Do We Know the Life of a Showgirl?
Updated: Sep 9
Taylor Swift promised us a glimpse behind the curtain. Instead, I came away wondering whether the curtain has ever been more firmly closed.
There was probably no album Taylor Swift could have released after The Eras Tour that wouldn’t have arrived carrying an absurd amount of expectation. How do you follow that? Not simply the tour itself, but the entire cultural event surrounding it: three and a half hours on stage, stadium after stadium, friendship bracelets, surprise songs, record-breaking ticket sales, a concert film, re-recordings, constant speculation about her personal life and an audience that had spent nearly two decades being taught that if Taylor Swift leaves a clue somewhere, somebody on the internet will have identified the font within seventeen minutes.
And somewhere inside all of that, Taylor Swift was apparently writing another album.
When she announced The Life of a Showgirl, I thought I knew what kind of record we were getting. Not musically. Taylor changes genres far too often for me to make that assumption. I mean thematically. The Life of a Showgirl? Come on. A woman who has spent nearly twenty years becoming one of the most recognisable people on the planet had just completed a tour that turned her own life and career into a three-and-a-half-hour retrospective performance. Who better to tell us what happens when the lights go down?
I expected exhaustion, performance, femininity and the peculiar loneliness of being adored by millions of people who don’t actually know you. I wanted the relationship between Taylor Swift the woman and Taylor Swift, the enormously profitable cultural institution. What does it mean to perform happiness when you’re exhausted? What does fame do to somebody when there is almost nowhere left for them to become more famous? Who is the woman taking off the sequinned bodysuit after everybody else has gone home?
There is an incredible album hiding inside that concept. I’m just not convinced The Life of a Showgirl consistently is it.
The Performance Behind the Performance
Something about this era feels different, and I don’t necessarily mean that Taylor has changed creatively. Artists should change. God forbid she were still writing Fearless at thirty-six because some of us got emotionally attached to it as teenagers.
It’s the voice around the music that feels different. Taylor Swift has always been a brand as well as a person; that isn’t new. What feels newer is how visible the machinery has become. Captions can feel polished within an inch of their lives. Announcements arrive as events. Merchandise drops become miniature productions. Limited editions appear, disappear and reappear in slightly different clothes. At some point, being a Taylor Swift fan began to feel slightly like participating in an extremely well-managed retail ecosystem.
Which, yes, is capitalism. Taylor Swift is not personally forcing anybody to buy their seventeenth vinyl variant at gunpoint. But it’s difficult to separate the art from the machinery surrounding it when the machinery has become this visible. Taylor used to perform onstage. Increasingly, Taylor Swift performs at the checkout page too.
That’s particularly strange for an album supposedly concerned with performance, because The Life of a Showgirl had the perfect opportunity to interrogate that machinery. Instead, quite a lot of the album seems content to participate in it.
Taylor wrote the record during The Eras Tour, and you can hear that. Not necessarily because the album sounds emotionally raw, but because at times it sounds tired. Creatively tired. There are moments that feel as though they were written at three in the morning after a three-and-a-half-hour stadium show by a woman who, with love, desperately needed to go to bed.
Perhaps that’s unfair. Except this is Taylor Swift, a writer who built a career partly on making the intensely specific feel universal. She could make a scarf devastating. A cardigan became mythology. A getaway car became an entire relationship. She has written songs where one turn of phrase can suddenly make you understand a relationship you’ve never been in.
So when The Life of a Showgirl gives me lines that sound more like Instagram captions than observations, I notice. Especially because occasionally the old precision comes roaring back, and then I remember exactly what I’m missing.
The Visuals Understand the Assignment Better Than the Songs
Take “The Fate of Ophelia”. There is a genuinely beautiful idea sitting inside that title. Ophelia: a woman destroyed partly by the expectations, manipulations and actions of the men surrounding her. A showgirl: a woman whose profession requires her to become spectacle. Taylor Swift: a woman whose relationships, body, friendships, feuds, sexuality and emotional life have been turned into public entertainment since she was a teenager.
There is so much to work with there that I practically want a whiteboard.
The problem isn’t that Taylor uses contemporary language alongside Shakespeare. She has always blended registers, and I don’t require every lyric about Ophelia to sound as though Shakespeare has temporarily taken a producing credit. The problem is that some of the language doesn’t carry the weight of the concept surrounding it. A potentially enormous idea can suddenly become strangely disposable.
And bizarrely, the visual world does understand it.
The imagery moves through different forms of female performance: muse, screen siren, showgirl, woman posed and watched and transformed into something for other people to consume. That is exactly where the concept becomes interesting. The visual language understands what The Life of a Showgirl could mean.
Which leaves me with a strange problem. The concept around the song is often more interesting than the song itself.
That’s almost the album’s problem in miniature. The showgirl aesthetic is magnificent. The photographs are magnificent. The colours, costumes and Old Hollywood references create a world I immediately want to enter. But a visual concept cannot do all of an album’s thematic work for it.
Sometimes Showgirl feels less like a concept album than an album standing beside an extremely good concept.
I Keep Seeing the Songs These Could Have Been
That was the frustration I had repeatedly. “Elizabeth Taylor” should be catnip for me: Old Hollywood, beauty, fame, impermanence, a woman so famous that the public’s relationship with her image became almost inseparable from the person herself.
There is an entire song available there about what happens when a woman becomes an icon and then has to survive everybody else’s relationship with the icon. When the song commits to that world, it works. The production is luxurious and melodramatic enough to justify invoking Elizabeth Taylor in the first place. This is one of the moments where the album actually feels as expensive, theatrical and excessive as its visual identity.
But elsewhere, I keep seeing ideas that could have been pushed further.
“Eldest Daughter” could have explored female responsibility, inherited perfectionism and the strange experience of becoming a family’s first experiment in adulthood. The eldest daughter as prototype: the first child expected to get everything right so everybody else can learn from her mistakes. The girl who becomes responsible before anybody remembers to ask whether she wanted responsibility.
There is something generational in that. Something specifically female. Something worth writing.
But when emotionally specific ideas are expressed through internet language that already feels culturally temporary, some of that potential collapses. Taylor’s best writing has historically done the opposite: it takes something rooted in a particular moment and finds language capable of outliving the moment.
That’s why the weaker writing on this album frustrates me more than it probably would from somebody else. Taylor taught us what she can do.
Taylor Swift Is Still at Her Best When She Gets Specific
The songs that work best for me are the ones where she stops announcing an idea and simply tells me something.
“Ruin the Friendship” returns to territory Taylor understands almost instinctively: memory, regret, the person you could have kissed, the parallel life that existed for three seconds before disappearing. It remembers something small and then interrogates its importance. That is what her best writing does. The personal becomes universal because the personal was specific enough in the first place.
“Opalite” works for a similar reason. Its central metaphor is simple, but there is emotional movement underneath it. Instead of merely informing us that she is happy, the song gives that happiness a before and an after. There is a person who understood love one way and now understands it differently.
That is a story, and stories are where Taylor is strongest.
It also reveals something about the album’s larger problem. Travis Kelce is everywhere on The Life of a Showgirl, but strangely little Travis Kelce is actually there.
His world is present: the team, the public romance, the stability he represents, the idea of a huge uncomplicated love arriving after years of emotional chaos. But as a person on the page, he remains surprisingly indistinct.
I don’t think that necessarily means the relationship itself lacks depth. I suspect the opposite explanation is more interesting.
I think she’s protecting it.
The Diary Has Gone Through Communications
Taylor Swift’s best records create an illusion of dangerous proximity. They make you feel slightly intrusive, as though somebody left a diary open and you know you shouldn’t read it, but unfortunately you’ve already reached page six.
The Life of a Showgirl is still personal, but it frequently feels like the diary has gone through Communications first. Everything is still personal; it’s just approved personal.
That difference matters.
Taylor is older now. Her relationship is more public in some ways and perhaps much more protected in others. She may simply have reached the point where she no longer wants to hand strangers a small window of something she hopes to keep.
Which is good. She doesn’t owe us that.
The problem is artistic rather than moral. Taylor has historically been exceptional at making private specificity universal. Here, she often seems to write around the relationship rather than from inside it. We receive what Travis means: safety, stability, happiness, desire, partnership, a future. We receive less of the ordinary detail that turns a symbol into a person.
So one of the most publicly visible romances in the world has produced some of Taylor’s most carefully guarded love writing.
Perhaps that is growth. Perhaps that is privacy. It is probably both. But it also means that the audience promised life behind the curtain is very definitely still looking at fabric.
“Actually Romantic” gives us another version of that distance. Its premise is genuinely funny: if somebody spends this much time hating you, at what point does hatred begin looking suspiciously like fixation? That is exactly the sort of petty conceit Taylor can make delicious.
Yet at times the execution feels more concerned with ensuring that we know she won than with investigating the obsession itself. Old Taylor could make petty sound literary. This Taylor occasionally seems content merely to make sure you know she came out on top.
Winning, as it turns out, is not automatically good material.
Winning Is Not Automatically Good Material
That may be Taylor’s strangest creative problem now.
She won. Not everything, obviously. Human beings are inconveniently incapable of completing life like a video game. But professionally, what exactly is left to prove?
She survived the backlash that was supposed to end her career. She rebuilt. She re-recorded her work. She completed an enormous tour. She has accumulated the kind of commercial dominance artists usually spend their entire careers chasing. Taylor Swift is no longer writing from the position of the underestimated girl trying to get into the room.
She owns a significant portion of the building.
That changes the story.
“Father Figure” becomes interesting precisely because it understands this. For once, Taylor is not positioning herself against power. She is power. The performer has become the boss. The person who once feared being controlled can now recognise something of herself in the person doing the controlling.
That is far more fascinating to me than another declaration that Taylor Swift is successful. I know she is successful. Everybody with access to electricity knows she is successful.
What interests me is what success has done to her. What compromises did it require? What instincts did it sharpen? Which ones did it dull? What happens when the person who spent years fighting gatekeepers becomes powerful enough that very few people can meaningfully tell her no?
Because another frustration running through Showgirl is that it occasionally sounds insufficiently edited. Not unfinished — Taylor Swift is far too technically accomplished for that — but unchallenged.
There was a ruthlessness to some of her earlier records. Good songs could be left behind because they didn’t belong to the larger story. An idea could be sacrificed so that another one landed harder. Here, I sometimes hear an idea that needed somebody in the room to say, Nearly. Again.
That doesn’t mean Taylor has lost her ability. The great songs prove the opposite. It means talent and filtration are not the same thing, and no artist becomes so talented that editing stops being useful.
The Showgirl We Nearly Got
When The Life of a Showgirl genuinely commits to its premise, I understand exactly why Taylor was excited about it.
“Elizabeth Taylor” belongs in this world. The glamour is excessive, the fame is absurd and the romance is theatrical. There is a woman becoming so culturally enormous that the public image begins threatening to swallow the private person. Now we’re talking.
“Father Figure” approaches the showgirl from the opposite direction. Not the showgirl as victim, but the showgirl as tyrant: the person who survived the machine long enough to learn how to operate it.
Those perspectives complicate Taylor’s mythology rather than merely celebrating it.
Then the title track arrives and, frustratingly, the whole album snaps into focus. One showgirl speaking to another. Glamour and exhaustion existing at the same time. The knowledge that being watched can be intoxicating and punishing and that eventually the person performing may no longer know how to separate herself from the performance.
That is the album I wanted.
Not simply fame is difficult. Taylor has written that before. The more interesting question is what happens when performing Taylor Swift becomes one of Taylor Swift’s longest relationships.
The show depends on her. The company depends on her. Thousands of people’s work depends in some way on her continuing to be Taylor Swift at an almost industrial scale, and she is apparently very good at it.
So when does she stop? Can she? Would she even want to?
That is The Life of a Showgirl.
Maybe We Aren’t Supposed to Know
This is where I eventually began wondering whether I had misunderstood the title entirely.
Maybe The Life of a Showgirl was never promising us the woman underneath the performance. Maybe the performance is the life.
Taylor Swift has spent nearly two decades transforming autobiography into pop music. Because she has given audiences so much apparent access through her work, it becomes easy to mistake that access for entitlement.
It isn’t.
She doesn’t owe us the unedited relationship. She doesn’t owe us a psychological autopsy every time something happens to her. She doesn’t have to bleed onto an album because previous versions of Taylor Swift did.
In fact, perhaps the emotional distance here is evidence that she has finally learned where to draw a boundary. There is something almost admirable about that.
But it creates a fascinating problem for an artist whose greatest trick has always been making the boundary disappear. At her best, Taylor can make seventy thousand people in a stadium feel as though she is speaking privately to each of them.
On The Life of a Showgirl, I can see the machinery: the branding, the commerce, the mythology, the celebrity relationship and the enormous cultural apparatus required to keep Taylor Swift operating at Taylor Swift scale. Somewhere inside all of it, I can still hear the songwriter.
There are flashes of the precision that made 1989 so clean, the teeth of reputation, the intimacy of Red and the storytelling discipline of folklore and evermore. They are still there.
Which is why the weaker moments frustrate me as much as they do. I don’t think The Life of a Showgirl is evidence that Taylor Swift has suddenly forgotten how to write. If anything, the opposite problem may be true. She knows exactly how good she is, and she no longer needs every song to prove it.
Perhaps after twenty years, she has earned the right to make whatever she wants. But earning the right to make whatever you want does not make everything you make equally interesting.
That is where I land with this album. I don’t hate it. I don’t think Taylor has lost whatever made her Taylor Swift. There are songs here I genuinely love, ideas I wish she had chased further and moments where the entire concept suddenly becomes as brilliant as the imagery surrounding it.
But for a record that appears to offer a look beyond the spectacle, I finish it feeling strangely distant from the woman performing it.
We get glimpses: a costume change, a knowing look, the illusion of a dressing-room door left ajar. But perhaps that door leads to another set. Maybe that is deliberate. Maybe some things are finally hers and hers alone.
Or maybe the most convincing performance of The Life of a Showgirl is making us believe we have been invited backstage when we are actually still sitting in the audience.
So, do we know the life of a showgirl?
I don’t think we do.
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