All Show, No Tell
What did you think of the new T.S. album, “The Life of a Showgirl”? I didn’t expect much; I’m not a Swiftie, even though I enjoy a lot of her older songs. I took my daughter to her concert in L.A. and we had a great time, but I found her narcissism as dazzling as the glitter on her costumes. (At one point in the concert she talks to the crowd, “opens up” to them, and then there is a 15-minute standing ovation. She lets it go on and on and on; you can almost see the endless adulation filling her bottomless ego. I found it a little gratuitous.)
On to the new album: I listened to it hoping for a few catchy tunes to add to my writing playlist and was instantly disappointed. The main problem, for me, with the album is that each song sounds exactly like the next one. The opener, Fate of Ophelia, has a mild hooky melody but otherwise the rest is ponderous, light, devoid of whatever it is that makes me love a song.
The album is one long chunk of undifferentiated Taylor Muzak. It’s a perfectly fine record for the average pop singer to put out! But for the 35-year-old Queen of Music, it is totally unimpressive. After eleven albums packed with hits, this one fails to slap in the extreme.
Is her banger era over? For now, yes. She has habituated her fans to Taylor the Banger Machine, churning out album after album with catchy concert karaoke hits spaced so close together there’s no daylight between them.
Many people predicted the demise of her songwriting superpower once she got engaged. But I don’t think the songs are duds for the reasons everyone predicted. Yes, moving out of a twenty-year long tumultuous cycle of romantic longing, lustful anticipation, and crushing heartbreak and into the smooth sailing of a sure thing will certainly change your musical output.
But the songs on the new album are not the staid and self-satisfied victory lap of a taken woman. They are instead a slobbering, naughty paean to her meathead NFL-playing fiancé; a corny love letter wrapped in a set of steamy boudoir photos she had taken at the mall. It’s filled with sexual innuendo and cringe double entendres that let us all know exactly how enormous Travis Kelce’s orange pubed-phallus.
We get it, honey. He’s got you “dickmatized,” as you so eloquently declare on “Wood,” a ditty devoted to his turgid member. She traded her bangers for one, ahem, banger.
We’re all super happy for you. Congrats!
But like, we really didn’t need to know this, honey chile. No one did. Sex-crazed tramp is just not your brand. Very few women can pull that off and still remain appealing.
I can’t wait for my nine-year-old to ask me what “dickmatized” means.
Taylor Traded the Girl Gaze for the Male Gaze
The photo shoot that accompanied the album is one of her best. She’s never looked better, or sexier. But this is a photo shoot for one guy. The looks are more high-class escort than “Showgirl,” especially with the [redacted]-me look in her eyes in every single shot. Again, we get it. You’re the roundheeled Vegas showgirl who finally met the guy who swept her off her feet.
But I realized that the reason the album is so different is that it is the first one she made that caters to a man’s gaze and taste, and not to her legions of female fans. Her other albums have been directed squarely at girls, as they live vicariously through her complaints about toxic boyfriends and toxic girlfriends and toxic breakups. But in “The Life of a Showgirl,” Taylor is talking TO a real person throughout the album: Travis Kelce. He became her muse for the music, and well, if you have ever heard Travis Kelce talk, it explains the juvenile nature of some of the lyrics.
Let’s face it: Taylor Swift has about 40 IQ points on Travis Kelce and she dumbed it down for him. The song about Travis’s schlong is set to Jackson-Five music—a genre that isn’t exactly female-coded.
Maybe I’ll write an album to my husband. I just need to write songs about making dinner, paying the mortgage, and remembering to feed the dogs.
BRB going to book a boudoir photo shoot at the local Glamour Shots.
Ah, the Life of a Housewife!
Thanks for reading!
—Peachy
😂
Loved the final photo.
I know little about Taylor Swift. Haven’t heard any of her music in 15-20 years since she was “country.” But I loved the article’s light-hearted tone.