i’m just a notch in your bedpost, but you’re just a line in a song” by isabel and “How You Get the World: Reflections on Taylor Swift, Pt. 5” by Dave Moore. My favorite track is “Elizabeth Taylor,” followed by “Father Figure.” It is sort of funny that what it means for this album to be reputation vol. 2 is that it’s like… “I bet my life looks pretty great to you.… And you know what? It is great. 10/10 life.” I hope all the people who have been saying “she needs to stop working with YES man Jack and start working with NO man Max” since Midnights are feeling a little embarrassed. I always wanted Taylor to write an anxiety-free love song, and now she has, and it’s “Wood.”

There’s a funny musical theater quality to this album that kind of comes in and out of focus for me. The title track, obviously. “Eldest Daughter” feels like the big second act ballad for a musical that doesn’t exist. “CANCELLED!” is like a Disney villain song. Even “Elizabeth Taylor” can feel that way, if delivered in a stripped-down manner:

Finally, I am not on the Taylor Swift “bribing critics” payroll that social media is sure exists but writing this book is expensive so… Taylor… I will stop blogging about you for at least five years for a cool million (post tax). Just PayPal me or something.

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I kind of soft logged off over the weekend, aside from keeping up with my comments, because every social platform was flooded with Taylor reactions and I wanted to be able to process the album. Apologies if you wrote a review or a take, but I probably did not read it! As my text messages would attest, if for some insane reason this question came up in court, I didn’t truly succeed at avoiding discourse. I have a few comments I’ll put down here, but I think the album is fun but minor and the meta discourse it’s generating is really, really stupid. A rule I try to live by on here is “don’t have stupid conversations” and many hot takes on this album are interesting only for their lack of contact with reality. No point.

But I’m human and I get annoyed so here’s all the stuff that annoyed me. Discourse speed round. What I’m talking about here is posts, not criticism, by the way. I haven’t read many articles or reviews but I have unfortunately seen nine hundred thousand posts. If you have not seen nine hundred thousand posts, I’m happy for you. This is similarly about discourse, not music. Music up there. Discourse down here. Reasoned criticism, nowhere.

Number one. If you hate Taylor Swift in a way that verges on unhinged, here is an unfriendly reminder that the first rule here is attention is attention. There’s lots of music out there. I suggest trying it out instead of strategically parceling out your hate streams:

If you want something else to grab the discourse you have to give it your attention. It isn’t that simple, true, but… it also kind of is? Like, Coldplay is as big as Taylor Swift, you know? When was the last time your feed was awash in Coldplay takes? The day people are normal about Taylor is the day she transitions into “legacy artist.” Should you wish to hasten this day, try it.² When Taylor becomes a legacy artist she’ll start doing the boomer thing where she releases albums of demos and live performances… and I will enjoy that, soooo… I kind of win either way here.

Number two. “Actually Romantic.” Did we all listen to the same brat? The one I heard:

• mocks an unnamed peer for being fake, broke, and a starfucker

• has an ode to Dasha from Red Scare

• has the line “shall we do a little key,” which I suspect, but cannot prove, does not allude to Charli xcx’s love of locksmithing

• has a special “filled with white powder” variant

• contains a fantasy about committing a spree shooting at the Grammys

It’s a mean album about doing cocaine, you know? It’s also about career insecurity, wondering if you should get married and have kids, and so on. Isn’t that combination of meanness, vulnerability, and willful immaturity what we all liked about it? If I were Charli, which I’m not, I would not really enjoy my fans logging on to be like how can you take a swipe at poor little Charli, she’s just a thirty-three year old baby, the only white powder she’s ever touched is the stuff on a jelly doughnut.… This response is frankly not very brat. Go do some drugs or have some sexual intercourse or something.

And “Actually Romantic” is definitely a petty-ass hater song, don’t get me wrong. That is why it’s fun. Most fun Taylor Swift diss track since “Mean,” for me at least.

Number three. Many people need to grasp that there is a vast space between “Taylor Swift is an angel who has never done anything wrong” and “Taylor Swift is an evil ghoul” and in that vast space is where all the actual Taylor stuff happens.

As the ancient texts say:

is this seriously only from 2023

This is how the Taylor Swift experience goes. You are gonna project things about yourself onto her and get let down.³ She is never going to speak out on issues you think are important. You’re going to find out about something cool and kind she did and then you’re going to find out about something spiteful. She is going to write “right where you left me” and then she is going to write “karma’s a relaxing thought / aren’t you envious that for you it’s not.” She is going to make albums you don’t like. She is going to make albums you do like that she promotes in such over-the-top commercial and / or boneheaded ways that you feel like Billboard needs to make rules that apply only to her.

That’s just the ride. You don’t need to like it. But it’s how it is. And I say all this because with Taylor it’s just really easy to get locked into bizarre conversations where you find yourself doubling down on positions far removed from anything actually happening. You lose sight of any referent and you are not talking about the music or even “factual events.” Taylor is a person who exists ten thousand feet in the air. You cannot “hold her accountable” for being mean to another singer or even releasing a just okay album. You can’t change her behavior. All you can do is give her your attention or not. That’s it. But at the same time, don’t get backed into a situation where you have to be like, this is the greatest pop album ever made, just because some people have fried their brains and are like… it’s not okay to use “starving” in a metaphorical sense because some people are actually starving elsewhere in the world.

Number four. Somebody sent me a post from someplace, I don’t remember and I’m not going to look, that was like “at last, I get to watch both Ezra Klein and Taylor Swift be over.” I’m not a fan of Ezra Klein but if you post stuff like this my assumption is that you mean you would abandon your work the moment somebody posted one (1) mean tweet about it. Much like the frequently repeated “wild horses wouldn’t drag this out of me” as regards TTPD, you are simply revealing yourself as weak. You will not survive the Taypocalypse.

Number five. In re: the posts that Taylor is the Hillary Clinton of music, has failed ennervated DNC vibes, whatever. I understand that the existence of suburban moms is a constant torture to some people, that you get up every day and remember people are drinking out of trendy coffee mugs and you feel actual pain, I understand that they are to you the boring dough out of which thinkpieces are crafted, but in the world I live in, Hillary Clinton is “bad” because of things like “playing a role in the Libyan civil war” not “liberal feminism.” But as far as the failed political establishment goes, they did go all in on a pop aesthetic last year. What was it…?

Sorry, babes: cool was on the ballot. It lost.

Finally, and this is sort of small, it’s just something I find personally annoying. Many people who like to talk about how Taylor is stuck in high school are also apparently living in a teen movie where jocks are drooling subliterates. Travis Kelce is not well-read, he is almost certainly not well-rounded (in the same way anybody who has spent the majority of their life training at one thing is not well-rounded), but… he’s not stupid, guys. I don’t care about Travis; if he and Taylor break up I will instantly forget he ever existed. But he’s not dumb and I find this need to insist he’s too stupid to know words over one syllable kind of pathetic. If you are going to be an asshole about it, try to remember that there are positions in football other than “quarterback.” (Hey, that’s a three syllable word.)

None of this “matters,” by which I mean, have you looked at the news, but also mean, the internet is (still) not real. If you’ve read this whole thing while being annoyed, go donate money to some place where that matters. Anyway, I do have to get some stuff done so—I’m switching off my notifications / email but I’ll try to check in here at some point. I only ever say “be nice” on my Taylor posts, but uhh be nice. To each other, I mean.

1. But it is fun. I was like Boring Barbie Autumn has arrived when I went to a coffee shop after church and “The Fate of Ophelia” was playing on the radio and I unconsciously did a little shimmy up to the counter, where I ordered a London Fog. Every single part of that sentence is an indictment in some corners of the web… but well… here at BDM Industries, we live, we laugh, we love.

2. Neither here not there but please pour one out for the moderation team at the Florence + The Machine subreddit, forced to say “we are not condoning…Taylor Swift.”

3. Further ancient texts: