About a month ago, if you asked me about the upcoming Taylor Swift album, “The Life of a Showgirl”, I would have expressed nothing but excitement. The narrative built in this album, through the glossy, high budget marketing and intriguing visuals promised glamour, drama, and a look behind the curtain. The album also covered Swift’s highs and lows during the record-breaking Eras Tour.

With collaborators like hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback, the general expectation was pure pop banger after banger. Fans geared up for a return to “1989”-style ear candy after more depressing, melancholy eras such as “The Tortured Poets Department”. The aforementioned album had a lukewarm reception and, with its 31 songs including “The Anthology,” signaled that perhaps the world’s number one pop superstar needed to curtail herself a bit. Perhaps another editor for the poet would help bring out Swift’s best while leaving the muddier, monotonous songs in the drafts.

As such, with a succinct, twelve-song tracklist and no extra surprises, coupled with the knowledge that Swift is in the blissful fiancé era she has yearned for since the days of “Love Story”, “The Life of a Showgirl” was supposed to satiate the public’s pop appetite.

And yet, when the clock struck midnight on Oct. 3, all the world got was about forty minutes of…meh. Meh, leaning on bad, if I am being honest, even as a fan of Swift’s work. Truly, it was the sort of listen that forced me to go back into her earlier works to cope with the blandness-bordering-on-pop-slop that constituted “Showgirl”.

The first three songs are catchy; “The Fate of Ophelia” was an easily digestible bop I went back to a couple times after the first listen. Despite my initial feelings about its misinterpretation of “Hamlet” and Ophelia’s main arc, I was impressed by the music video, which is dripping in expensive sets and colorful production). Sonically, track two, “Elizabeth Taylor”, with its piano riffs and slightly “Reputation”-esque vocals, is also a treat, and probably the one song at this point in time I actually would go back to. The third song, “Opalite”, is fun but not much more than that. 

From there, the album dissolves into redundancy, with not much distinguishing each song sonically or vocally (even with expensive, high-quality production) from the rest. The fourth track, “Father Figure”, has the workings of good storytelling and imagery and a classic Swift subversion of common phrases. “You’ll be sleeping with the fishes before you know you’re drowning,” she sings in the last verse. Ultimately, it is difficult to get over her attempts to be edgy with the explicit lyrics in the chorus. If anything, the clean version of the song works better. It shifts the tone of the song too much, and this problem is echoed in the rest of the album — Swift opened up Urban Dictionary and never went back, and seemingly random contemporary words and phrases stick out in this album like a sore thumb.

Combined with the allegations of her microaggressions towards Black women in multiple songs on the album, Swift comes off as too comfortable, careless, and even lazy with her art. She likely knows she is too big to fail, and that comes through with the half-baked themes in the discography of “Showgirl”. Of course, there are still moments of better lyricism on this piece, but they are so greatly overshadowed by the attempts to be “cool” and overt references that they cannot hold their own.

These moments are also similar enough to previous thematic ideas in Swift’s twenty-year career that they become disappointing and tired. The romance can be justified, sure, but her misguided self-victimization (her Charli XCX diss track, plus the song Cancelled!) seem like a cheap, last ditch-attempt to play the underdog when it’s well-known she firmly sits on top. Beef in music is not new (we all remember Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake in 2024), but in Swift’s case, it seems one-sided and silly.

While holding anyone to constant evolution is not the fairest, from an artistic standpoint, Swift has built her mythology around this changing and constant pursuit of making good music.  Even if it is not objectively the best music ever, there is a certain passion — a songwriting energy like the rent is due — that shines through in her older albums. 

Or maybe Swift has evolved, but just in a direction that hurts her art. She is now a mega-successful billionaire who has bagged the football player and lives in a bubble of wealth and security. And this blandness, this lack of fire, has unfortunately carried over into “The Life of a Showgirl”. As Swift says in an advertisement for one of the many “Showgirl” variants, “it’s giving no-girl.”