It has been quite the whirlwind these past few days on the internet following the release of Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl. The Swiftie in-fighting is real, and potentially worse than after the release of The Tortured Poets Department. The most common discourses I have observed in these dark, dark times is that one side believes the album is simply meant to be fun, something to dance to, a reflection of Swift’s blissful life with Travis Kelce right now. The other side would go as far to say it’s the worst possible album she has ever put out, and that she represents everything that is wrong with pop music and society today. Now, if you’ve listened to the album I believe we can come to a middle ground on this debate that neither side is fully correct in its entirety. But what has plagued me the most about the album since its release is its track five, “Eldest Daughter.”
A song with so much potential in title alone, I planned for seismic levels of emotional destruction in the most cathartic way possible. Maybe she would invoke themes about independence and loss of girlhood like from past songs “You’re on Your Own Kid” or “Never Grow Up.” This is Swift’s bread and butter, it always has been. She knows how to capture these delicate feelings in understated but beautiful detail. To top it off, “Eldest Daughter” was given the coveted track five position, a pattern known by fans as being the most emotionally vulnerable song on a given album. However, the song we received… anything but.
What Swift delivered instead was an uninteresting ballad made up of disjointed themes and lyrics that make you cringe. Despite its name, the lyrical content grapples more with Swift’s rejection of vapid, apathetic internet culture and how she finds solace from those expectations in her relationship, than it does with the song’s namesake. To demonstrate this, she uses millennial-era slang:
“Everybody’s so punk on the internet
Everyone’s unbothered ’til they’re not
Every joke’s just trolling and memes
Sad as it seems, apathy is hot”
Besides these lyrics feeling flat and one-dimensional in and of itself, the melody follows suit in being quite uninteresting and repetitive. Swift’s typical knack for storytelling is totally missing from this verse, and is void of nuance. Maybe the larger implication for why our internet culture is currently stuck in this bleak era, is in response to the injustices we witness and face as a younger generation, an experience that Swift would not necessarily be privy to. It feels out of touch on her part, if anything.
The chorus is the 2nd most egregious element of the track where she gives her response to the first verse:
“But I’m not a bad bitch
And this isn’t savage
But I’m never gonna let you down
I’m never gonna leave you out”
This execution is corny when paired over sappy production. I will point out that it seems Swift is trying to say that despite her faults in the eyes of commenters on the internet, Kelce provides her with a safe space to truly be herself and not have to worry about how she is perceived. This is all well and good, but I would argue she has addressed these themes much more successfully on past songs like “The Lakes:”
“I’m not cut out for all these cynical clones
These hunters with cell phones
Take me to the Lakes, where all the poets went to die
I don’t belong and, my beloved, neither do you”
Swift is essentially saying the same thing here as she does in “Eldest Daughter” but in a way that is 100% more gratifying. She does not feel like she belongs in this modern world of cynics, and yearns for the private life her beloved provides. The quality is much higher however, and at a level Swift has continuously set for herself album after album. That is where my frustration stems from—fans know what she is capable of and just want to feel that same level of dedication to her craft demonstrated as we have in the past.
We haven’t even touched on the concept of being an eldest daughter yet in the song, and Swift really only does in one pre-chorus: “Every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter, So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.” The first half of the lyric is exactly what I wanted from the entire song, Swift’s perspective on “eldest daughter syndrome.” Us daughters who can relate have been thrust into positions of high expectation for emotional maturity early in life, notably more so compared to how many men and younger siblings have. So we wear tough skin and persevere despite it all. But couldn’t we have said anything other than “and we looked fire”? Like anything less cheesy?
At the end of the day, I am never going to stop being a Swiftie, her claws are in too deep. It’s okay to be critical of the artists that we love and financially support. That is one of the purposes of creating art—to stimulate conversation and debate. But when an artist like Taylor Swift has self-labeled herself as a lyricist and “your favorite English teacher,” we are allowed to hold her to a different standard (something she should understand as an eldest daughter!)