The pop megastar’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, has left her fandom divided: while some Swifties are as devout as ever, others believe the record is cash grab devoid of her usual lyricism
26-year-old Amy* has been a Swiftie since she was nine years old. “I still have the Wonderstruck perfume I won in a magazine competition in 2011 – you had to write in with your favourite Taylor Swift song, mine was ‘Hey Stephen’,” she recalls. Today, Amy owns all of Swift’s albums and a sizable merch collection – including “cardigans and Christmas ornaments” – and attended the Eras tour with her fiancé last year. “I love her for her lyricism and her ability to speak to the everyday female experience,” she explains.
But Amy was disappointed by Swift’s latest release, The Life of a Showgirl. “I was expecting a complex piece about the reality of being a showgirl – crashing in a bathtub after a show, hiding in European cities, and FaceTiming from planes. But I’m not really sure what we got,” she says. “Lyrically, it’s all over the place. It sounds like what her haters think her music sounds like.” She adds that she has seen a “mostly critical” reaction from her fellow fans, too. “We all love her and know she can do better. I just hope she takes some time off, gets back to her roots, and comes to us with more of an album than a product [...] but unfortunately this really is her dumbest album yet.”
As a card-carrying Swiftie, Amy is part of an enormous, global fandom renowned for its unwavering devotion to Swift (and sometimes described as cultish for it), comparable only to the Beatlemaniacs of the 1960s. It’s highly unusual for Swift superfans to speak critically about their idol; in recent years, as Swift’s career has reached dizzying new heights, music journalists have been doxxed, harassed and sent death threats by Swifties for daring to describe her output as anything less than perfect. But The Life of a Showgirl seems to have given some of the fandom pause. Amy is by no means the only Swiftie with qualms about Swift’s new direction: fans on X are openly regretting pre-ordering multiple copies of the record, while on TikTok, videos of Swifties “crashing out” over the album’s cringeworthy lyrics are going viral.
27-year-old Will, while ordinarily a fan of Swift, is not a fan of the new album. “Ever since her debut, Taylor Swift has possessed an innate ability for storytelling,” he says, explaining that the singer’s lyricism has always been the main draw for him. “I personally do not care for The Life of a Showgirl at all. I found the lyrics, which have always been her strong suit, to be superficial and basic.” He describes one line from ‘Eldest Daughter’ – “but I’m not a bad bitch, and this isn’t savage” – as “straight up cringy”. Parisa, 28, feels similarly. “I keep trying to relisten to The Life of a Showgirl, to maybe come to terms with her new sound, but it’s just very different to her usual lyrics that have a deeper meaning,” she says. “The songs don’t reflect the Taylor we’ve known who’d reference Aristotle and Greek mythology.”
For 27-year-old Nina, part of the issue is that Taylor’s work just doesn’t feel “relatable” anymore. “Maybe this is a sign of me outgrowing her music. I personally can’t relate to the all-American vision of her and Travis. I struggle to relate to the fairytale ending. I’ve never subscribed to that ideology,” she says. “I think she could still write beautifully about it, but it will get harder to relate.” It’s an understandable concern: many of Swift’s most popular songs grapple with themes like heartbreak and yearning, often rooted in her personal experience. As Tyler Foggatt recently wrote in The New Yorker, her exes “haven’t just been her boyfriends; they’ve been her muses.” Many fans, in light of this, are wondering what kind of music Swift will produce now she appears to be in a happy, settled relationship. Swift herself even recently admitted to once fearing her songwriting abilities would “dry up” if she achieved happiness and stability in her personal life.
Perhaps this is an unfair question to ask; comparatively little attention is given to the relationship status of male artists. But it’s very possible that Swift, now a pop behemoth and billionaire to boot, is becoming more and more out of touch. “You can see how her reality is very different to her fans’ lives on this record, with mentions of luxury brands and expensive hotels,” Nina says. It’s certainly a far cry from the carefully crafted, apolitical ‘everywoman’ image that helped catalyse her career by enabling fans to project whatever they wanted onto her. Maybe, then, the issue isn’t that she’s ‘happy’ – it’s that she’s increasingly sheltered, living a life devoid of any semblance of ‘normalcy’ anymore.
This chimes with 22-year-old Emily, who is nothing short of a superfan. “I’m autistic and Taylor Swift has been a massive hyperfixation of mine for years,” she explains, adding that she first became “super obsessed” with the artist as a teenager. “I’ve always preordered multiple copies of albums and woken up at 5am on release days to listen as soon as they come out,” she recalls. “I saved for years to see her on tour – last year I saw her ten times on the Eras tour, across Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff, London, Amsterdam, Milan and Zurich. I even have a ‘13’ tattoo.”
The lyrics felt jarring, a product of an echo chamber she’s in at the moment
But the first time Emily listened to The Life of a Showgirl, she “wanted to burst into tears”. “The whole album feels out of touch with the world at the moment”, she says, adding that ‘CANCELLED!’, where Swift asserts that she likes her friends “cloaked in Gucci and in scandal”, feels especially tone deaf. “She’s been rich and famous for as long as I’ve been a fan, but her music still felt deeply relatable,” she continues. “I felt this was completely absent from the new album. The lyrics felt jarring, a product of an echo chamber she’s in at the moment.” She adds that she’s increasingly “uneasy” with Swift’s political apathy, especially her reluctance to say anything about Palestine.
It’s been challenging for Emily to be confronted with the reality that she might not love Swift as wholeheartedly as she once did. “It sounds so silly, but I do feel like I’m going through some sort of grief. I can’t listen to her at the moment without crying,” she says, explaining that it feels disorientating to ‘lose’ a special interest like this. “It feels really confusing trying to balance this love I’ve had for years for Taylor and her music and the realisation that she is just another billionaire who is completely out of touch with the world around her.”
Of course, many fans are still as devoted as ever, decrying anyone who dares offer even a mild criticism of the album as a “fake Swiftie”. Obviously, it will take far more than a single dud album to knock Taylor Swift off the stratospheric pedestal that her staunchest followers have placed her on (and I’m sure there are some fans who would still stand by her even if she released an experimental musique concrète album or said a bunch of slurs on an Instagram Live). But it’s possible that the release of The Life of a Showgirl might come to be remembered as a turning point in Swift’s career; the very first dip after the acme of the Eras era. What goes up must come down, after all.
*Name has been changed