The Life of a Showgirl
I have so many thoughts about the negative discourse currently surrouding Taylor Swift’s latest album release, The Life of a Showgirl. Maybe I am biased, since I am someone who has been a Swiftie since I was 16 (I am now 35) and was there for the original release of ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’, which made me fall in love with how good she was at storytelling through music. Maybe, I’m not, though.
I have grown up alongside her music and being the same age as her is one of the reasons why I feel so connected to her art. I could relate so strongly to what she was writing during each release because they were such common global experiences for young women, and still are. I genuinely believe there is a Taylor Swift song for everyone, and the right one for you will find you and pierce your soul in a way you don’t expect, you just have to give it a chance. As evidenced by Marc Maron.
Source: clipped by u/rp1105; Reddit.
One of the things that really bothers me is the narrative that this album is tone-deaf, because she’s happy. Wild. What do you mean; how dare she be happy?! I understand there is a plethora of world issues right now and the dialogue surrounding this indicates that should be our only focus, but real life isn’t a meme.
People are multi-dimensional and we are allowed to find joy amongst all the horrific atrocities occurring in the world, whilst still caring about those things. It is possible to do both at the same time and we should be chasing happiness and hope where we can, doing this doesn’t negate our compassion or care for the suffering around us. There has never been a time when this hasn’t been true. It isn’t new that terrible and awful things are happening all around the world. And it isn’t new that people continue to live their lives and be happy in between all of it. We are certainly more exposed to it now with how accessible information is, but with that also comes the dangers of only consuming the bombardment of bad news. You’re made to feel guilty for being happy when the world is burning, but you shouldn’t be.
It is so important to manage the constant influx of emotionally and mentally onerous information crammed into headlines; processing all of this is an arduous task because you might then feel compelled to gather more and more information after seeing the bad headlines—when do you give your brain a break from all the dread? We have to set boundaries for ourselves and limit how much time we spend consuming all of this information. What good does it do for anyone to live in a constant state of heaviness and despair? Amidst all the global chaos, finding happiness and joy is an act of resistance. Sure, it isn’t a solution to the pandemonium, but it provides us with the light at the end of the tunnel, silver linings, glimmers of hope, and it helps us weather the maelstrom.
If we stay in the turbulence, how do we fight the despondence we feel from the weight of carrying everything the world is throwing at us? We have to embrace things that make us want to rebel and fight against disarray we’ve been thrown into. Studies that have been conducted tend to find people who feel happiness towards their personal lives are more likely to want to contribute to change. Searching for pockets of joy amongst the darkness is not selfish or tone-deaf; it generates a want to take action and help those who need it. It makes us want to protect these precious moments so that we still have something to live for when we come screaming out of the dark, calamitous tunnel that we fought to get through to reach the light.
I’m going to address the other things that have also been so loudly brought up, which makes me exceptionally concerned that nuance, the ability to use critical thinking, and any form of comprehension skills might be close to extinction. Why are we experiencing such a major literacy crisis right now? Or are we not and it’s just people insisting on hating Taylor Swift simply for existing? So they’re just grasping at flimsy misinterpretations on purpose to further crush her for absolutely no reason that I am able to fathom (it’s probably misogyny, though). Have we reached the end of the line and it’s looping back to being “cool” to hate her? It is baffling.
This happens during every album release of Taylor’s. I am tired of this kind of discourse. Art is subjective. You need to fix your language and stop making sweeping statements about how the album is bad. It isn’t bad. You just don’t like it, and that’s OKAY! Like I said, art is subjective. You don’t have to like it, but you also don’t get to speak on behalf of everyone else. Share your opinion respectfully about why the album isn’t for you, but don’t make other people feel stupid or inferior for enjoying it, and whole-heartedly, please stop projecting nonsensical theories about racism, patriarchal facilitation, and trad-wife propaganda onto it.
Have we stopped acknowleding that metaphors exist? It is so common for words associated with darkness to evoke feelings of negativity and words associated with light to conjure feelings of positivity. Taylor is not racist just because she wrote ‘Sleepless in the onyx night / But now the sky is opalite’ about her and her fiancé’s experiences with former partners and his happens to be a black woman. She is not implying white supremacy. Come on, opalite isn’t even pure white. It is milky white (sometimes even looking colourless) with iridescent blue and golden orange undertones.
The hyperfocus on just these specific lyrics being racist without considering how commonplace the duality of the light and dark metaphor is, is actually absurd. Let’s not forget how usage of this metaphor is strewn throughout multitudes of aristic expression to tell stories, dating back to Shakespeare, probably before his time, too. ‘Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires’ - straight out of Macbeth; he is making associations of his murderous intent with darkness and wants to hide these desires from the light (goodness).
Say it with me now, it is not anti-feminist to want to get married and have children. It is not anti-feminist to want companionship and want someone to share your life with and to have someone to celebrate your accomplishments with you. It is not anti-feminist to feel lonely and melancholic when you think you’ve found that one person, only to realise that you stayed longer than you should have because of sunk-cost fallacy.
No woman needs a man to save her from anything, but as human beings, there is a fundamental need for companionship, this is biologically driven and vital for physical and mental well-being. Please refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It is not anti-feminist to want to share your love with someone and it is not anti-feminst to want to find romantic companionship and it is not anti-feminst to want to be loved. Feminism is essential because it grants us the autonomy and freedom to choose without the input and control from the patriarchy. I can’t believe I even need to dispute that. Stop weaponising feminism for your own misguided agenda.
The criticism is endless, she can’t even do an interview where she is asked about her writing process and concepts behind certain tracks on the album without the comment sections flooding with disparagement and saying if she needs to explain herself then her writing is bad. She was asked to explain and share her process. Why is everything being taken out of context? And projecting onto her your speculative idea that what she is saying is because she is doing damage control when she’s explaining her use of satirical venacular, but you’re refusing to accept this and insist her lyrics be taken at face value, forcing onto her your interpretations of seriousness and sincerity, despite her telling you it is not.
Finally, the claims around the album concept and aesthetic not aligning with the music doesn’t make sense to me. Prior to release, she mentioned this is album represents her life behind-the-scenes of The Eras Tour—this does not mean the music will be a reflection of what you would expect a typical vintage Vegas showgirl sound to be. It in no way should be that because that would depict an on-stage experience, but she has never said that, she has maintained that it is about what went on in her life backstage and behind the curtain. Also, since comprehension is dead, I do not mean that literally. I mean that figuratively. I don’t understand where people have been getting the expectation that this would be a noir showgirl genre album.
The marketing around it has been glitter and Taylor has spoken about how she has established for herself genre categories for lyrics she writes, i.e. quills, fountain pens, and glitter gel pens. We are in the glitter gel pen era, to quote Taylor, these songs are “frivolous, carefree, bouncy” and “glitter gel pen lyrics don’t care if you don’t take them seriously because they don’t take themselves seriously”. These songs are “the drunk girl at the party who tells you that you look like an angel in the bathroom”, she goes on to say, “it’s what we need every once in a while in these fraught times in which we live”, and she is keeping it one hundred
Let us be happy, let Taylor be happy and share in her joy with us. It’s unfair and cruel to want her to stay tortured. She’s finally gotten what she’s been writing songs about since she started writing songs and she is being more authentically herself than she’s ever been. You shouldn’t take that away from anyone. You should be celebrating it.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Also, I wrote this by myself. It is not AI just because I like using em dashes.











