Taylor Swift ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ Review: The Artifice of Authenticity

Taylor Swift has always complicated notions of authenticity, which is often used as a benchmark for greatness but also as a cudgel against female singer-songwriters in ways that are less about poptimism versus rockism than about upholding cultural structures based on oppression. Authenticity has rarely been applied to experiences of a teenage girl: In the mainstream country space where Swift was operating, it was reserved for the likes of Jamey Johnson and Eric Church and occasionally Miranda Lambert. But Swift invited her growing fanbase to trace autobiographical details through every lyric and Easter egg to such an extent that it was impossible to argue that her persona was anything less than authentic.

To that end, The Life of a Showgirl finds Swift making a purposeful shift in her persona. She doesn’t fully retcon the narratives of her work to date, but, perhaps for the first time, she leans fully into the idea of her persona as a work of artifice. The 12 songs here are either a peek under the mask or are another mask altogether. From a critical perspective, that pivot makes it at least a little bit interesting as an exercise, but what’s most surprising about The Life of a Showgirl is the extent to which it’s off-putting both as a pop album and as a Taylor Swift album.

The first few tracks might actually make for a solid enough EP. The album’s opening run is at least on par with the sounds and compulsive listenability of 2022’s Midnights or the album tracks from 1989. Opening track “The Fate of Ophelia” finds Swift returning to the “Love Story” well of rewriting a Shakespearean ending because she can. Even an interpolation of George Michael’s “Father Figure” is a surprising and effective choice, though it would be better deployed on a song that’s more than another shot at Scott Borchetta.

But the back half of The Life of a Showgirl is Swift’s least engaging work since she fully transitioned to pop more than a decade ago. Producers Max Martin and Shellback unsubtly repurpose obvious points of reference—“Father Figure,” the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” the Ronettes’s “Be My Baby,” and the Pixies’s “Where is My Mind”—into a vision of pop that sounds contemporary. Beyond the chorus of the standout “Opalite,” though, the production choices simply aren’t distinctive or catchy enough. There’s nothing here that’s so enjoyable that it pulls focus from Swift’s lyrics, and that’s a problem because this is the first album she’s released since her debut in which the songwriting doesn’t elevate the project.

There’s something ordinary about the experience of falling in love, getting engaged, and dreaming about a house with a basketball hoop in the driveway, and those types of ordinary experiences have been essential to Swift’s development into a generational songwriting talent. The issue is that Swift seems to have suddenly lost the capacity to write about those ordinary experiences in a way that’s compelling. “Wi$h Li$t,” for one, is destined to be co-opted as an anthem for TradWives, while the metaphors on “Wood” are neither sexy nor funny.

Whether any given listener is engaged in the exegesis of who past gems like “White Horse,” “Starlight,” or “All Too Well” are really about has always been incidental to the fact that they’re great songs. On The Life of a Showgirl, there’s no subtext. “Actually Romantic” doesn’t work as anything but a diss track about Charli XCX, and “Wood” would require wordplay more original than “cocky” and “redwood” to justify a three-minute paean to Travis Kelce’s dick.

There are surely fans who believe that being Taylor Swift is enough of a hook to make these songs worthwhile and, maybe, enough to overlook some of the horrific poetry of the lyrics. Swift is certainly under no obligation to write about anything else, like, say, our perilous political moment. She isn’t, and I’d argue that the magnitude of her success is already so inherently political that it would make an album of protest songs ring false.

Swift absolutely has the agency to cast herself as the villain by punching down at her contemporaries and re-airing her public grievances, and to aspire to a normie life where she and her football player are left alone. And choosing to write about those topics is ultimately and authentically on-brand for her, whether she couches in a new layer of artifice or not. But it isn’t the content of The Life of a Showgirl that’s beneath her—it’s the caliber of the songwriting.