The Banal Life of a Showgirl

Taylor Swift appeared to be at the peak of her career throughout 2025. She had wrapped up her record (and bank-breaking) tour in December 2024, publicly announced her engagement to Kansas City Chiefs’ player Travis Kelce in August 2025 and had a much-anticipated 12th album on the way—The Life of a Showgirl. 

As a relatively dedicated Swiftie who flew to see her perform at The Eras Tour in France, I had high hopes for the album, which Swift described on the New Heights podcast as “infectiously joyful, wild, [and] dramatic,” with “melodies that were so infectious that you’re almost angry at it and lyrics that are just as vivid but crisp and focused and completely intentional.”

When the album was released on October 3, it was met with polarizing reviews by both critics and fans. Some stated it “hits all her marks,” while others labelled it a “dull razzle-dazzle” (The Guardian, Rolling Stone). 

My personal circle of friends and I, who had gathered for the midnight release, found ourselves rather disappointed with the album for a variety of reasons. The eclectic, vivacious aesthetic described in the advertising was not reflected anywhere in the music, and multiple songs featured lyrics that were so cringeworthy—“every joke’s just trolling and memes,” and “did you girlboss too close to the sun?”—that we had to pause the album.

The first issue I had with the album relates to the opening track, “The Fate of Ophelia.” In this song, Swift uses the character of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to describe her love story with Kelce. But Swift’s Ophelia is unlike the original. The Ophelia of Hamlet is a victim of the men in her life—her father, brother and Hamlet—whose dominance leaves her powerless, her death an indirect result of their actions. Swift’s song, in contrast, frames Ophelia as a damsel-in-distress, “alone in [a] tower,” waiting for her powerful lover to save her. 

I am not saying that songwriters cannot reinterpret and reimagine literary works. Swift has done so effectively before with another Shakespeare play—Romeo and Juliet—in “Love Story.” Simply put, Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” disregards the powerful symbolism of the dire consequences of an oppressive patriarchy in Shakespeare’s character and exchanges it for a shallow, fairytale narrative.

The crude lyrics of some songs also irked me. The sexual topics themselves were not what bothered me; Swift has written racy songs before, such as “Guilty as Sin?”, which disguises her sexual fantasies with a metaphorical veil.  However, the more recent song “Wood” feels ironically childish and far from the more elevated delivery for which she is known. This is out of character for Swift, and is much more reminiscent of rising star Sabrina Carpenter, who is featured on the final track of The Life of a Showgirl.

In this album, Swift also disappoints in her treatment of the women she considers adversaries. In her Netflix documentary Miss Americana, Swift clearly attacks the misogynistic treatment of women by the larger culture; she proclaims, “there is no such thing as ‘someone’s bossy’, there’s just a boss.” 

However, there are a few instances in The Life of a Showgirl in which other women are attacked with misogynistic language in both “Honey” and “The Life of a Showgirl.” She ups the anti by escalating to shaming a fellow female pop star (CharliXCX, a singer  less famous or wealthy than Swift) with her diss-track “Actually Romantic,” which is apparently a response to Charli’s song “Sympathy is a knife.”

In this song, Charli offers her complex feelings on stardom, contemplating how “this one girl” (said to be Swift) makes her feel insecure in her fame and in herself, stating “I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” Swift’s “Actually Romantic” appears to deliver a juvenile response, claiming Charli is simply obsessed with her and describing her as a “toy chihuahua barking at [her] from a tiny purse.” From an artist who had previously defended other female artists against unfounded press criticism, this implicit critique seems to come out of left field.

We hear a similar collision of values when Swift writes about materialism in The Life of a Showgirl. Swift spends “Wi$h Li$t” painting herself as someone who does not want the expensive, consumerist lifestyle that most of the rich desire—“Yacht life under chopper blades,” “Bright lights and Balenci’ shades”—but rather a quiet, suburban life with an imagined husband and children, completely cut off from the media. 

However, other songs on the album make this sentiment ring false. Swift states elsewhere on the album that she likes her friends “cloaked in Gucci” and retrieves wayward proteges in her Jaguar, mentioning her “diamonds”—real or metaphorical—more than once.

My concerns with the lyrics are compounded by some of the limitations of the music itself. Unlike her past pop hits, which had easily identifiable melodic hooks (e.g., “Blank Space,” “Shake It Off,” “Out of the Woods”), many of the songs in The Life of a Showgirl are sonically uniform, utilizing a lot of the same instruments, chords, rhythms and audio post-production. 

Further, the breezy, soft-pop sound of the majority of songs comes across as rather mundane compared with the invigorating sound of the music in her previous pop albums, such as 1989, Reputation and Midnights. Musically, “The Fate of Ophelia” and “Opalite” are the only standouts in The Life of a Showgirl.

Another music-related concern that I (and others) have noticed is the rather derivative nature of some songs on the album, in which we hear varying degrees of sonic resemblance to certain past hits that do not feel like an intentional reference or sample. For example, the instrumental introduction to “Wood” sounds very similar to “I Want You Back” by The Jackson 5. Similarly, the chorus of “The Life of a Showgirl” is reminiscent—in both melody and beat—of the Jonas Brothers’ “Cool.” This results in a less original or fresh musical score in the album.

The only song on the album that truly speaks to Swift’s discography, in my opinion, is “Ruin the Friendship,” which follows her more tried-and-true narrative storytelling found in albums like Speak Now and Red. A narration of her romantic feelings for a high school classmate with whom she fell out of touch, but who died by suicide years later, the song evokes a more authentic reflection on her life than anywhere else on the album.

Taylor Swift is not infallible. Like any musician, she experiments with her work. Sometimes, these experiments are undeniable successes, like Folklore. Other times, they simply fall flat. One can hope that the lyrical and musical weaknesses of The Life of a Showgirl are simply an aberration in a mostly stellar career, and that another smash-hit album will appear in the years to come.