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Taylor Swift in showgirl guise for her twelfth album. Supplied<\/p>\n
The Life of a Showgirl<\/p>\n
by Taylor Swift<\/p>\n
Rather than being inconvenienced by listening to her music, many prefer to dismiss Taylor Swift through career statistics: more than 100 million albums sold; her Eras tour grossing more than $6 billion; a net worth around $2.7 billion.<\/p>\n
\n However the idea that
\n success in pop means baseline populism plays into the myth that modest sales or cult status equate to greater integrity and superior music.\n <\/p>\n
As far back as We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together on her 2012 Red album Swift dismissed a former lover with \u201c[you] find your peace of mind with some indie record that\u2019s so much cooler than mine\u201d.<\/p>\n
It must be galling for those writing \u201cTaylor who?\u201d on Facebook that, at 35, she\u2019s still here with her 12th studio album, not including four re-recorded albums with extra tracks.<\/p>\n
The uncomfortable reality for naysayers is a lot of people like Swift\u2019s music.<\/p>\n
With producers Max Martin and Shellback who crafted some of her better pop hits (Shake It Off and I Knew You Were Trouble), Swift here delivers an album with few surprises outside of Wood, an innuendo-filled celebration of fianc\u00e9 Travis Kelce\u2019s sexual apparatus: \u201cHis love was the key that opened my thighs\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Fate of Ophelia has her \u2013 in a rather broad interpretation \u2013 suffering as Shakespeare\u2019s Ophelia, a woman being driven mad by unrequited love \u2026 until Kelce called. In Elizabeth Taylor she asks the late, much-married star \u201cdo you think it\u2019s forever?\u201d.<\/p>\n
The relentlessly Swift-centric songs explore mixed emotions (\u201cI had a bad habit of missing lovers past\u201d in the poppy Opalite), poke at her former record exec on the downbeat shuffle of Father Figure (\u201cthey don\u2019t make loyalty like they used to\u201d) and push back at trolling of celebrities in Eldest Daughter (\u201ceverybody\u2019s cutthroat in the comments \u201d).<\/p>\n
There\u2019s the obligatory diss track, the coldly barbed Actually Romantic, apparently about Charli XCX. However little challenges or resonates like 2020\u2019s Folklore and Evermore albums.<\/p>\n
![\"Coming]()
Coming up for air: The artwork to Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s musically familiar, not especially populist because of her continuing self-obsession and just not that interesting or fun.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s Taylor Swift. Fans will dissect it and reviews \u2013 even by those who listened open-minded \u2013 are of little consequence. The day before release a BBC online heading read, \u201cTaylor Swift Has Made Herself Too Big to Fail\u201d.<\/p>\n
As she sings on the title track, a meditation on fame and the price paid for the payoff, \u201cbut I\u2019m immortal now, baby dolls\u201d.<\/p>\n
This album is available digitally, on CD and limited edition vinyl<\/p>\n
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Copy LinkEmailFacebookTwitter\/XLinkedInReddit<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Review by Graham Reid Music writer\u00b7New Zealand Listener\u00b7 5 Oct, 2025 10:59 PM3 mins to read Graham Reid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[695,156,50420,2082,157,117,111,139,7805,69,7680,8628,23741,11208,50419,163,1361],"class_list":["post-61374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-album","tag-entertainment","tag-except","tag-for","tag-music","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-no","tag-nz","tag-sex","tag-song","tag-surprises","tag-swift","tag-swifts","tag-taylor","tag-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61374","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=61374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Graham](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/aff68604-9048-4b0d-8b50-b48a0484757f.jpg\")
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