Even with 38 ways to buy it, Taylor Swift\u2019s fans aren\u2019t living for The Life of a Showgirl.<\/p>\n
When Swift dropped her 12th studio album earlier this month, people were already primed to hate it. As part of her rollout, she released a concerning amount of products<\/a> around the release. From \u201cThe Shiny Bug Vinyl Collection\u201d to the \u201cShowgirl Cardigan Boxed Set,\u201d many people weren\u2019t excited to fork over more money for an exclusive version of her album.<\/p>\n The 12-track record got mixed reviews; it was divisive even among her biggest fans. Some critics said it was cringey<\/a>, disappointing<\/a>, and that her music has \u201cnever<\/a> been less compelling.\u201d Upon this reception, Swift said<\/a>, \u201cI have a lot of respect for people\u2019s subjective opinions on art. I\u2019m not the art police.\u201d<\/p>\n Ann Powers, a music critic at NPR, says this is all part of the Taylor Swift agenda. Powers makes the case that at the height of her success, Swift is now playing a villain on purpose. We spoke with her about Swift\u2019s showgirl mentality, hyper-personal lyrics, and why she\u2019ll likely come out stronger on the other end of this record\u2019s hate train.<\/p>\n Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There\u2019s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained<\/a> wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Pandora<\/a>, and Spotify<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Life of a Showgirl was released three weeks ago. Has your thinking evolved at all?<\/p>\n I found it really interesting to observe the backlash against Taylor Swift, which is more intense this year and with this release than it was with her previous release. I\u2019m most interested in how both critics and the general public are now responding to Taylor in a very different way than they did even about the Eras Tour. I imagine her clinging to a giant pendulum as it swings back and forth.<\/p>\n And this is possibly inevitable with anyone of her stature. But I really think we\u2019re seeing it play out that Taylor Swift has become the avatar for so many of our anxieties, so many of our dissatisfactions.<\/p>\n But two things happened with his album. The first is that there are so many variants: There\u2019s a Target exclusive, \u201cCrowd Is Your King\u201d vinyl; there\u2019s the hairbrush that falls apart; there\u2019s a \u201cTiny Bubbles in Champagne\u201d collection. <\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the fact that a lot of people, when the album first dropped, decided they didn\u2019t really like it. How do we square those two things? Do those two facts depend on one another?<\/p>\n They\u2019re in a relationship with one another. I\u2019m not sure if they depend on one another. What\u2019s interesting about the backlash [to] the album itself is that it seems to have been triggered by the leak of the lyrics for a particular song, \u201cActually Romantic,\u201d which is the song that allegedly is aimed at the pop star Charli XCX. And I think the timing of that leak was a big negative for the reception of this album.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not like: and then we realized that Taylor Swift is rich. How did everyone become so irritated about the same thing?<\/p>\n This has been building for a while. After The Tortured Poets Department came out, I\u2019ve started to see more and more online chatter about Taylor Swift\u2019s wealth, her social status, and her choice to continue to write songs in which she is the \u201cunderdog,\u201d even though she is so on top of the world. Not coincidentally, this was going on as a larger backlash has been brewing against very wealthy Americans in general.<\/p>\n And Taylor\u2019s response is what exactly?<\/p>\n Well, Swift did a small number of interviews upon the release of the record, and in one of them, on The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music, she basically said, \u201cI\u2019m not the art police. I am okay with how anyone responds to this album.\u201d<\/p>\n And that has been a notable part of this backlash. It\u2019s not only professional critics, it\u2019s not only online trolls who never liked Taylor Swift anyway. A lot of very diehard Taylor fans are also publicly raising doubts about their hero.<\/p>\n A lot of people have asked whether a person can create great art when they are rich and happy. I remember when Cowboy Carter came out, and there was this line in one of the songs where Beyonc\u00e9 talked about being overworked and overwhelmed. And that line really triggered people. This is a similar type of pushback. <\/p>\n Beyonc\u00e9 did something very smart and very deft. She did it out of conviction, which is that at a certain point in her career, she stopped speaking so much personally as representatively. She started connecting her personal stories with the history of racism and oppression. She\u2019s continued to do that. Also uplifting her family, uplifting her community, as she\u2019s defined it. She has managed to sort of make her music bigger than herself \u2014 make her art bigger than herself.<\/p>\n Consider that next to Taylor Swift. She has very much clung to autobiography as the center of what she does. And it\u2019s harder to kind of figure out how exactly she would have consciously and righteously made herself representative of anything or anyone besides herself.<\/p>\n Beyonc\u00e9 is, you\u2019re arguing, very clearly evolving. What do you make of the critique that this album is an example \u2014 not that Taylor Swift isn\u2019t a great artist, but that she\u2019s not growing?<\/p>\n I find it strange that being a pop star and producing albums is sort of being talked about as if it is a life journey of self-improvement. Did we ask that of Mick Jagger? I don\u2019t necessarily think we did. Another thing is: I don\u2019t have any problem with someone writing songs about adolescence for their whole life. That\u2019s fine with me.<\/p>\n Now do you want to hear my theory about the record?<\/p>\n You\u2019re damn right I do.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think Taylor Swift made this record to make more money. Does she need the money? Obviously not. She\u2019s a capitalist. I do think, however, that she\u2019s very interested in controlling her public narrative and controlling the narrative that she\u2019s building through her albums. She\u2019s very focused on her music being the center of everything.<\/p>\n And I think she made this record because she is now in a happier place in her life. She needed a marker on the highway that said, \u201cHey, I\u2019m happy now. I\u2019m in control. I have power. I no longer feel the way I felt when I was wallowing in my own misery.\u201d<\/p>\n So do I blame her for that? No, I don\u2019t blame her for that. I get it completely. But let\u2019s recognize it for what it is. It\u2019s a marker on her highway. She\u2019s going to go somewhere else pretty soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even with 38 ways to buy it, Taylor Swift\u2019s fans aren\u2019t living for The Life of a Showgirl.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102026,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[2396,156,52126,157,111,139,69,49,1865],"class_list":{"0":"post-102025","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-explained-podcast","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-podcasts","16":"tag-today"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}