{"id":70908,"date":"2025-10-10T23:13:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T23:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/70908\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T23:13:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T23:13:07","slug":"we-need-a-break-from-taylor-swift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/70908\/","title":{"rendered":"We need a break from Taylor Swift"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a familiar rhythm to a Taylor Swift<\/a> album drop, honed over the past decade: The critics weigh in. The takes arrive. The ancillary gossip about who and what is referenced in lyrics and who\u2019s going to be chapped about it begins circulating. There\u2019s a burst of Swiftie-related social-media drama, some notes on the quality of the production and the obvious references. Eventually, all the main angles are covered, and the various dissents and theories are taken to Reddit. People continue listening or they don\u2019t, and the world goes on turning.<\/p>\n

There has never been a pop star quite like Taylor Swift. That\u2019s not meant as a value judgment. There\u2019s never been a pop star like Swift because until fairly recently, there had never been a 24\/7 delivery system for multimodal pop stardom, or a culture where the release of an album prompts so many people to feel that having a response is a non-negotiable critical duty.<\/p>\n

This year, with \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl<\/a>,\u201d things felt a little different. Maybe it was the 11th-hour announcement of release parties or the residual weirdness of Donald Trump\u2019s apparent preoccupation with getting Swift\u2019s attention<\/a>, or the atmosphere of general chaos. Whatever the reason, there was a mad scramble to be the first out of the gate with the definitive takedown. It\u2019s bad. It\u2019s mid. It\u2019s lazy. Too cringe.<\/a> Too happy. Too self-referential. There were confident assertions that the album was going to flop<\/a>, followed quickly by reports that it absolutely wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

There has never been a pop star quite like Taylor Swift. That\u2019s not meant as a value judgment. There\u2019s never been a pop star like Swift because until fairly recently, there had never been a 24\/7 delivery system for multimodal pop stardom, or a culture where the release of an album prompts so many people to feel that having a response to it is a non-negotiable assignment. Taylor Swift is unique not because she\u2019s a bigger or better pop star than Michael Jackson, Madonna<\/a>, Whitney Houston or Beyonc\u00e9<\/a>, but because she is a self-sustaining media ecosystem that people regularly enter for the sole purpose of performing a reaction.<\/p>\n

Paying near-constant attention to Taylor Swift, and Swift paying near-constant attention to the attention paid to her could only result in a codependent relationship, and it has. Way too many of us think we need to love Taylor Swift, hate Taylor Swift or at the bare minimum have a strong opinion about her. In turn, Swift herself bears an outsized self-consciousness and sense of responsibility<\/a> to an audience beyond her actual audience. That this has become a routine dynamic doesn\u2019t make it a healthy one.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to take a break from Taylor Swift, and for her to take a break from us.<\/p>\n

I get that this sounds presumptuous: Who the hell am I to stage a Taylor\/America intervention, even a purely hypothetical one? It\u2019s a fair question. As a writer and editor and pop-culture critic, I\u2019ve spent a lot of the last decade-plus aware of Taylor Swift\u2019s cultural primacy despite having never made an effort to know anything about her. Gigabytes of information about her life, her music, her legal battles<\/a>, her dramas and especially her relationships<\/a> have piled up on my screens unbeckoned. I\u2019ve seen relationships derailed because of Swift-related misalignment and watched fellow critics be tormented by her notoriously intense fandom<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But also, I am firmly neutral, neither a fan nor a non-fan. I have appreciated her bangers and been moved to tears by her epics, but that\u2019s true of any number of artists. If all the other pop stars on Earth were raptured away and Swift was the only one left, I could probably live with it. If an alien craft absconded with Swift and her music disappeared overnight, I\u2019d be sad for her loved ones but basically unaffected. I have no dog in this fight, just a sense that it\u2019s a good time to consider how this relationship is impacting everyone involved.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s consider a few of the issues.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(Bruce Bennett\/Getty Images) Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift on June 12, 2025 in Sunrise, Florida.<\/p>\n

Issue #1: Expectations have become needlessly high<\/p>\n

Swift made \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl\u201d during breaks in the \u201cEras Tour<\/a>,\u201d which visited 21 countries over 21 months and involved a breakneck schedule. She flew to Sweden to work with songwriting team Max Martin and Shellback, reuniting with them for the first time since 2016\u2019s \u201c1989.\u201d \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl\u201d is a concept album in the same way that \u201cThe Tortured Poets Department<\/a>\u201d was a concept album, visually setting a specific mood \u2014 in this case, with the invocation of hustle and routine, stage makeup and wardrobe fittings and the clinging scent of industrial-strength hairspray. The promotional photos feature Swift decked out in peek-a-boo rhinestones, flesh-tone fishnets, and neon-bright plumage of the kind that once filled Las Vegas casino stages.<\/p>\n

But with Swift\u2019s own metric in mind, I don\u2019t think this will be remembered as her Showgirl Era. That doesn\u2019t mean the new album isn\u2019t catchy or well constructed; the content just doesn\u2019t match the energy of the concept. Each track has something going on somewhere within it (even the one about Travis Kelce\u2019s junk<\/a>, I\u2019m sorry to report); the lyrics are maximalist tangles presented on shiny trays to be combed through for shared history and Easter eggs. But the tacit promise of overall oomph just doesn\u2019t deliver. There\u2019s no bump and no grind: The bits of spicy wordplay stand out mostly because Swift doesn\u2019t sound fully committed to them.<\/p>\n

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter<\/a>, Crash Course.<\/p>\n

The success of the \u201cEras Tour\u201d put pressure on Swift to offer up something splashy and new to keep the momentum going, and the album\u2019s title and visuals suggested that the tour had inspired Swift in a more mature, world-weary direction. Commercially, the reviews don\u2019t matter: \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl\u201d has already put up record-breaking first-week numbers<\/a>. Popular reception defying critical reception and vice-versa is pretty standard. TLOAS will fold into Swift\u2019s existing oeuvre, hauled out and reconsidered every few years until eternity. Releasing a new album every year, regardless of how much else is going on, means that every so often one of them will feel a little phoned in. If there\u2019s an action item here, it\u2019s that everyone can be more proactive about managing expectations.<\/p>\n

\"Taylor<\/p>\n

(Gareth Cattermole\/TAS24\/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management) Taylor Swift during \u201cThe Eras Tour\u201d at Wembley Stadium on August 15, 2024, in London, England.<\/p>\n

Issue #2: Pop stars do not work for you<\/p>\n

At the intersection of late-stage capitalism and toxic fandom lies the misguided belief that spending money to be entertained is an investment that guarantees a return, and that\u2019s a hard no. If you love an artist or director or comic-book creator and make the choice to buy their stuff and help ensure they make more of it \u2014 that\u2019s great, but the relationship ends there. Money spent on tickets, albums and meet-and-greets doesn\u2019t buy anyone, much less everyone, a say in what comes next.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, this was a lot more clear-cut before the internet and social media gave fans the opportunity to interact with their faves. Shortening the distance between creators and fandoms isn\u2019t inherently unhealthy, but these parasocial relationships<\/a> can lead fans to confuse themselves with patrons. The result is a plague of entitlement with real-world impacts. Taylor Swift\u2019s fans have stood out over the years for group mobilizations that, even at their most well-meaning, are still titanic oversteps: harassing Swift\u2019s past lovers, doxxing critics who are insufficiently complimentary about albums, delivering an open letter <\/a>to the singer demanding that she answer for her boyfriend\u2019s past behaviors and remarks, and more.<\/p>\n

At the intersection of late-stage capitalism and toxic fandom lies the misguided belief that spending money to be entertained is an investment that guarantees a return, and that\u2019s a hard no.<\/p>\n

Credit to Swift for putting in extraordinary effort to give her best to fans despite their menacing tendencies. On the other hand, it\u2019s tempting to wonder if all the exclusive vinyl editions<\/a> and bonus acoustic tracks function as a kind of hassle tax on her fans. But even if it\u2019s not passive-aggressive, the fact that \u201cTaylor\u2019s version\u201d has morphed into multiple limited-edition alternative packaging is a bad look. Just as ACAB includes Benson and Stabler<\/a>, \u201cbillionaires shouldn\u2019t exist\u201d includes Taylor Swift.<\/p>\n

A couple of action items here: Remember that just as you don\u2019t owe an artist your time and money, they don\u2019t owe you more than the art you have made the choice to enjoy. And Taylor, don\u2019t take advantage of fan worship by squeezing extra money out of fans \u2014 it\u2019s bad optics, and it normalizes an overly transactional dynamic.<\/p>\n

Issue #3: Taylor Swift is reflexively centered in pop-music discourse\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPoptimism\u201d was a good-faith concept when it first entered the lexicon in the early 2010s to help give critical context to Taylor Swift\u2019s emerging body of work<\/a>. A somewhat reactionary term from the jump, poptimism was situated as a corrective to \u201crockism,\u201d a binary explored in Kelefa Sanneh\u2019s influential 2004 New Yorker piece \u201cThe Rap Against Rockism.\u201d<\/a> In theory, poptimism gave critics \u2014 and it was mainly critics who used the term \u2014 a framework for countering long-prevailing ideas of pop music as insubstantial and empty, with no claim to importance. In practice, positing all pop music as deliberate pushback to rockism\u2019s narrowly conceived authenticity ended up on a slippery slope into overcorrection, hyperbole and and the inadvertent big-upping of an exploitative industry.<\/p>\n

With every drop of a new TS album, there are people strapping on headlamps and diving into the lyric sheets like they\u2019re decoding ancient runes on a tight deadline.<\/p>\n

Honestly, it takes nothing away from Swift\u2019s songwriting to push back against the claim that Taylor Swift is the greatest pop lyricist of all time, in that the claim is evidence of a limited frame of reference. Her popular and critical ascent has already secured her place in music history. Meanwhile, streaming has allowed all of us to discover music we love without needing to slot that music into a hierarchy of genre and value dictated by critics. Putting disproportionate energy into dissecting every professional and personal move of a performer who is already very much inevitable just re-entrenches Swift as the standard to which every emerging woman artist is held. They deserve the chance to make us love them on a more even field. The main action item here is one that Taylor already does \u2014 shifting the spotlight to others \u2014 but I think she could go further by taking a creative break somewhere remote, with inconsistent WiFi.<\/p>\n

Issue #4: Not everything needs to be a grand narrative<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should all know less about each other\u201d is a shibboleth that\u2019s marked social media\u2019s supersaturation. I\u2019d amend it to say that we should all specifically know less about Taylor Swift.<\/p>\n

Part of what makes Swift a compelling songwriter and performer is her ability to make the personal universal, but somewhere along the way, things started lingering in the realm of the personal, with Swift scattering each release<\/a> with lyrical callbacks and Easter eggs meant to prompt avid close-reading. With every drop of a new TS album, there are people strapping on headlamps and diving into the lyric sheets like they\u2019re decoding ancient runes on a tight deadline. This, in turn, creates a whole news cycle about beefs and backstories that further perpetuates all the previously mentioned issues. This not only makes Swift seem petty, it drags whomever she is wordily trash-talking back into something that\u2019s likely not worth the effort to explain, much less relitigate.<\/p>\n

Several months back, I thought the reactions to the news that Taylor and Travis were engaged \u2014 for instance, the University of Tennessee professor canceling an exam<\/a> so everyone could process the news \u2014 was ample evidence that the parasocial investment into Swift\u2019s life is more than just escapism. But Swift is part of this feedback loop: She had every right to jazz up the announcement with an engagement photoshoot, of course. (\u201cYour English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.\u201d) But that set her up for an inevitable counternarrative that\u2019s emerged with \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl\u201d \u2014 namely, that a happy Taylor Swift is a boring Taylor Swift<\/a>. I hope I\u2019m wrong in my hunch that a rogue band of Swifties has already been calling on Etsy witches to curse this union and release the tortured poet back into the heartbroken wild.<\/p>\n

The action item here is very simple: Taylor, take a break and let us miss you a little bit. We know you\u2019ll be back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a familiar rhythm to a Taylor Swift album drop, honed over the past decade: The critics weigh…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-70908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70908","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=70908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}