Can She Do It With A Broken Heart?

In 2023, Taylor Swift was on top of the world, literally. She embarked on the highest grossing tour ever recorded with the Eras Tour, becoming the first and only tour to ever gross over one billion dollars. She had the number one album globally with Midnights, securing her historic, never-done-before, fourth Album of the Year win, and she became the first ever artist to occupy the entire Billboard Top 10 at once, beat only by herself a year later. 

She would also meet Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Travis Kelce that summer, the back-to-back Superbowl champion she would marry three years later. And, almost comically, as if you couldn’t imagine more success finding her way if it tried, she was awarded Time’s Person of the Year, an award never before given exclusively to an entertainer. For context, the prior year was Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine, and following Swift was none other than Donald Trump, freshly elected president of the United States that year. 

Whether you like her or not, her impact universally cannot be understated. Name me one other pop star right now named among our world leaders in impact? She has quicker than any other artist alive surpassed the role of popstar and adopted global icon. Three years later though, almost every single person I discuss her with responds the exact same way: 

I like her old stuff. 

Swift took a swing with The Life of a Showgirl, and many think she missed. It comes far removed from the brutally honest, haunting exploration of her life and career that was The Tortured Poets Department from just a year before, relaying both the end of a dwindling relationship and the fire of an old flame relit, then the coinciding fall out, all under a microscope surveyed by the whole world. She was self-deprecating and candid. Showgirl is a spectacle. It’s feathers and glitter and lashes; it’s aware the microscope is there and waving right back, mic in hand and not a hair out of place. 

Both pieces met mixed reactions, with public perception seeming to turn sour quickly for Swift. Tortured Poets was labeled overzealous, she bit off more than she could chew. With thirty-one tracks it was deemed bloated and most egregious, repetitive. Listeners felt that the formula she curated with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the only producers she had worked with since 2017, was growing stale. The tedious vocabulary and story-telling paired behind piano-based synth ballads wasn’t cutting it anymore. 

On Showgirl, Swift drops Antonoff and Dessner and reunites with Max Martian and Shellback, the producers that brought us Shake it Off and Blank Space. The tracklist is a simple twelve tracks, the newly released The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore adding four more. The songs are almost completely void of synths, opting for a more retro, guitar sound. The lyrics are less fantastical and more literal, adopting a similar writing style to her earliest pop attempts, leaving behind the oak cabin for a Shakespearean castle once again. She almost completely flips the aesthetic on its head. Yet Showgirl isn’t quite loved either.

This is not a blind Showgirl defense, I think there is a lot to be said about the album and there is context to support the idea she has lost artistic integrity in the pursuit of success. This album is not at the level of Folklore, it’s hardly at the level of her past projects with the same people. My issues lie in the fact that most of the negative response towards this album is coming from a crowd that either never believed she contained much artistry in the first place or alternatively, is looking to degrade her work any chance they get.

It has time and time been proven that hating Taylor Swift will never go out of style. 

I don’t believe this is a Swift-specific issue though. Female pop stars have time and time again been held to standards far higher than their male counterparts: Harry Styles, Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars. Their careers, their writing, has never been isolated and nit-picked in the way hers has. She is largely ridiculed for only writing songs about her exes, which is categorically untrue, but I can’t place one song by those men not about women, not about romance. You never hear someone say their gripes with Justin Bieber are he writes all his songs about women. 

Female popstars are not given the space to create that men are, they cannot experiment. Swift made a calculated career move to try a new sound, paired with a fresh formula, after receiving criticism she was plateauing. It didn’t play well, but the consensus isn’t that she made a few bad songs in an ocean of incredible, genre-forming work, a smudge on the page, it is as if every good song she ever made was something she stumbled into, the well finally dried. 

When Taylor Swift was nineteen, she self-wrote the entirety of Speak Now, her third studio album featuring hits such as “Enchanted” and “Back to December.” She only has the ability to re-record her albums because every single song on those records she was a composer on. Most pop artists, male or female, cannot say that. Justin Bieber can’t, he has never released a song without at least two other co-writers. Does this make Justin Bieber a bad artist? No. But how long will we claim female artists jump through hoops and do tricks while their male counterparts never leave the ground? When will we demand half as much of men that we do of women in culture to enrich our lives? At what point is Taylor Swift just…allowed to be good? She will not always be amazing, she also does not need to be. Do you think every single album John, Paul, Ringo and George produced post-Beatles was good? Some of them aren’t even palatable to the men themselves, that doesn’t mean Abbey Road was for not. I actually hope this era is the least of my worries one day and she releases an album so bad I refuse to even revisit it. To me, that means she is taking risks and inviting change and experimentation to her work, and any good artist, especially one in her position, has to.  

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