Rating: 3.5/10
Taylor Swift released her 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” on Friday, and she probably shouldn’t have. Due to poor lyricism and misleading marketing, Swift fell far short of expectations.
“The Life of a Showgirl” is her shortest album yet, with 12 songs and one featured artist, Sabrina Carpenter. On Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, Swift markets the album as “everything going on behind the curtain” and claims to give folklore-level lyrics and 1989 melodies.
From the moment she announced the album, she compared it to two of her best works. Swift even says she kept the bar “very high” for the quality of the songs.
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Unfortunately, the music does not reflect this. Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” as a whole leaves much to be desired, missing the mark for understandably high expectations, especially lyrically. With only 12 songs, every single one counts.
The album starts with a great first song, completely misleading the listener. The lead single and track one on the album is “The Fate of Ophelia.” This song is exactly what one would expect from Swift, calling back to the classic Shakespeare play, “Hamlet.”
The track has a similar structure to her 2008 song, “Love Story,” which takes a Shakespearean tragedy and gives it a happy ending. “The Fate of Ophelia” has an upbeat sound that, at times, contrasts with the lyrics, but overall ties them together nicely and is a standout track on the album.
Tracks two and three, “Elizabeth Taylor” and “Opalite,” were also very well done. Swift leads with her best songs, giving fans hope for the rest of the album.
The tracks that follow kill this hope. Songs like “Wood” and “Father Figure” have lyrics that feel out of place and leave the listener feeling uncomfortable.
“Wood” is amazing sonically, and the intro really is magnetic — then she gets to the rest of it. Swift makes eight different allusions to her fiancé’s “redwood tree” in a row, and they are not subtle.
Track four, “Father Figure,” takes on a mobster tone, including lyrics like, “You’ll be sleeping with the fishes before you know you’re drowning,” and “All I ask for is your loyalty/ My dear protégé.”
Swift said in an interview with Magic Radio that the song was “very much written in character.” Songs like these are usually fun to hear from her, but this is repetitive and has creepy undertones throughout.
On the topic of cringy lyrics, “Eldest Daughter” and “CANCELLED!” must be part of the conversation. With the bombardment of slang terms, these two songs are borderline unlistenable. Someone, take social media access away from Swift, please.
Track five, “Eldest Daughter,” could’ve been an enjoyable song if more thought had been put into the writing. The concept was good, but the lyric “But I’m not a bad b—-/ And this isn’t savage” is not.
Swift set herself up for what could’ve been a good lyric, but she ruined it with modern slang: “Every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter/ So we all dressed up as wolves, and we looked fire.” This was meant to be a deep cut song, but the lyrics simply do not match the tone.
However, it cannot be as bad as “CANCELLED!,” which is probably the worst song on the album — and with how it’s been going, that says a lot. What Swift was trying to accomplish is unclear, and lines like “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?” and “Welcome to my underworld where it gets quite dark” leave the listener both confused and shocked by the poor lyricism.
In addition to this, the song calls into question what, and specifically whom, Swift is referencing. People aren’t canceled for no reason.
Does anyone else miss when Swift’s songs felt timeless and not extremely dated?
The title track, “The Life of a Showgirl,” featuring Sabrina Carpenter, was not outstanding. It details the pitfalls of being a showgirl, but Swift has previously written songs with the same concept that were better than this.
Carpenter’s vocals outshine Swift’s, which is to be expected. The song ended with crowd noise from the last Eras Tour show, which was creative and probably the best part of the album.
Overall, the album was not great. It wasn’t even good. It did not fall in line with the showgirl aesthetic Swift was pushing, and it takes more away from her discography than it adds to it. “The Life of a Showgirl” had a lot of hype swirling around it, and it completely fell flat of any expectations.
