In my ideal world, Taylor Swift is someone whom I’ve heard of. Maybe I could hum along to a song or two of hers that blew up on the radio, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to name even a single album. In this ideal world, I wouldn’t be able to place her face, nor would I know which football player or musician she’s dating. There is no way for me to live in this fantasy, however, for to live in 2025 is to be forced into having an opinion on Taylor Allison Swift.
There’s many things one can say about Taylor Swift. While, as with every other public figure who happens to be a woman, some of them are rather misogynistic, most of them are pretty fair critiques to levy against someone. For instance, all of her albums have a steadily growing amount of variants, each of which contain essentially the same album with only minor aesthetic changes. Taylor Swift is also a billionaire, something it is always unethical to be. Swift has also had a long history of political controversy, her most recent backlash coming from her most recent album.
Said album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” is interesting in how poorly it was received, both by critics and audience.
Usually when Swift releases an album, her fanbase are quick to retaliate against any and all “haters,” regardless of their reasons for criticism. Either her lyrics are “too deep, and haters just don’t get it,” or “she’s just having fun” and haters need to just “let people enjoy things.” During this album rollout, though, it was different. Even Swifties hated it, both for mediocre songwriting and lyrical content, as well as for the extensive conservative dogwhistles scattered throughout.
But “The Life of a Showgirl” is a symptom of a much bigger problem, one that is more insidious in her last album, “The Tortured Poets Department.”
The album, nicknamed “TTPD,” came out at the height of Swift’s Eras Tour, and while it wasn’t universally liked, it was beloved by her fans. It was (allegedly) an artistic masterpiece, with 31 tracks and a black and white asylum aesthetic, and so those who criticized it were dismissed as haters.
The day that it came out, I listened to all 31 of those songs. It was a miserable experience.
“TTPD” reads as a first draft. It’s too long, and none of the songs are particularly distinct from each other, all being Taylor Swift singing clunky lyrics over the same soft synths. The album’s aesthetic is incredibly tone deaf, glamorizing the long history of medical abuse in insane asylums, and, all due respect to Swift, labeling herself a “Tortured Poet” is laughable, considering the fact that she is currently the biggest musical artist in the world.
On the subject of being a tortured poet, in the song “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,” Swift says that we “wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.” Swift, of course, was raised in an $800,000 mansion in Pennsylvania.
This isn’t the only out of touch lyric, but it is one of the most glaringly obvious ones. Aside from that, though, the whole album is lyrically messy and leaves Taylor Swift chasing the music to fit every word in. While this is a style of song that can work (see Fall Out Boy’s discography), Swift is a vocal artist. There is very little else in her music for someone to listen to.
The summer of 2024, when “TTPD” came out, was an amazing one for women in pop music. “Brat” by Charli xcx defined the summer, and both Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter were breaking through into proper mainstream stardom. Beyoncé released “Cowboy Carter” and Billie Eilish released “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” both receiving massive critical acclaim. During that year, Swift released over 80 different physical and digital variants of “The Tortured Poets Department”. Coincidentally, these releases seemed to be perfectly timed to block other artists’ success on the charts.
All of this was criticized at the time, and this criticism seemed to have no real effect on her career. I was resigned to deal with it.
Until the aforementioned release of “The Life of a Showgirl.”
Online, many Swifties have claimed that “TLOAS” was a fluke. One of the common reactions was shock, or anger that the album that they preordered three copies of wasn’t what they expected. The unfortunate truth, though, is that it didn’t come out of nowhere.
It was foreshadowed by a certain tortured poet.
