The Taylor Swift “Life Of A Showgirl” Hate Is Way Overblown

Note: This post is an Op-Ed and shares the author’s personal views.

Hey guys, did you hear that Taylor Swift bludgeoned someone to death? Wait, what? Oh, she just released an album? My bad. I thought, given the tone of some of the reactions, that she had committed some heinous crime.

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By nature of your clicking into this article, you’re likely aware that Ms. Swift released an album called The Life of a Showgirl on Friday. Yet, before it came out, I was oddly nervous. Nervous in a way that I’m not when it comes to other artists I enjoy. Nervous because of the firestorm of reactions it was bound to provoke, regardless of its quality.

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Lo and behold, my fears were far from unfounded. People went out of their way to smugly declare how a fairly inoffensive 40-minute pop record was a crime to their ears. Taylor’s new work has been called “naval-gazing” and her album a “charmless chore” in the opinion pages, with one one-star review lamenting for the Folklore days and calling it a “parody album hallucinated by some porn-addled AI.” People are welcome to have their earnest criticisms, but the extremity of some reviews do make me wonder if we listened to the same album.

I would humbly argue that the storytelling on “Ruin the Friendship” is on par with the best songs in her career.

But reviews of Taylor have never been solely on the basis of her music. Case and point: Reputation, a spiritual predecessor of TLOAS in many ways, was evicerated by many, only for publications like Consequence to later write, “Taylor Swift of 2017 deserved better from the media at large, and this album deserves a much better score. Time has proven it.” Right now, Taylor is overexposed and doing too well. The discourse around her has always presented a fairground mirror of society’s most impossibly high expectations. I only wish it could be realized in real-time, rather than retrospectively.

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Much of this is demonstrated with reception to “Actually Romantic,” a song widely perceived to be a diss track aimed at Charli XCX. Pitchfork called the track “cringey,” “mean,” and “dumb” in a review dedicated to the track (despite it not being a single). In this discourse, Charli, one of the most openly shit-talking women of pop, has been reframed as some kind of precious flower trodden on by the mighty heels of Ms. Swift, a take I would imagine she finds somewhat infantilizing. The worst the track gets is calling her a “tiny chihuahua.” Remember when Kendrick Lamar played a song calling Drake a pedophile at the Super Bowl?

I wouldn’t be writing this if there wasn’t a version of this that happened every time something beloved by women and girls reached stratospheric heights. From the Twilight panic to endless Fifty Shades of Grey discourse, there’s a level of scrutiny given towards pop culture that dares to be fun and for women that just doesn’t exist on the other side of the gender line. It’s more than just criticism; it’s a whole media backlash complex. Right now, Sabrina Carpenter is the permissibly quippy girl-du-jour, but I’m sure it won’t take long for that to change. Don’t girlboss too close to the sun, ladies!

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Maybe Taylor herself put it best: “They wanna see you rise, they don’t want you to reign.”

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