The Life of a Showgirl: An Autopsy
Part 1: THE FATE OF OPHELIA through RUIN THE FRIENDSHIP
Let’s get one thing straight— I stopped listening to The Life of a Showgirl for pleasure about two weeks after its release. Like I think this album has the range of a teaspoon. Where it does succeed, however, is in offering a fascinating articulation of our pathetic culture at large. Showgirl inhabits so much of what I see as our widespread cultural problems: idiotic internet thinking, straight-girl delusion, and the ever-widening ditch you wind up in when you live your life as a brand. In the rollout to Showgirl, Taylor said to Zane Lowe that she “welcomes the chaos:”
I’m not the art police. Everybody is allowed to feel exactly how they want and what our goal is as entertainers is to be a mirror…I have such an eye on legacy when I’m making my music — I know what I made, I know I adore it.
The mirror part is not wrong— like, it kind of mirrors America’s migraine of the Spirit. Anyway…
I could not be happier to publish this close read of the first half of the album, in conversation with one of the sharpest minds I know, my good friend Khalid bin Ya’qūb.
You will lmao, you will cry, you may need to take some breaks to compose yourself… and by the end you’ll be clamoring for part 2. Which is coming soon!
Sooo… without further ado…
Is THE LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL a good Taylor Swift album? And where would you rank it in her discography?
CD: If you ask me, it’s not a good album. I find the songwriting lazy, sloppy, and downright confusing. But she clearly set out to make a “Taylor Swift album,” and it succeeds under that conceit. There’s a meta-ness to The Life of a Showgirl that none of her other albums—except maybe Midnights—has. The sold-out stadium crowds of the Eras tour, and the billions it raked in, seem to have embedded themselves into the fiber of her being, making it harder for her to separate Regular Taylor from Showgirl Taylor. I’m not sure a Regular Taylor even exists anymore, at least within her art.
I find the album’s self-awareness emotionally draining. Each song feels engineered to satisfy a particular type of fan. She’s no longer Taylor Swift without the world’s attention on her, and this album feels written not as personal catharsis but as explicit product. That’s what’s so draining about it: there’s zero intimacy.
People keep remarking on how the sound of the album doesn’t match the Showgirl aesthetic—how they expected more theatrics, more camp, more horns and strings. The production is actually pretty mellow. Poppy, classic (I’m not sure what I mean by that word yet), full of oldies tricks and sonic callbacks, and full of language manipulated for maximum addictiveness (“Be my EN WHY when Hollywood hates me”). Very Cocomelon of her.
I think that “product” feeling is why she called it The Life of a Showgirl. Listening to it feels like eating something too sweet—your teeth ache afterward. It’s not pure cocaine; it’s cocaine cut with something sinister.
Still not sure where I’d rank TLOAS in her discography. Might literally be at the bottom.
KbY: It definitely would have been interesting if Taylor had released an album sonically inspired by the cabarets and music halls of the early 20th century. Even if such an album ended up flopping, you could at least admire the ambition and the artistic curiosity. But let’s be real, that was never going to happen. This album has even less to do with all that than Midnights has to do with “thirteen sleepless nights.” TLOAS is kind of a concept album, but, yeah, it’s not anchored, or even interested, in any musical genre other than modern pop or any circumstance or experience other than Taylor’s.
The title is necessarily a bit inapposite because Taylor has already used the most fitting title for this album, which is “Taylor Swift.” The album’s organizing concept is The Famous Taylor Swift, and yet, more than any previous Taylor album, it leaves one wondering why this person is even famous. Certainly the quality that made Taylor compelling in the first place, despite, say, her lack of exceptional vocal talent— call it ‘authenticity,’ or, as you said, the ‘intimacy’ of her writing, or simply ‘humanity’— is shockingly absent from TLOAS. And what’s bizarre is that this is actually the point! We are actually supposed to applaud that these songs respond not to any emotion but only to the exigencies of “show business,” because “that’s the life of a showgirl.” But is Taylor really living the ‘life of a showgirl,’ anyway? Is Taylor going to be buried in a pauper’s grave like Lillian Loraine? Besides that she’s a woman and is a performer— not to say those things don’t matter— I feel like Taylor actually has more in common with Florenz Ziegfeld than she does with Anna Held. That’s the other thing about this album— it’s certainly ‘self-conscious,’ but ‘self-aware’ is not how I would describe it. Her understanding of herself seems, for the most part, alarmingly warped.
The fear I expressed at the end of our discussion of TTPD was partially realized, in that she bought into bad faith criticism of TTPD, a great album, and overcorrected. But how naïve I was to worry that the result would be “another Midnights.” One of the most disorienting aspects of this album to me is how good it makes Midnights seem by comparison. Even “Midnight Rain” is a more interesting, self-reflective take on fame than anything on TLOAS, to say nothing of “You’re on Your Own Kid” or “Dear Reader.” Maybe I shouldn’t even expect self-reflection from TLOAS, the point of which seems instead to be self-congratulation, but without good songwriting the whole premise that there is anything to celebrate about Taylor Swift basically collapses. Like you said, this album seems to be a kind of tribute to the Eras tour (which was already a self-tribute), but is The Life of a Showgirl as impressive a studio album as The Eras Tour was a tour? Not even remotely. The vibe of the album is kind of how I imagine it must feel to watch the Taylor Swift Impersonator at Canobie Lake Park, except in this case it’s Taylor Swift impersonating the Taylor Swift impersonator.
Whether this is her worst album depends on the metric; if we account for the differential between Taylor’s capabilities at this point in her career and what she produced, this must be the worst. In terms of her “mature” albums, it is unequivocally worse than Midnights, and I’m inclined to say it’s worse than Lover, too. I can say for sure that TLOAS is the TS album I least respect.
TRACK 1- THE FATE OF OPHELIA
KbY: I do not like this song. Well, I guess what I really don’t like is the lyric, but I feel that the song as a whole epitomizes this pattern that runs through the entire album, this Max Martin, “now that I’ve become who I really are”-style prioritization of “catchiness” over meaning. Here it’s not on the syntactic level really, but more on the conceptual level. Taylor released a version of the album that includes short verbal explanations of each song, so I want to highlight part of what she says about The Fate of Ophelia:
“It kind of combines Shakespearean storytelling of this legend of this tragic hero, Ophelia, and what happened to her, blended with this kind of newer concept of escaping that fate and having more modern terminology used in the song too… I just love the blending of old and new with lyrics.”
So much about this drives me crazy. First of all, the pretense that there is any “Shakespearean storytelling” going on in this song is just offensive— There’s something gross in general about how, at some point, Taylor came to understand that her “storytelling” was something people valued in her songwriting, and now she just says it like a marketing buzzword, but this song in particular is actually a betrayal of the very idea of storytelling. I’m fairly convinced that the verse about Ophelia is just a rephrase of the blurb from the “Ophelia” Wikipedia article, but slightly less accurate (just had a vision of an English teacher having to grade a blue book essay about the importance of Ophelia’s status as the ‘eldest daughter’). This song “tells the story” of Ophelia just enough to explain that “the fate of Ophelia” means going crazy and dying because of the scorpions of love, and no more than that, because the actual story of the song is about how Travis rescued Taylor from being sad and alone. So, if there is going to be “blending of old and new” here, why not use a story that actually parallels the one you trying to tell, like, idk, Lancelot and Guinevere? That could even fit with the “locked in my tower” line, the crown, etc. She could even, theoretically, make up a story. As is, the content of the “Shakespearean allusion” is so irrelevant to the song that she could be saying like, “you saved my heart from the fate of Harambe” and it wouldn’t even make a difference! Obviously, I’m exaggerating slightly, but you get the point.
This total dissonance between the story of Ophelia and the actual theme of the song is especially egregious in the second part of the chorus, when she sings:
“Don’t care where the hell you been,/cause now you’re mine/About to be the sleepless night/you’ve been dreaming of/The fate of Ophelia”
What does “The Fate of Ophelia” have to do with any of that???? It’s like “my fiancé is great, we’re gonna have a lot of sex tonight, btw picture a woman’s corpse floating in a river”
I notice that the video for this song has no story either. It’s just a sequence of unrelated setpieces. Honestly it’s impossible for me to cover everything that bothers me about this one. But I do want to mention a few more lines in this “literary storytelling (but still catchy!)” song that reveal it to actually be illiterate— or even beyond illiterate, just inane. Those lines are: “And if you’d never come for me,/I might’ve lingered in purgatory,/you wrap around me like a chain, a crown, a vine/pulling me into the fire”
I actually like the sequence of “a chain, a crown, a vine”— maybe a chain and a vine are a little too similar or a crown is a little too different, but it’s one of the better single lines in the song. But, first of all, purgatory is definitionally temporary. You can’t linger in purgatory forever. More importantly, if you are in purgatory, my understanding is that you are already in a fire. This comes up in Hamlet, actually. If you are being pulled out of purgatory and INTO the fire… would that not mean you were being pulled into hell? Somehow I feel like that could not have been her point. But even if it was… what? Has she finally actually sold her soul to the devil?
CD: Your point about Taylor being more like Florenz Ziegfeld than Sally Held—because showgirls were historically underpaid, underprotected, and treated like shit—articulates nearly every problem with this album and era in one fell swoop. :D
In the same way I mentioned to you how I get secondhand embarrassed anytime her 2019 Billboard “Woman of the Decade” speech comes across my feed, I felt that same thrilling secondhand embarrassment reading your evisceration of this track and lead single. THIS is the kind of criticism we need to get in front of Taylor’s face for her to actually internalize—not the wan, lazy reviews of TTPD that so many critics served up cold on deadline last spring. (TAYLOR + TREE PAINE PLEASE READ ANNOYING BLONDES.)
I’m in agreement with you that “a chain, a crown, a vine” is nice, even if purgatory is “definitionally temporary” (I screamed). My least favorite line is “legend has it you / are quite the pyro / you light the match to watch it burn,” followed closely by the line before it: “I heard you calling / on the megaphone / you wanna see me all alone.” As you point out, this is not at all the story of Ophelia, nor a sequel to Hamlet where Ophelia is resurrected from death by another guy (??). It’s simply the story of how she got together with Travis—a story she has already blabbed about publicly so much that she’s left nothing to imagination or interpretation.
Because I listened to her episode of the New Heights podcast, I know that the “megaphone” line directly references Travis shooting his shot live on an earlier episode, and that the “pyro” line is about Travis’s “wild, happy-go-lucky personality” and “being a human exclamation point.” And probably nothing more. NEXT!
TRACK 2 — ELIZABETH TAYLOR
CD: An endearing thing about our sweet, self-centered Showgirl is that she can only be truly moved by—or obsessed with—something when it relates to her in some way. I figured her fixation on Elizabeth Taylor was due to them both being famously careless romantics, and the shared name. (On …Ready for It? off Reputation, Swift sings, “He can be my jailer / Burton to his Taylor / Every love I’ve known in comparison was a failure.”)
I was amused, however, to discover that the inspiration for this song goes “deeper” than that—and involves a clip of Elizabeth Taylor’s son saying that Swift (and Kelce) remind him most of his mother “in terms of persona and all the chaos around us”:
“I just immediately started talking to Travis about it. I was going on and on about Elizabeth Taylor… I had to get out of the car, I was like, ‘I have to get out of the car for a second,’ and I just sang this melody into my phone, got back in the car and… that’s what it’s like when it happens.”
The way she sings “ELIZABETH TAYLOR!” megaphone-style at the beginning of the song—like the name means something concrete on its own—turned me off on first listen because, like, WTF. Again, giving me nothing. But I like the sentiment of this song a lot: the high stakes of love, the glamour, the Portofino view. The production really does give Sad Rich Lady Standing on a Balcony on the Italian Riviera Contemplating Jumping If Her Paramour Doesn’t Text/Write Her Back.
And I like “Cry my eyes violet, Elizabeth Taylor,” which I interpreted as her blue eyes turning purple from crying so much. It’s just too bad the rest is riddled with little cringe tricks (“Be my En Why” makes me nauseous, as does “I would trade the Cartier for someone to trust (just kidding).”). Does love matter most or does money, Taylor—which one is it???
For all its high points, there’s a lack of specificity or narrative intention here that’s just flat-out missing. That line I cited above from …Ready for It? inspires more thought in me than the entirety of this song.
KbY: It makes perfect sense that this song originates in Taylor pulling off to the side of the road and screaming into her phone because she was so excited to be compared to Elizabeth Taylor. It’s fossilized stimming.
Given Taylor’s false promise that this would deliver the “storytelling” of Folklore with the “pop” of 1989, I imagined that this song might be kind of a “Last Great American Dynasty” song about Elizabeth Taylor. Well, it isn’t, but, anyway, this song is definitely better than the album opener on basically every metric— it’s even, oddly, much catchier imo. I feel like Max Martin must have promised that the Fate of Ophelia had some special nøkken magic in it that would make it the ultimate hit or something, but Elizabeth Taylor should have been track 1. It even establishes the “concept,” such as it is— no, Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t a “showgirl” really, but I don’t think Taylor makes a distinction between “showgirls” and classic Hollywood stars (if only that were my main complaint about this album).
I have to admit I like the hook on this one— “CRY MY EYES VIolet.” I guess I can resist three consecutive rhymes but I crumble at the fourth. Honestly though, this may be the one not-quite-sentence on the album in which its two opposite songwriting philosophies—emotive poetics and earworm-technism— actually exist in balance. It is a striking, meaningful image with some complex suggestions— when we hear “Elizabeth Taylor/do you think it’s forever?” in isolation at the beginning of the song, we associate Elizabeth Taylor with “forever,” i.e. her enduring celebrity, but the chorus shifts and complicates that meaning. Although, outside the context of the song, Taylor apparently views Elizabeth Taylor as an aspirational figure, the role of Elizabeth Taylor in the song itself is not unlike the role of Ophelia in the last one: Taylor only becomes her through the pain of losing her love. Granted, all that could be an accident of Max Martin’s acoustics-first approach to songwriting, but I have a sense that it actually reflects Taylor’s creative process (“Elizabeth Taylor!” was probably the first thing she shouted into her phone the side of the road). Either way, the idea is there.
But, yeah, “be my NY when hollywood hates me” is quite a weak follow up. I firmly believe that a bit more thought could have yielded a better lyric, even given the desire to rhyme as much as possible and to work in Elizabeth Taylor references. I can’t help but feel that there was some good reason why Taylor didn’t work with Max Martin for years after Reputation. If you watch this video of the writing of Delicate—
— this seems like a process that is not especially conducive to generating great lyrics. Granted, it’s not the full picture, and the video of her writing process with Martin for I Did Something Bad shows her steering the ship a bit more, but considering that the development of this album, overlapping with her tour, likely had even less room to breathe, I can see how, in that context, a minor challenge like a couplet with an internal rhyme and some reference to Elizabeth Taylor leads to the incoherence of the “Musso and Frank’s” line.
Yes, the “just kidding” is particularly baffling and out of step not only with the point of this song but also with a major theme of the whole album, that love is more precious than wealth or fame. It’s like she suddenly decided to adopt this “bad bitch” character who values literal jewels more than companionship in the middle of a song about how “I can’t have fun if I can’t have you.” What???
Lastly, I’ve noticed that there are a few songs on this album of which the bridge, fairly unusually for Taylor, is the absolute worst part. That’s definitely the case here. “All my white diamonds and lovers are forever”— the reference to the perfume is corny, forced, and not only irrelevant to but distracting from the point she is actually trying to make, which seems to have something to do with the contrast between the posterity of her relationships in the public eye and a true “forever.” If that is the idea here, it’s somewhat interesting, but I can’t tell because it’s never actually expressed and just fizzles into the generic “don’t you ever end up anything but mine.”
TRACK 3- OPALITE
KbY: This is a tricky one. On one hand, I appreciate this song for a few reasons: it actually develops an idea and explores it from different angles; its experiment with the “bubblegum” sound is, if not totally successful, at least notably more tasteful than the intolerable “ME!”; and it stands out, amidst this album’s many attempts, as the song that comes closest to conveying why— or, if not why, then at least how— Taylor loves Travis.
On the other hand, the lyric hangs itself on nonsense. To go again to Taylor’s explanation on the track-by-track: “Opalite is actually a man-made opal… so I kind of took that metaphor of a man-made gemstone and applied it to, well, what if you make your own happiness in life.” But opalite is not a man-made gemstone. “Opalite” is a commercial term for opalescent glass. It’s made to simulate the “play of color” of the precious gem opal, but no one would ever actually confuse opalite with the real opal that is Travis Kelce’s birthstone. This is all the more ridiculous because man-made opal is a thing, but that isn’t called “opalite,” it’s opal, it’s chemically and physically identical to natural opal, the same way that a lab-grown diamond is a diamond. It’d be one thing for someone to write a song about how her love is like a diamond she created for herself, but would anyone ever seriously write a song about how her love is like cubic zirconia? One might think that Taylor’s explanation is just a way to paper over the embarrassing mistake of confusing the gemstone opal with opalite or to rationalize a preference for how the word “opalite” sounds— and, honestly, I consider it possible that she became aware of the problem towards the end of the recording process, because other than one throwaway line (“you had to make your own sunshine”), whole idea that you make your own happiness does not seem especially relevant to Opalite.
In fact, does it not almost seem like this song is about the exact opposite— that is, the power of fate? For example, I take “you were dancing through the lightning strikes” to be a less trite way of saying “you dodged a bullet,” which basically means “you were fortunate to avoid that.” Maybe that’s a bad example because I wouldn’t put it past Taylor to misinterpret an idiom. But what about “Life is a song, it ends when it ends?” That is an extremely fatalistic refrain. And the bridge, which tells us that “life” (an impersonal force) will “beat you up, up, up”? If we “make our own happiness,” the inevitable corollary of that would be that we cause our own unhappiness, but Taylor Swift probably would sooner literally create her own sun than take responsibility for anything unwelcome that happens to her. Now that I think about it, the bridge is confusing in general: “this is just a storm inside a teacup/but shelter here with me my love/thunder like a drum…” What? This is why I don’t put it past Taylor to misinterpret idioms— if it’s just a storm inside a teacup, why do you need to shelter from it? Can’t you just create your own sunshine? Or is the idea that, even though it’s just a tempest in a teacup, they are pretending that it is a big storm with “thunder like a drum,” because sheltering together makes them happy, and that’s creating their own happiness? Maybe? She sings that “this is just a temporary speed bump/but failure brings you freedom,” but is it “a temporary speed bump”— an insignificant delay— or is it “failure”? If the idea is that even true failure is really just a speed bump in the scheme of things, then there shouldn’t be a “but” between these clauses, should there?
Okay I digress (but I’m leaving it in)— I think the best evidence that this is not really a song about “making your own happiness” is in these lines about Travis’ past relationship: “And don’t we try to love love?/we give it all we got/You finally left the table/and what a simple thought/you’re starving ‘til you’re not.” There is some thematization of agency here, but it seems contradictory. On one hand, yeah, when Travis leaves the table, he finds it simple, and the pain he felt from his ex’s neglect just disappears I suppose, so in that way he is “making his own happiness” (let me note that Taylor decided to explore this idea of how we choose our own happiness through the metaphor of starvation, while in Gaza half a million people are being made to starve by Israel under the aegis of our own government, to the disgust of every person on Earth with even the barest trace of a conscience). On the other hand, Travis “gave it all he had” in that relationship and was able neither to convince his gf to get off her phone nor to make peace with the fact that she was addicted to her phone. The real problem was that Travis and his ex were just ultimately incompatible; they were not meant to be. This is just a temporary speed bump on the road to a preordained telos. You don’t make your own happiness, you find it, like… a natural opal.
Honestly, the more I think about this song, the less sense it makes. I said above that “you were dancing through the lightning strikes” probably means something similar to “you dodged a bullet,” and I was fairly confident about that at the time, but it just occurred to me that Taylor might instead mean that she was sort of “singing in the rain,” keeping a positive attitude despite her circumstances. That would align better with the supposed point of the song… and yet, she wasn’t keeping a positive attitude, because her whole problem was that she felt sad and lonely.
Taylor has always believed in destiny, from “You Belong with Me” to “Invisible String” to “The Prophecy,” and I’m inclined to say that has not changed. I think the word “opalite” sounded pretty to her, which is a shaky foundation on which to build a song. It sucks, because I do see a glimmer of something in Opalite, but it’s just fighting against itself.
This song includes the more significant of the album’s (by my count) two references to God. “Oh my Lord/never made someone like you before.” Especially for an album from which God is relatively absent, this is a substantial mention, because it references God specifically as creator; “my Lord” in this particular line is not just another way to say “wow.” This is interesting in light of the alleged and actual themes of the song. But something weird happens with this line in “Opalite.” It’s a little hard to pick up on, but I’ve confirmed this with the official Taylor Swift Opalite lyric video. In the first chorus, which is framed as Taylor’s mom speaking to Taylor, the line is as written, but in the subsequent choruses, in which Taylor speaks to Travis, she changes it to “Oh my Lord, [I] never met no one like you before.” That is, after the first Chorus, the line changes so that “Oh my Lord” does become just another way of saying “wow.” Why does Taylor do this? Maybe she just wanted to change it up, but that seems doubtful, as it’s barely noticeable. Maybe she came up with “never met no one like you” first, but felt it implied a fresh meeting and so was a weird thing for her mom to say to her— I’m not sure that it actually implies a fresh meeting, but either way, that would be surprisingly conscientious for someone who wrote a song called “Opalite” without googling “opalite” to make sure she knew what it was and released a whole album full of nonsense lyrics. I’ll assume it is not because Taylor thinks that she is an absolutely unique creation of God but that Travis is only unique relative to the other people that Taylor has met. I have to consider the possibility that she changed this because Taylor’s mom believes that God is our creator, but Taylor herself does not. Say it ain’t so, Taylor.
CD: What’s up with that tea cup line? Are they inside the teacup together? Is the teacup supposed to represent the fame bubble they live in? In what part of the teacup is she inviting him to come shelter with her?
Obsessed with the idea that Taylor didn’t realize opalite is not what a man-made opal is (you’d expect someone who wouldn’t trade her “CARTIER for someone to trust” would understand that man-made gemstones are elementally identical to ones found in nature, wouldn’t you), and then decided to edit lyrics once she realized. I think you’re onto something about Max and Shellback’s studio not exactly being a hotbed of lyrical creativity. On NYT’s Popcast Jon and Joe wondered if part of the reason the lyrics are subpar on this album is because neither Martin nor Shellback speak fluent English, so nobody was there to check her cringe lyrics or offer better suggestions.
I am 100% in agreement with you that this song does seem to successfully convey something genuine about her feelings for Travis. I need to point out to the readers here that this is the song that caused ire on TikTok about its racially tinged lyrics, because she connotes “onyx night” to sadness and despair and an “opalite” sky with happiness— to shade Travis’s ex Kayla Nicole, who is Black.
I wish it was still available to view, but there was an epically unhinged TikTok made by the user Sampire1513 in which she argues that the lightning strike ‘Opalite’ necklace Taylor had on her merch store was deliberate SS/White Supremacist imagery (which Sampire claimed to be an expert on because her dad belonged to a White Supremacist gang, which she mentioned very casually…unbelievable stuff). The necklace was then pulled from her store.
For a more convincing take on the matter, I thought writer Nikki Payne had an interesting analysis of the lyrics “You were in it for real / she was in her phone, and you were just a pose.” From her Substack post titled “Taylor Swift and the Death of White Innocence:”
Taylor isn’t secure enough to just celebrate her relationship; she needs to diminish what came before. Specifically, she needs to suggest that Travis’s previous relationship was somehow less authentic, less worthy, less “real” than hers.
What’s particularly insidious here is the way Taylor uses the phone as synecdoche, a part representing the whole. “She was in her phone” suggests inauthenticity, vanity, superficiality, disconnection. It’s shorthand for “she wasn’t really present, wasn’t really invested, wasn’t really there
[…] The implication is that Kayla’s work as an influencer and content creator, her literal job that requires phone use.
TRACK 4- FATHER FIGURE
CD: This is my favorite song on the album. I think it’s very catchy, and that she makes cool vocal and melody choices. I like the production, particularly in the bridge. Most importantly, it feels like the story she’s telling on this song was actually worked through, the metaphors are considered, the lines are workshopped… they don’t feel like a first draft like some other songs on this album. It’s my second favorite bridge on the album— my first favorite bridge is on the subpar “Eldest Daughter” which we’ll get to in a second. You mentioned in the days after the album dropped that this is the first of her “villain” songs (other “villain” songs include Midnights’ horrible “Vigilante Shit,” and the goofy-at-best, preposterous-at-worst “No Body No Crime” ft. HAIM on evermore) that actually works, because it’s the first time she is correctly casting herself as the boss and not as the underdog. This observation is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. If so much of this album is to its detriment because she is at this stage of her career where she is Too Big To Fail, and Too Rich To Write Relatable Songs, this is a rare example in which her current standing serves as fruitful inspiration and yields something sort of interesting.
One could argue that the original “Father Figure“ by George Michael is overall sexier, creepier, and more multidimensional than her version, but I still feel like this was a successful homage— I’d say overall Taylor preserved enough of the thrilling eroticism of the original. It took me a few listens to stop flinching at “because my dick’s bigger” though. Way too much phallus on this album.
KbY: Father Figure is probably my favorite song as well, which is shocking given the special loathing I feel for “Vigilante Shit” and “No Body No Crime,” songs that I’d definitely put in the same category as this one— although I would not call them “Villain songs” per se. I guess the term I used in our text is “genre songs,” which I’m realizing now is not the clearest classification; what I had in mind is that these three songs all present a schlocky fictional (if allegorical) narrative of intrigue and crime. “Chansons Noires”? Idk, but the positioning of Taylor’s character within the stock genre plot has a lot to do with the difference you mention.
To take them chronologically, in No Body No Crime, Taylor plays a working class maid who takes revenge after her friend is murdered by her adulterous husband; she is the hero of the song, maybe an anti-hero, although I think she gives herself a bit too much moral high ground to really merit the “anti-“ by today’s standards. Her victim is clearly guilty of an especially evil, cold-blooded murder, but he’s escaped justice. Her implied scheme to frame his mistress is probably her most ethically ambiguous action (tellingly targeting another woman), but this is only suggested and the outcome is unclear; plus, it seems probable that the mistress colluded in the murder of Taylor’s friend. It’s difficult, in the context of the genre fantasy, to find much fault with Taylor’s character— if this were the plot of a movie, everyone would certainly be rooting for her.
“Vigilante Shit,” the worst song of the triad, doubles down hard on the weaknesses of No Body No Crime; there’s a pretense of moral complexity (“I don’t dress for villains or for innocents”), but it’s comically transparent, as epitomized by the fact that her idea of “vigilantism” is literally reporting crimes to the police. This is just a melodrama of goodies (aggrieved slay queens) and baddies (philandering white collar criminal bros)—if there’s a pleasure offered by identification with this song, it’s the thrill of righteousness, not the good feeling of doing “something bad.” In fact, there is perhaps no piece of media that exemplifies the cringe, performative girlbossery that Taylor criticizes on Eldest Daughter more than the song “Vigilante Shit.”
Okay, I spent a lot of time talking about those other songs, but it’s worth clarifying where those songs failed as it’s exactly where Father Figure succeeds. According to the genre convention, if we have a contest between a vigilante maid and sociopathic Bluebeard, it is clear who is the hero and who is the villain. In Father Figure, Taylor’s narrator is a mafioso, not only powerful, but interestingly, as you mention, hyper-masculine, and the addressee is a younger male protégé turned would-be usurper. If this song were a movie, the villain would almost certainly be Taylor. Whereas one has to “read against the grain” to build a case against the heroines of her previous “crime songs,” to the point of supposing that these women are completely delusional, the Father Figure’s narration naturally creates uncertainty about who is right and who is wrong. Did the addressee really betray him out of pure ambition, or did he do something fucked up to instigate it? Was there even a “betrayal” at all, or is he a paranoid megalomaniac?
This ambiguity may not be by Taylor’s design— as I think I mentioned to you before, if we interpret this song as an allegory of events in Taylor’s life and career, I’m firmly convinced that it’s a burlesque of her relationship with a rising female pop star, probably Olivia Rodrigo. The idea that this is about her victory over Scooter does not hold up; there is simply no “viewpoint shift” in the song as some have proposed. So, the song may simply be— and likely is— meant as a boast of her power and a threat to any who would oppose her, which, needless to say, is insane, but the ambiguity and nuance is there and works, through a serendipitous combination of self-awareness and a lack thereof. Taylor casts herself much truer to type than in her previous crime songs, but she remains unreliable as the narrator of her own life.
It’s interesting to trace the meaning given to father figures across Taylor’s oeuvre— I suggested on our episode of SJ that Taylor’s references to a father often express a wish to appropriate his paternal power (“his strength is making me stronger”). One could definitely perform a Freudian reading of the phallocentrism of this song.
Lastly— the way she pronounces protégé in this song drives me insane!! Does she think that “prodigy” and “protégé” are the same word? She sounds like she’s saying “protigy.” Yes, I think you’re right, the fact that Martin and Shellback don’t speak English definitely hurt this album.
TRACK 5- “ELDEST DAUGHTER”
KbY: Father Figure is actually the first in a cluster of three consecutive songs that I’d highlight as the worthiest on TLOAS, each for very different reasons. This one, Eldest Daughter, follows. If not Father Figure, this is my favorite song of the thirteen— it’s hard to say which I prefer, as they’re opposites in a way; one thematizes power and takes the form of tropey narrative; the other thematizes vulnerability and takes a confessional form. I understand why this is track five, as it is unquestionably the album’s deepest song, the one with the most to say— of course, that statement of mine does not say very much itself, but I’d go as far as to propose that there is real substance to Eldest Daughter. Yet where Father Figure succeeds despite its banal or even foul idea—“don’t fuck with my empire”— by dint of its (mostly) airtight packaging and the strange alchemy of Taylor’s distorted self-perception, Eldest Daughter’s interesting ideas are somewhat undercut by their presentation.
That this track deals with the experience of using social media isn’t a problem for me— on the contrary, I actually value this about it. I may be tilting at windmills, because I can’t remember a specific instance of this, but I vaguely recall some ridicule of the song for its treatment of this supposedly petty or trivial subject. While I would hardly claim that Taylor has her priorities in order with respect to how she chooses to apply her talent, especially on this album, in the emotional and social life of a bourgeois millennial woman—her usual thematic domain— the internet is by no means a trivial matter. That being said, it does not do one any favors to come in with the piano, priming your audience for the somber track five piano ballad, and then mellifluously sneer “everybody’s so punk on the internet.” And before we have a chance to process that, we’re hit with the unbearable “trolling and memes/sad as it seems,” and it goes on. “Every single hot take is cold as ice”— I see what you did there Taylor! And what’s with the bizarre, jarring (mis)use of the AA jargon “terminal uniqueness”? Suffice it to say that the first verse of this song is brutal. Again, the topic is not the issue, but it’s just so cutesy and, as you said, first-draft-y that I could almost believe her post-hoc excuse that it sucks on purpose to illustrate “dying just from trying to seem cool.”
Well, I do believe her excuse in a way— I believe she is trying to, as she might say, write with two “types of pen” to draw the same kind of contrast she draws in her iconically awful line from Midnights’ “Paris”: “Sit quiet by my side in the shade/And not the kind that’s thrown/I mean, the kind under where a tree has grown.” The lingo represents superficiality and falsehood, and she uses it with irony— this is clear in lines like “every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter/and we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.” The lingo gets subverted here, as “looking fire” comes at the cost of disguising and suppressing one’s real self.
Could she have pulled off this device? Maybe, but it’d definitely require more care and precision than she shows here.
It’s a sad failure, as the contrast of reality and illusion that she means to describe through the dueling lyrical styles is part of what I find compelling in this song. She develops this contrast in a sophisticated way. The false self— the vaporous illusory subjectivity epitomized by social media— offers a kind of power, the power of constant and extensive social connectivity with none of the danger of actual relationships— “when your first crush crushes something kind,” as Taylor sings in the second verse, which is much better than the first. I consider it important that in this song Taylor does not say she has changed her view on anything but instead confesses to lies. We lie to ourselves as well as others that we can avoid the pain of a broken arm by giving up the joy of love’s trampoline, but the whole world is that trampoline. As Taylor has said, we are what we love. Although she mentions a “vow,” I don’t read the chorus as a series of promises, at least not primarily; I read them as a statement of fact. “I’m never gonna let you down,” “I’m never going to leave you out,” “I’m never gonna break that vow”— she doesn’t say “I promise not to” or even “I won’t,” but “I am never going to.” The vow doesn’t need to be made, it already has been, because love makes its own vow on our behalf, and this vow defines who we are, to break it makes us a “traitor” not only to whom we love but even more to ourselves. These lines bring something profound out of the seemingly dumb line that precedes them in the chorus, “I’m not a bad bitch.” That line tells us who Taylor is not; “I’m never gonna let you down,” by way of telling us what she’ll never do, tells us who she is.
I agree that the bridge is inspired. Classic Taylor Swift songwriting at its finest. The rhyme supports it, but it isn’t forced—well, maybe the invention of the phrasal verb “shimmer back” is ever so slightly forced, but it’s forgiven. Tbh I kind of like it. Taylor certainly excels as a poet of memory and the phenomenology of time. “Ferris wheels, kisses, and lilacs” is a quintessence of Taylor’s lyricism to me, or at least one major aspect of it— a series of images that should be bloodlessly trite and yet is somehow so evocative that I can’t tell whether it’s brilliant or dumb. And what should be the next line but “things I said were dumb”. The Mastermind, folks.
I like the way she sings the word “out” on this song. “Owwat.”
CD: This song is one of her most “Track 5” Track 5s, IMO. How does one define a Taylor Swift Track 5, exactly? On her YouTube Live during the Lover rollout, she said: “Track five is kind of a tradition that really started with you guys… I guess I don’t know why, but instinctively I was putting a very vulnerable, personal, honest, emotional song as Track 5.” I definitely thought putting her most emotional song as Track 5 originated with her—but whatever. What’s the difference between Swiftie groupthink and Taylor’s brain, anyway?
I appreciate your breakdown of that first verse, and I agree that, in the mind of a “bourgeois millennial woman,” being a person on social media is an interesting, even complex topic. HOWEVER—it boggles my mind that she would deliberately spend a full-ass verse (of which there are only one or two in a song, they are precious!!) entirely devoted to speaking of it in this way, when these observations have been made by many, many people for the last ten years.
Yet...there’s something so tragic about being as terminally online as Taylor has always been—and still not feeling fluent in it, or “punk” enough to belong there. However, “every single hot take is cold as ice” is not a terminally unique thought, and neither is “dying just from trying to seem cool.” That’s most people, actually. She’s already expressed feeling uncool in the presence of less sincere people in other songs—“You Belong With Me,” for starters, or “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” It feels like she’s expressing the same idea here, just using the internet as the setting.
If this first verse felt more personal to her truly “terminally unique” experience—being both extremely online and perpetually excluded and the biggest pop star in the world—there are so many more creative ways she could’ve articulated it. As it stands, first-draft vibes.
But once the second verse gets going—ooooh yeah, I love the song from here on out. I love how her voice comes in louder but more intimate on verse 2, like she’s suddenly conversing with you. I love the narrative surprise of “that was the night I fell off and broke my arm” after “you know the last time I laughed this hard was / on a trampoline in somebody’s backyard.” Really excellent Taylor stuff there. I actually had to consult ChatGPT because I forgot the name of that literary device where you deflate the line that came before it— BATHOS!
But much like “trolling and memes / sad as it seems,” I loathe “when your first crush crushes something kind.” But then “when I said I didn’t believe in marriage, that was a lie” comes in and washes away the cringe completely.
When I say this song is “emotionally honest,” I mean it’s a very clear portrait of her inner life: the constant comparison and competition, the obsession with being “cool” (a.k.a. revered by others), and the rumination on her deepest desire—to return to the comfort and happiness of childhood, before she was famous and stripped of her innocence.
Like I said earlier, I looooove this bridge—probably my favorite moment on the entire album. When she sings “we lieeeee back / a beautiful, beautiful time lapse,” the repetition of “beautiful” perfectly matches the breathlessness of the moment. I love the vocal layering, too. “I thought that I’d never find that / beautiful, beautiful life that / shimmers that innocent light back / like when we were young” makes me cry. It’s perhaps the most beautiful moment on the album—and the one where I can really feel her relief and happiness in having found that with Travis.
Aside from Verse 1, I also struggle to understand what she’s saying about eldest daughters and youngest children. Presumably, the “youngest child” she’s referring to is Travis—if she’s the “eldest daughter,” then he must be the “youngest child.” But when she says “every youngest child felt / they were raised up in the wild,” on what planet can that be seen as the opposite of the eldest daughter’s experience of being “the first lamb to the slaughter”? Oh, I guess the youngest child was just chilling in the pasture or something? IDK, there’s something incomplete or off about this metaphor.
It’s also not the first time she’s likened her partner to a sibling. In “Call It What You Want,” she says “trust him like a brother / yeah, you know I did one thing right.” Someone should psychoanalyze that. Anyway, I agree with you that this is song #2 in the three-banger run of Father Figure-Eldest Daughter- Ruin the Friendship, which I’ll get to now.
TRACK 6- RUIN THE FRIENDSHIP
CD: First, I need to direct attention to the bass line. It sounds like it belongs on a SZA song or a 90s R&B midtempo ballad. Actually, when I just Googled the lyrics to reread them while I listened, I saw this…
????????????
R&B no, but I suppose it’s a soulful song, in a way...
We’ve got the whole Swift universe high school word bank on this song—Gallatin Road, Jeep, 50 Cent song, Abigail. The subject of the song is a friend, rumored to be Jeff Lang, who passed away in 2010. Part of why I like this song so much is because it feels like a “You Belong With Me” retrospective. Whereas “You Belong With Me” was written from the perspective of desiring a friend who is spoken for, “Ruin the Friendship” feels like her looking back on that friendship and regretting that she didn’t just make a move (even if it wasn’t “conveniaaaaahnt”). It reminds me of “Could’ve Would’ve Should’ve” in that way— her unearthing lore from her past that she’s not quite over yet.
I love the pastoral, mundane scenes of 2000s high school suburbia the verses provide, and how the chorus (“should’ve kissed you anyway”) imbues them with subtext. In the song’s bridge, the point of telling takes place an indeterminate amount of time later— after high school. Abigail “calls [her] with the bad news”— the friend has died, and they never knew whyyyyy. After this, the chorus, lamenting “it was not convenient / would’ve been the best mistake / should’ve kissed you anyway,” becomes even more profound.
The first time I heard the post-bridge lyric switch—“but I whispered at the grave / should’ve kissed you anyway”— I had to laugh because the image of her showing up at this guy’s funeral and standing at his grave whispering “should’ve kissed you anyway” is the most Taylor Swift shit eeevverrrrrr.
In the outro, she gives questionable advice to the listener— a mode of songwriting she’s always been comfortable with (see “Dear Reader,” “Never Grow Up,” “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” and “Shake It Off,” for example). The advice at hand is to “ruin the friendship / better that than regret it for all time.” We’ve already discussed this, but I need to re-stress here that this is not the wisest advice she’s ever given. It’s actually Carrie Bradshaw–level advice—in that, if you’re living life for the plot, by all means, ruin the friendship! But if you value emotional sanity, or want to keep a little something to offer the muse, maybe don’t listen to this advice, idk?
The outro continues— “my advice is always answer the question / better that than regret it for all time”— and it’s impossible for me not to think about Matty Healy, and how she ruined that friendship. Which almost ruined her… before the invisible string led her to Travis. So I guess the advice she’s doling out here is to act on your feelings rather than just feel them. Like I said to you: in the same way I’m glad I didn’t see Sex and the City in my twenties, I’m glad this song didn’t come out during other moments in my younger life, because I might have taken her advice and really regretted it.
Plus, by not ruining the friendship, she wrote a great song. What would have happened if she had kissed him anyway? She probably would’ve hooked up with that guy for a little while, and then they would’ve broken up. The tension between two possibilities is alive and well in this song, which I think is what makes it so effective.
One thing though: in press for this album, she claimed she hadn’t written about high school in a while (”I obviously used to write about high school all the time. I haven’t written about it in a very long time, but sometimes I will, like sometimes on Folklore, I’ll just be like, you know that feeling when it’s August about you’re like, ‘meet me behind the mall and you’ll cancel your plans.’ I love to kind of go back into that mode.”) and it’s like... “So High School” from TTPD exists…!
KbY: I didn’t even think about who the “youngest child” is; yeah, I suppose it is Travis. My brain seems to have just refused to engage with the whole “Eldest Daughter” part of the song, even though that is the title and a major through-line, because I simply can’t process Taylor’s seeming incomprehension of what that phrase even means. You don’t call yourself the eldest daughter if you are the ONLY daughter, because then you are also the youngest daughter. It’s meaningless!!!
I wish I could truly enjoy Ruin the Friendship, but it just feels a skosh too calculated. This is the “Taylor Swift Impersonator” effect— I feel like the song isn’t even really even about what it’s about, but rather just an overwrought exercise in recreating the vibe of a Fearless-era Taylor song. Yes, the image of looking over your prom date’s shoulder to lock eyes with your crush as 50 Cent plays will stir the nostalgia for people of Taylor’s generation (like us), but there’s something fake about it. Like, what 50 Cent song was it? If we think of Ruin the Friendship as a friendship bracelet, it seems to be just an excuse to string together individual beads of Fearlessploitation. Elements like the Abigail name drop just come off like the checking of boxes.
The bad advice of the song is kind of an example of what I mean. When she sings “my advice is always ruin the friendship,” I don’t believe her. If a friend or a younger protégé (whom she didn’t secretly want to sabotage) or a future teenage daughter came to her for advice about whether to risk ruining a friendship for a chance at something more, I think— or at least hope— that Taylor would do the sensible thing and evaluate the particular situation at hand. I could forgive the bad advice of the song if I believed it were sincere, but I don’t; I think she just says that because it sounds good to her or gives the song a “message.” Taylor already wrote a reflective song about her high school experience that, without making any statements as explicit as “my advice is,” offers much sounder and much truer advice: “when you’re fifteen, and somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them.“ In fact, “always ruin the friendship” almost contradicts her message in Fifteen: “look before you fall.”
“I whispered at your grave ‘I should’ve kissed you anyway’” elicits the same reaction from me— i.e., no, you didn’t. That didn’t happen. That might be a “conveen’yont” way to incorporate the refrain, but that’s exactly the problem. It rings too false; it’s contrived.
The part that made me laugh on first listen was the “GoodBYYYYEE.” It’s such a dramatic tonal shift, and now that this has become an “in memoriam” song, the shallowness of the relationship as described suddenly snaps into view. We literally know nothing about this guy other than that he has a nice smile and that he and Taylor stare at each other— he is basically just a prop in Taylor’s nostalgic tableaux. Just think about how insane it would be if someone gave a eulogy as self-centered as this song is. It becomes all the weirder with the next line, “and we’ll never know why.” If this man had died of an illness or in a tragic accident, this line wouldn’t make much sense (unless it’s intended to express a very abstract philosophical question about human mortality in general, which I do not think is the case). This line strongly suggests to me that he died by suicide. So, if Taylor is actually interested in the question of “why,” that would seem to be a much better subject for the song. To be fair, I think the Red vault track “Forever Winter” might have to do with that aspect of this relationship, but, idk, there seems to be a lot of distance between the addressee of Ruin the Friendship and the addressee of that song. Perhaps there is something to explore in the space between the “what if” fantasy of RTF and the helpless anxiety of Forever Winter? To take up your speculation about what would have happened had Taylor “kissed him anyway”—does knowing what eventually happened not change her calculus at all? Does she think that she could have “saved him”— that she could “take the bomb in [his] head and disarm it,” as she imagines on Forever Winter? Or does she consider that she might have exhausted her efforts in vain? If she still wishes she had pursued a relationship with this guy, knowing that it could entail guilt and pain far beyond pissing off his ex, then that’s interesting, but this does not seem to enter into Ruin the Friendship at all. Maybe there could be another verse in between “don’t make it awkward in second period” and “goodBYyYyE,” that deals with his spiraling into depression and substance abuse as depicted in Forever Winter? Or anything whatsoever that addresses or even alludes to this? The closest thing we get is maybe “you drive (mm-mm) 85,” but I can’t tell if this is foreshadowing or just part of the high school mise en scène. It’s a conspicuous crack in the song’s veneer, and the fact that the song relies so heavily on glossing over something so huge is part of what prevents it from becoming much more than quaint. Ironically, I think this song cares less about what is truthful than about what is “conveen’yont”— such as, by the way, rhyming “convenient” with “invitation”— and that, ultimately, is not very FEARLESS, is it?
Something about the production on this track sounds a little bit… how to put it… karaoke? Maybe it is a result of the general strummy Fearless vibe sitting on that bass line. Also, while I commend the effort I guess, I’m not sure she quite pulls off the melisma dipping into her lower register— the stand out example to me is “have fUuUun… it’s prOahAHahAhom.”
Part two in the works!✪
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