Popstar extraordinaire, Taylor Swift, off the back of her recent engagement to NFL player Travis Kelce and re-recording 4 of her most popular records in an egregious money-making farce, released her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, off the back of a typically outlandish marketing scheme….and what is to be said of the music on the album outside of nothing at all.
This is an album that should cast doubt on the (not wholly undeserved) critical re-appraisal of Taylor’s artistic merits since the dual albums Folklore and Evermore (courtesy of Aaron Dessner of the National). Those records demonstrated a matured Taylor that could perhaps stand alone without superproducers like Max Martin (who ironically is back in the main seat for the new album).
Nonetheless, this album exposes the vital weakness of Taylor (alongside many of her contemporaries): an obsession with themselves rather than the music they are creating. Thus, we get utterly ridiculous tripe like Eldest Daughter and CANCELLED!, which are ostensibly meant to be honest and raw but instead expose how out of touch these stars can be with the world around him. This album reminds me of her old nemesis, Kanye West – an artist whose music increasingly became less about what it sounded like and more about what it said about the star and his or her fame (of course, leading to a severe decline in the quality of the actual music). We are meant to care about this music not for what it does or says musically but for who is saying it. The problem for Taylor is that her perspective is boring, her poetry is trivial and no one in their right mind cares about what billionaire celebrities and their friends feel.
The fact that people are surprised that the music on this record is so boring shows that people have not been paying attention. It is not like Evermore and Folklore were truly pushing the boat out with homogenous folk-pop (and they are the two most acclaimed albums). The chorus of soft-rock shuffle The Fate of Ophelia (where she compares life without Travis to the Hamlet tragedy) could be that of 100 other pop songs. Elizabeth Taylor is really the type of songs she’s wrote 100 times: standard repetitive pop progression and ordinary singing over hip-hop-influenced production. Even Max Martin can’t salvage the boring vintage pop of Opalite. And these are probably the most passable tracks. One cannot salvage a single melody on the remainder of the album. Meanwhile, it is amusing how the lyrics seem to deteriorate into madness. Its as if due to her commercial infallibility, the producers who had reined in her worst habits in the past are now powerless to stop her from indulging in cringe-inducing self-analysis.
Label: Republic
Released: October 3, 2024
Losing My Edge Rating: 3/10
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