The packages arrived square and thin and carefully wrapped on Saturday afternoon. There were three of them, but only one was mine. If I could have rejected my package, sent it back from whence it came and been refunded my $34 plus shipping, I would have. I didn\u2019t want it anymore. The two other identical packages belonged to my neighbors, who didn\u2019t seem to want theirs either because they sat outside all weekend. Inside was the vinyl record for Taylor Swift\u2019s The Life of a Showgirl, an album that was released on Friday, but which we had all ordered on her website weeks before.<\/p>\n
Eventually, I took my package inside, but I haven’t opened it. I don’t need to, because I have already listened to the album on streaming, and I know that it’s not good. I had high hopes for this album, because Swift was finally returning to the producers she used for 1989 and Reputation. I’ve listened to her music since we were both in high school, and my body remembers the anticipation it felt before some of her better albums, and the ecstasy of having that anticipation rewarded with an LP full of bangers. But despite Swift’s meteoric rise in the last five years, the quality of her work has stagnated. No combination of fanfare and publicity blitz and headlines and awards can outweigh an album that you don’t want to put on repeat. “Only as hot as your last hit baby,” Swift sings on this album. Unfortunately for her, that phrase feels like a curse.<\/p>\n
Despite my hopes, The Life of a Showgirl is the weakest and least interesting album Swift has ever made. It has no heart, no purpose, no emotional core. And it is transparently clear why that is: because Swift clearly cared more about producing something\u2014anything\u2014that could be sold for profit than about making an album worth buying. It’s not an album. It’s a product for sale, and it sounds like one.<\/p>\n
Taylor Swift is a good business person. Her father worked in finance, and she has always understood how to make money as an artist. In her 2016 Vogue interview<\/a>, when asked what advice she has for young artists, Swift advised them to get a good lawyer. She boycotted Spotify when their rates weren\u2019t good enough for her. She has long-standing advertising gigs with Capital One and Diet Coke. When someone else stood to make profit off of her masters, she re-recorded all of the albums and re-sold them to fans. The Eras Tour is estimated to have grossed more than $2 billion<\/a>. Swift is unbelievably good at making money off of music in an era where almost no one is good at that.\u00a0<\/p>\n As it has been for her past few releases, Swift’s business acumen has been on display in full force for the promotion for The Life of a Showgirl. Upon announcing the album, Swift put up a vinyl for pre-order on her site, and then another, and then another. Before the album was even released, she had promoted and sold on her site eight exclusive vinyl variants in different colors with different names (“Sweat And Vanilla Perfume Edition,” “Baby, That\u2019s Show Business Edition”, etc), and eight CDs, and one sweater which comes with a CD. The vinyls cost $34. The CDs cost $20. The sweater\/CD costs $70. And one of those was a Target exclusive edition! Don\u2019t forget Target!\u00a0The marketing scheme for each of these releases (which came one after another) was scarcity. They will sell out! You will never have another opportunity! Hurry! Show your love and devotion! <\/p>\n And it worked. Billboard estimated that on the first day of release, from all of these pre-orders, Swift sold 2.7 million copies of this album<\/a> in physical and digital editions. When she announced this album on the New Heights podcast, she promised that this album wouldn’t have any bonus tracks. Historically, Swift has sold her fans the album, and then asked them to buy it again to access extra songs. The Life of a Showgirl, she promised, was fully complete. But then on Saturday night, another countdown appeared on her website, and at the end of it, she announced \u2026 four additional CDs of the same album that fans could buy. These versions cost $7.99 apiece and each includes two “exclusive” acoustic versions of songs on the album. That means that in addition to the songs on the album, Swift also recorded eight acoustic versions, but you can only hear them if you purchase each of the four CDs. She didn’t lie, technically. There are no new songs on these CDs\u2014just an opportunity for her to make even more money.<\/p>\n And on top of all of this, at the 11th hour before release, Swift announced a \u201cmovie.\u201d In theaters across the country this weekend, tickets were sold to a The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, event. The thing people are paying to watch in theaters is not a movie, really. It is a single music video for the lead song of the album, \u201cThe Fate of Ophelia\u201d (three minutes and 46 seconds), followed by 85 minutes of Swift providing commentary on the other songs, and lyric videos for those songs. The experience ends by playing the video for \u201cThe Fate of Ophelia\u201d again, which as Heather Schwedel wrote for Slate<\/a>, \u201cunderscores that you really did just pay $12 (plus convenience fees) to watch one short video.\u201d\u00a0According to Deadline<\/a> the gross for a weekend of ticket sales was about $33 million.<\/p>\n Almost all of these purchases were made by fans in anticipation of what the album might be. But now that the album is bad, people are justifiably mad. A billionaire asking her fans to buy several editions of the same exact mediocre album is a little hard to stomach.<\/p>\n All of this greed might be more palatable if the album were good, but it isn\u2019t. It is worth noting that Beyonc\u00e9 released Lemonade, an album with an accompanying movie that was as beautiful and well-directed and inspired as the album itself, at about the same age. But The Life of a Showgirl isn\u2019t beautiful or smart or even that catchy. The album is riddled with lazy writing and cliches. \u201cLife is a song, it ends when it ends,\u201d she sings on \u201cOpalite.\u201d \u201cI can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger,\u201d she sings on \u201cFather Figure.\u201d \u201cHis love was the key that opened my thighs,\u201d she sings on \u201cWood,\u201d which is a song about Travis Kelce\u2019s dick set over what sounds like a Jackson 5 sample.\u00a0<\/p>\n Worse is the album\u2019s over-reliance on memes and internet trends. It is very hard to write songs or essays or books about the internet\u2014anything that can\u2019t be composed and published in less than two days\u2014 without sounding outdated, because the internet moves at a speed that is so rapid that by the time you\u2019ve captured what was happening, no one is talking about it anymore. What makes a person sound old isn\u2019t using slang; it\u2019s arriving to the slang late, which Swift does repeatedly here. \u201cKeep it one hundred on the land, the sea, the sky,\u201d she sings on \u201cThe Fate of Ophelia.\u201d \u201cGirlboss too close to the sun,\u201d she sings on \u201cCANCELLED!\u201d \u201cThey gave her the keys to this city \/ Then they said she didn’t do it legitly,\u201d she sings on \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl.\u201d Perhaps most egregious is the song titled \u201cEldest Daughter\u201d\u2014referencing the infinite memes about how hard and terrible it is to be an eldest daughter\u2014where she sings \u201cEvery eldest daughter \/ Was the first lamb to the slaughter \/ So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.\u201d This not only uses a cliche, but doesn\u2019t make any damn sense.\u00a0As an eldest daughter myself, grow up!<\/p>\n Because Swift was on a massive media tour this weekend, I thought maybe her explanations would salvage some of this sloppy, lazy writing. Instead, her appearances made already bad lyrics worse. In a radio interview<\/a>, she said that her favorite piece of writing in the album is the line \u201cI pay the check before it kisses the mahogany grain\u201d from \u201cFather Figure.\u201d She then goes on to explain that this is her favorite because \u201cWhat do those words mean? Oh. Somebody got the bill before it hit the table, but instead you say \u2018kisses the mahogany grain\u2019.\u201d Using words that sound nice together, that make a simple sentence slightly more complicated, is not what makes writing good. Swift, in theory, knew this at some point in the past, because the writing on albums like Folklore and Evermore do not suffer from this problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n A personal gripe I have is that the first song on the album (which seems like it\u2019s meant to be the lead single), \u201cThe Fate of Ophelia,\u201d does not seem to have any understanding of Hamlet. Swift admitted in a BBC radio interview with Greg James that she \u201cdidn\u2019t really need to reread [Hamlet]. I wanted to sprinkle some references in the bridge, so like the the bridge references kind of some paraphrasing of some lines from Hamlet, so I did like do a little brush up. But I just love the idea that like, \u2018You you saved me from love driving me mad,\u2019 right? \u2019Cause that\u2019s what happened to Ophelia. Spoiler alert.\u201d<\/p>\n That is, in fact, not what happened to Ophelia. Ophelia in Hamlet did not kill herself because she wasn’t dating an NFL player. Ophelia commits suicide because she has no agency in her own life, because she is being controlled by the men around her. The bridge Swift is referring to in that song is \u201c’Tis locked inside my memory \/ And only you possess the key \/ No longer drowning and deceived \/ All because you came for me.\u201d As far as I can tell, the only Shakespeare reference here is the word “drowning.” It’s careless to write like this. And good work requires care. If you are going to write a song \u201cabout Ophelia\u201d titled \u201cThe Fate of Ophelia,\u201d the least you could do is re-read a play which would take you three hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n All of this is significantly worse from a writing perspective than Swift\u2019s first two albums, which she wrote as a high-schooler. Her fans are trying to cover for this: Pure pop albums don\u2019t have to have good lyrics! They can just be sounds! I have seen online this weekend infinite variations of the idea that \u201cIf you don\u2019t listen to the words, the songs are bops.\u201d First off, no they aren\u2019t. I cannot remember the melody to any of these songs despite listening to the album many times to write this article. But the problem is that Swift has spent so much of her career demanding to be taken seriously as more than a pop star because she specifically is a songwriter. “I wouldn\u2019t be a singer if I weren\u2019t a songwriter. I have no interest in singing someone else\u2019s words,” she told Billboard in 2014<\/a>. And if we judge The Life of a Showgirl by the standard of songwriting prowess she herself has demanded we view her through, it is an undeniable flop.\u00a0<\/p>\n How does someone who wrote a line like \u201cYou call me up again just to break me like a promise \/ So casually cruel in the name of being honest.\u201d or \u201cI should\u2019ve kept every grocery store receipt \/ Because every scrap of you would be taken from me.\u201d or \u201c\u201cTake the words for what they are \/ A dwindling, mercurial high \/ A drug that only worked \/ The first few hundred times\u201d end up writing, \u201cForgive me, it sounds cocky \/ He ah-matized me and opened my \u0435yes \/ Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see \/ His love was th\u0435 key that opened my thighs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Why is this such a lyrical disaster? Why doesn\u2019t it show any of the intrigue or the artistry she\u2019s managed to display in the past? Is it because Jack Antonoff was the secret sauce the whole time? Is it because she\u2019s so dickmatized (\u201cah-matized\u201d as she self-censors it on \u201cWood\u201d) by Travis Kelce that she forgot how to write? Is it because she\u2019s happier now and she can only write when depressed? Is it because her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn had more of a hand in the writing of Folklore and Evermore than we thought? Is it because Aaron Dessner wasn\u2019t involved?\u00a0<\/p>\n All of these theories are swirling around Swift fans on TikTok and Twitter and in person. I think the answer is simpler: Greed will always destroy art, and Swift\u2019s desire for profit\u2014her need to sell product when she already has far more money than any one person could possibly require\u2014has destroyed her ability to create anything of value. \u201cLack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.\u201d Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot. \u00a0That\u2019s what art becomes when its primary goal is to make money: unoriginal, boring, palatable.\u00a0<\/p>\n To create something, anything, good, takes time and desire. \u201cA project that takes five years will accumulate those years\u2019 inventions and richnesses. Much of those years\u2019 reading will feed the work.\u201d Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life. Good creative work draws on the well of your experience, on everything that you consumed and felt and saw over a period of time. If you dip into the well constantly without giving it time to refill, you end up with nothing but pieces of mud, nothing that will satiate a thirst for art.<\/p>\n Swift hasn\u2019t given herself time to write anything good in years. Since October 2022 (three years ago), Swift has released three full-length albums: Midnights, The Tortured Poets Department, and now Life of a Showgirl. Each of them was weaker than the last. In addition, she has also re-recorded four of her previous albums and released them (with new bonus tracks) as Taylor\u2019s Version editions.\u00a0During that same time period, she also spent eighteen months on the road performing 149 shows on the Eras Tour.\u00a0<\/p>\n