“It must be exhausting always rooting for the Anti-Hero.”-Taylor Swift, extremely accurately, 2022.
I.
I’ve spent the last five years completely convinced that I understand Taylor Swift’s music more deeply and powerfully than you ever could. This is incredibly stupid and arrogant, but it has always felt amazing. That’s the value proposition of being a fangirl. I engage at depths that would make a deepsea anglerfish’s head explode. I identify common threads so fine you could sew thousand thread count sheets with them. In return, I get to feel that I have shined a light on essential truths of great public interest, but more importantly, that my intellect has been sharpened and my soul nourished by the endeavor. To everyone else, the uninitiated masses, casual fans, and especially the “haters,” to you guys I look completely insane. But that’s a small price to pay.
If you’re reading this blog because of my NYC politics coverage, you might not know that I used to write about Taylor Swift kind of a lot. I forecasted her surprise songs for the American stretch of the Eras Tour, with exquisite levels of probabilistic precision and in retrospect, decent accuracy. I ranked her ghost songs. I begged her not to change the lyrics of “Better Than Revenge,” or at least to do so more artfully. I gave an early review of the Tortured Poets Department and then came back the next week to go deeper on a specific song because it was also about ghosts. And earlier last year, in anticipation of that album, I wrote a two-part manifesto on how I believe her songs are widely misunderstood and thus underappreciated, focusing on one widespread misconception in particular. Taylor Swift, I argued, almost never writes autobiographically. The practice of mapping every song onto an ex-boyfriend or some other celebrity narrative is excellent for marketing. But it makes the songs incredibly boring to listen to, with one prescribed meaning and interpretation grounded in layers of context that most people don’t know or care about. The songs should be understood as works of fiction, I wrote. She tries on different costumes and personas and uses her imagination to tell a story that anyone can get something out of, even if we’ve never flirted with someone at the Met Gala or obsessed over the minutiae of merchandising rights clauses in record deals. And it was important to hear the songs the proper way, because if you let the celebrity nonsense get out of the way, you would see that these songs were unparalleled feats of fine art, on the level of Mozart, Emily Dickinson, and the Beatles. My particular sect of Swiftie-ism was based on these two foundational axioms: Taylor Swift is an incredible writer, and she does not write autobiographically anywhere nearly as much as people think.
I have clung to these axioms as elite cultural opinion has grown ever increasingly hostile to Taylor Swift. It’s hard to remember, but she had a stretch there from about September 2019 (release of Lover) through October 2022 (Midnights) where she was widely loved and respected by elite critical consensus. Check out this episode of Charli XCX’s BBC Radio podcast Best Song Ever, where she and guest Phoebe Bridgers geek out over how much they love the song “Betty.” “It’s high art,” you can hear bisexual college-radio-station NPR-Tiny-Desk-veteran indie darling Phoebe Bridgers say, as Charli XCX, one widely considered one of the very coolest people in pop music then and now, repeatedly agrees. “I can’t imagine getting to work on a cooler project [than Red (Taylor’s Version)]” Bridgers concludes. This episode came out in March of 2022. Seriously, it was only three and a half years ago that everyone, and specifically Charli XCX, thought Taylor Swift was not only talented but extremely cool.
It’s been all downhill from there. Taylor has been egregiously overexposed for a while now, feeding the world an unending stream of music, and just as critically, nonmusical celebrity output. In 2023, she was viral on Tik Tok three nights a week with shaky cam videos from the tour. Then, she started showing up on national television every Sunday for her new boyfriend’s big games. There was an insatiable hunger for Taylor Swift content, and the media went to absurd lengths to feed that hunger, hiring full-time reporters to cover only her, interviewing anyone who’d ever served her pasta in the West Village, and running dead-serious New York Times op-eds about how she was probably gay. It all became way too much pretty quickly, and everyone except the absolute die-hards (the level-ten Swifties, the ones far more fanatically devout than I ever could be) has at some point or another in the last two years reached their limit.
“That’s fine” I could always say to detractors. “The celebrity stuff isn’t why I’m a fan. She was never that good at being a celebrity anyway. The real stuff is the songs, and the songs are brilliantly written even (especially) if you ignore all the extratextual celebrity stuff. That’s what makes her cool.”
Tortured Poets Department was the first Taylor Swift album that was maybe not so brilliantly written. There were interesting ideas, clever lines, and catch melodies throughout, but it was thematically cluttered, in need of an editor, and featured some real clunkers, lyrics that were so overwritten and overwrought that they landed with a dull thud. That’s something that is not supposed to happen when I’m listening to a song that’s written by a generational genius.
“I have totally different aims for this project.” Taylor told Jason Kelce on her New Heights episode this summer, when she announced the forthcoming release of her new album The Life of a Showgirl. “For the Tortured Poets Department, my goals were strictly lyrical. On this one, I wanted to do an album focused on quality… my main goals were melodies that were so infectious that you’re almost angry with it, and lyrics that are just as vivid, but crisp and focused.” I took this to be a tacit acknowledgement that her previous album hadn’t been her best, that she needed to rein in the crazy lyrics a little bit. And I was sure that if she focused on quality, and made her lyrics a little more focused and crisp, the end product would be characteristically excellent, and that it would make her cool again. After all, she was maybe the best songwriter of all time. The stakes were so high, the backlash had become so loud, she must have known how uncool she had become according to the elite critical media consensus, and how much worse it would get if she released anything that wasn’t excellent. It followed that if she was releasing it now, so soon after the last one, at the nadir of her coolness when everyone was still so sick of her, this album must be really good. Otherwise why wouldn’t she have waited? Surely she knew what she was doing.
II.
Two months before the release of The Tortured Poets Department, Special Prosecutor Robert Hur released his report on his investigation into President Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents during his predecessor’s first term. He announced that he would not be pursuing charges, in part because he was concerned that Biden would appear to a jury as “a well-meaning, sympathetic, elderly man with a poor memory.” The White House comms team was furious with the inclusion of this detail, and the president himself gave a fiery news conference decrying this broadside attack on his acuity. Five minutes later, he called Abdel El-Fatah Sisi the President of Mexico. Sisi is the President of Egypt. It was at this point that Ezra Klein first called for Biden to step aside and let someone else run against Trump in the 2024 election.
This was a nice little news cycle for Ezra, but I did not find it particularly convincing. Biden was fine! He’d always been a gaffe machine, and had stuttered periodically throughout his career. Besides, surely everyone involved knew the gravity of the situation. If there was actually a problem, he would have dropped his re-election bid months earlier. If he was staying in, that must have meant that it was because smart people thought it was a good idea. I believed this right up until the June 2024 debate. Why would he go up there on that stage if he wasn’t able to perform the basic functions of running for president? Why would anyone let him do that?
All of which is to say, sometimes being a fangirl1 means being completely delusional about everything, ignoring flashing red warning signs, earnestly expecting that everything will magically work out, and then looking like a complete idiot when it doesn’t.
III.
Tortured Poets Department had a few clunkers, poorly written lyrics that take the listener out of the song and reduce the capacity for true artistic engagement. “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day.” “Crash the party like a record scratch as I scream.” “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle.” “You deserve prison but you won’t get time.” By contrast, Life of the Showgirl is almost exclusively clunkers. It’s clunkers all the way down. It’s like she had a checklist of sloppy lyric writing crimes and was determined to check off each one.
Basic metaphors that are subsequently explained as concretely and literally as possible in case anyone was confused about how brilliant they are? Check: “you are quite the pyro, you light the match and watch it go,” “I thought my house was haunted, I used to live with ghosts,” (this one is especially painful for me for obvious reasons).
Cringy internet slang? Check: “Keep it one hundred on the land, the sea, the tides, pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes.” “Everybody’s so punk on the internet, everyone’s unbothered ‘til they’re not, every joke’s just trolling and memes.” “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?” “Thank you for the lovely bouquet, I’m married to the hustle.”
Rhyming four words to show off at the complete expense of meaning or subtlety? Check: “Her name was Kitty, made her money being pretty and witty, they gave her the keys to the city, then they said she didn’t do it legit-ly,” “it’s yours, kicking in doors, take it to the floor, give me more.”
Gratuitous profanity? Check and a half. She made eleven whole albums without using the word “dick”, but that streak ends here. There’s also a bunch of bitches, fucks, an ass or two, I’m sure I missed some others. There are a few exceptions (not on this album), but in general, few artists sound as lame, or like they are trying as hard to be cool, as Taylor Swift when she curses.
Lyrics that don’t even fit the basic meter of the song? Shockingly this is also a check. Here’s just one example. The very first line of the album is “I heard you calling,” but the phrase clearly needs five syllables so she stretches “calling” into an awkward three-syllable drawl. The same phrase repeats five bars later, and this time she does get five syllables, but she has to borrow a word from the next line to do it, with “as legend has it, you.” This adds a big, inexplicable gap between “you” and the rest of the line “are quite the pyro,” which makes the whole thing feel jerky and confusing to listen to. Finding a normal, complete five-syllable phrase that expresses the same meaning and avoids these awkward pitfalls may be hard, but it’s not the kind of thing that should trip up Taylor Swift. And this is THE FIRST LINE OF THE ALBUM!! There are so many more moments like this, where the lyrics formally resist being easily understood, and are undermined by the structure of the song. I’ve spent the last five years screaming about her unparalleled talent as a writer, and there are lyrics on this album that feel so abrasive and clunky that I wonder if it’s intentional.
I’ve also screamed that the songs aren’t autobiographical. That she is a brilliant storyteller, who uses fiction to illuminate profound truths about friendship, love, memory, and what it means to be an artist, and that this is all way more interesting than whatever the Owl City guy might or might not have said to her at that party one night in 2009. She seems to emphatically disagree with me on this point for this album. You could at least have some plausible deniability on Tortured Poets Department about whether “Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” was about Joe or Matty or Scooter or just a dream she had. There’s no such wiggle room on “Actually Romantic”, “CANCELLED!”, or “Wood”. The first one is a vicious takedown of Charli XCX, still one of the coolest and most critically beloved artists in the world, for daring to mention her (positively) on Brat. The second is about how she still loves her friend Blake Lively even though Justin Baldoni doesn’t. The third is about how Travis Kelce has a huge penis and how that’s really improved her outlook on life. You couldn’t come up with more polarizing, off-putting, uncool subjects if you tried.
And infuriatingly, all three of these songs rock. I’m sorry, they’re all absolute bangers. “Good thing I like my friends caaaaaaanceeeelled” I’ve been bleating to myself on a loop as I walk down the street. What nonsense! My friends are the nicest, blandest, least controversial dudes in the world. None of them will ever get cancelled, and I wouldn’t like it at all if they did. There’s nothing for me in this song at all, and yet I’ve listened to it six times in the last 36 hours. I’ve listened to “Actually Romantic” like ten times, and I get more bewildered each time. “It’s actually sweeeeeeet” I keep singing at my imaginary haters, that to be clear, I very much do not have! Of course I don’t have haters! No one thinks about me that much. Nevertheless! “Melodies so infectious you’re almost angry with them,” she said. Good job. I feel infected and angry.
Much of this album is explicitly autobiographical and much of it is poorly written. Is it good? Probably! “It sounds like what other people think Taylor Swift sounds like.” I saw one redditor post on r/TaylorSwift, which is about as harsh as they get over there. “Other people” think Taylor Swift is an annoying, cringy, self-obsessed, oppressive hegemon who gets by selling sugar high pop songs to kids who don’t know what real music sounds like. They think she’s the anti-hero. I thought she was secretly very cool. I still seem to enjoy the hell out of her music, but for her to take the other side of this debate is tough. There’s only so much fangirling I can do.
The album’s solid though. “Opalite” and “Elizabeth Taylor” especially.
I am not and have never been a Joe Biden fangirl for the record. I have many many notes. But I was a fangirl of Trump not being re-elected. Kamala is Brat etc.