Pop music had a banner year in 2024. There were a number of expertly crafted, culturally significant and commercially successful pop albums that competed both for our wallets and critical acclaim. Projects like Hit Me Hard and Soft, Brat and Short n’ Sweet gave us exciting, catchy and imaginative tracks with the pleasant accessibility that we expect from our favorite pop stars. Still, when you look at the charts and compare streaming numbers, none of these novel, creative or just plain fun projects came in first. Rather, it was a disappointing musical and artistic project from Taylor Swift that made it to the top.
While The Tortured Poets Department’s commercial success might be confusing for some given its questionable musical choices, there must be something that accounts for its success. And there is. By the time of this album’s release, Swift had built a brand so bulletproof that quality was no longer a consideration in judging her work. Making the album enjoyable was seemingly no longer the goal — Swift as an icon had proven more lucrative than Swift as a musician. While other pop albums in 2024 competed for attention through their commitment to musicianship, Swift was able to outstrip them through her sheer force of celebrity.
This airtight branding certainly worked for her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, which garnered astounding commercial success within its first week. It’s clear Swift is still not finished working her popular magic. Despite a brief runtime of only 41 minutes, she has continued her unmatched streak of mountainous success with this release, bringing together her massive fanbase for a more upbeat musical experience than her previous album.
Its commercial success, however, is truly the only impressive aspect of this record. For a project made by one of the most famous musicians in the world, it certainly does not sound like it. The title and artwork for this album spark thoughts of extravagance, drama, opulence and wealth. These thoughts should be tucked away immediately, as none of them will be manifested by the stale, unadventurous and frankly embarrassing journey of The Life of a Showgirl.
If you want something with a pulse, your best bet is “The Fate of Ophelia,” with a decently catchy chorus and a relatively elegantly crafted instrumental. Not exactly a fireworks show, but listenable enough for the department store speakers. After a couple more tracks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is going to be the album’s modus operandi: tasteful pop jams with Swift’s trademark lyrical flourishes. Oh, how right I wish you were.
After expending all of the gas in her tank on the first song, the last nine tracks of this album are in a high-stakes competition for making you skip the fastest. The tracklist subjects you to the most devilish game of roulette, where your binary options are “extremely boring” and “comically insufferable.” The songwriting on copy-paste tunes like “Wi$h Li$t” and “Ruin The Friendship” is instantly flavorless. These are song concepts that even a generative artificial intelligence model would reject as being too cliché, especially for an artist who has shown just how far into her songwriting bag she can reach when she demands it of herself.
On the flip side, lyrical exercises like “Eldest Daughter” and the title track seriously test one’s patience, the former being overtly stuffed with social media buzzwords to distract from the even more overt lack of anything interesting to say. The most immediate defense of these grating lyrical choices is the argument that Swift is being cringe on purpose; she’s only saying these things to comment on our lack of authenticity. But this song is not some sort of mask-off moment for Swift. It’s just another carefully laid brick in constructing a persona — Taylor Swift is not a bleeding heart poet simply too cringe for her own good, she is a billionaire with the best producers, marketers and PR managers that money can buy.
That being said, Swift clearly does not use this potential wealth of information to her advantage, as her few interesting artistic statements stand out as being obscenely out of touch. “Actually Romantic,” for instance, is seemingly directed at fellow pop star Charli xcx. The lyrics “I heard you call me Boring Barbie when the coke’s got you brave” appear to reference Charli’s own allusions to cocaine on 2024’s Brat, and “Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face” aligns with the story that Charli tells on “Sympathy is a knife.”
If the track is truly about Charli xcx, then it is a masterclass in being unable to read the room — “Sympathy is a knife” is not a diss track against Swift, but rather a harrowing examination of Charli’s feelings of impostor syndrome and insecurity, which have made her feel like she isn’t good enough to be around her mainstream peers. Furthermore, the angle that Swift chooses to approach this from is equally strange. Apparently, this insecurity somehow translates to Charli having a romantic fixation with her, which is about as convincing in this summary as it is in the actual song.
The album certainly does not hold up track by track, and as an overall experience it feels even clunkier. These tracks don’t really feel like parts of a whole; rather, they’re a list of songs that feel designed for profit. Given the surface-level execution of something like “Wood,” which feels like a Sabrina Carpenter song written by a boardroom committee, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that this album was made with an extremely cynical mindset. There’s a lurking feeling that the tragic, dense songwriter who made some of our favorite heartbreak anthems is playing us for fools.
Thanks to her most recent album cycles, Swift now knows that effort is not necessary to turn a profit or to have a cultural moment. She is the moment, no matter what she does. This has disincentivized her from pushing herself further, and has instead allowed her to settle into the expectations that have already made her rich and famous. When there is clearly no drive for the artist to make anything interesting or emotionally powerful, then the only emotion that pours out is greed.
For a while now, it has felt like Taylor Swift’s goal has not been to make good music but to supply a market. Swift has built a brand off of her particular style of music and songwriting, and feeding the expectations created by that brand is the end goal. We’re in the final stages of her journey, as the last vestiges of her musical talent disappear into a void of soulless tunes.
Daily Arts Contributor Nathaniel Evans can be reached at natevan@umich.edu.
