There’s a familiar rhythm to a Taylor Swift album drop, honed over the past decade: The critics weigh in. The takes arrive. The ancillary gossip about who and what is referenced in lyrics and who’s going to be chapped about it begins circulating. There’s a burst of Swiftie-related social-media drama, some notes on the quality of the production and the obvious references. Eventually, all the main angles are covered, and the various dissents and theories are taken to Reddit. People continue listening or they don’t, and the world goes on turning.
There has never been a pop star quite like Taylor Swift. That’s not meant as a value judgment. There’s never been a pop star like Swift because until fairly recently, there had never been a 24/7 delivery system for multimodal pop stardom, or a culture where the release of an album prompts so many people to feel that having a response is a non-negotiable critical duty.
This year, with “The Life of a Showgirl,” things felt a little different. Maybe it was the 11th-hour announcement of release parties or the residual weirdness of Donald Trump’s apparent preoccupation with getting Swift’s attention, or the atmosphere of general chaos. Whatever the reason, there was a mad scramble to be the first out of the gate with the definitive takedown. It’s bad. It’s mid. It’s lazy. Too cringe. Too happy. Too self-referential. There were confident assertions that the album was going to flop, followed quickly by reports that it absolutely wasn’t.
There has never been a pop star quite like Taylor Swift. That’s not meant as a value judgment. There’s never been a pop star like Swift because until fairly recently, there had never been a 24/7 delivery system for multimodal pop stardom, or a culture where the release of an album prompts so many people to feel that having a response to it is a non-negotiable assignment. Taylor Swift is unique not because she’s a bigger or better pop star than Michael Jackson, Madonna, Whitney Houston or Beyoncé, but because she is a self-sustaining media ecosystem that people regularly enter for the sole purpose of performing a reaction.
Paying near-constant attention to Taylor Swift, and Swift paying near-constant attention to the attention paid to her could only result in a codependent relationship, and it has. Way too many of us think we need to love Taylor Swift, hate Taylor Swift or at the bare minimum have a strong opinion about her. In turn, Swift herself bears an outsized self-consciousness and sense of responsibility to an audience beyond her actual audience. That this has become a routine dynamic doesn’t make it a healthy one.
It’s time to take a break from Taylor Swift, and for her to take a break from us.
I get that this sounds presumptuous: Who the hell am I to stage a Taylor/America intervention, even a purely hypothetical one? It’s a fair question. As a writer and editor and pop-culture critic, I’ve spent a lot of the last decade-plus aware of Taylor Swift’s cultural primacy despite having never made an effort to know anything about her. Gigabytes of information about her life, her music, her legal battles, her dramas and especially her relationships have piled up on my screens unbeckoned. I’ve seen relationships derailed because of Swift-related misalignment and watched fellow critics be tormented by her notoriously intense fandom.
But also, I am firmly neutral, neither a fan nor a non-fan. I have appreciated her bangers and been moved to tears by her epics, but that’s true of any number of artists. If all the other pop stars on Earth were raptured away and Swift was the only one left, I could probably live with it. If an alien craft absconded with Swift and her music disappeared overnight, I’d be sad for her loved ones but basically unaffected. I have no dog in this fight, just a sense that it’s a good time to consider how this relationship is impacting everyone involved.
Let’s consider a few of the issues.
(Bruce Bennett/Getty Images) Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift on June 12, 2025 in Sunrise, Florida.
Issue #1: Expectations have become needlessly high
Swift made “The Life of a Showgirl” during breaks in the “Eras Tour,” which visited 21 countries over 21 months and involved a breakneck schedule. She flew to Sweden to work with songwriting team Max Martin and Shellback, reuniting with them for the first time since 2016’s “1989.” “The Life of a Showgirl” is a concept album in the same way that “The Tortured Poets Department” was a concept album, visually setting a specific mood — in this case, with the invocation of hustle and routine, stage makeup and wardrobe fittings and the clinging scent of industrial-strength hairspray. The promotional photos feature Swift decked out in peek-a-boo rhinestones, flesh-tone fishnets, and neon-bright plumage of the kind that once filled Las Vegas casino stages.
But with Swift’s own metric in mind, I don’t think this will be remembered as her Showgirl Era. That doesn’t mean the new album isn’t catchy or well constructed; the content just doesn’t match the energy of the concept. Each track has something going on somewhere within it (even the one about Travis Kelce’s junk, I’m sorry to report); the lyrics are maximalist tangles presented on shiny trays to be combed through for shared history and Easter eggs. But the tacit promise of overall oomph just doesn’t deliver. There’s no bump and no grind: The bits of spicy wordplay stand out mostly because Swift doesn’t sound fully committed to them.
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The success of the “Eras Tour” put pressure on Swift to offer up something splashy and new to keep the momentum going, and the album’s title and visuals suggested that the tour had inspired Swift in a more mature, world-weary direction. Commercially, the reviews don’t matter: “The Life of a Showgirl” has already put up record-breaking first-week numbers. Popular reception defying critical reception and vice-versa is pretty standard. TLOAS will fold into Swift’s existing oeuvre, hauled out and reconsidered every few years until eternity. Releasing a new album every year, regardless of how much else is going on, means that every so often one of them will feel a little phoned in. If there’s an action item here, it’s that everyone can be more proactive about managing expectations.
(Gareth Cattermole/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management) Taylor Swift during “The Eras Tour” at Wembley Stadium on August 15, 2024, in London, England.
Issue #2: Pop stars do not work for you
At the intersection of late-stage capitalism and toxic fandom lies the misguided belief that spending money to be entertained is an investment that guarantees a return, and that’s a hard no. If you love an artist or director or comic-book creator and make the choice to buy their stuff and help ensure they make more of it — that’s great, but the relationship ends there. Money spent on tickets, albums and meet-and-greets doesn’t buy anyone, much less everyone, a say in what comes next.
Admittedly, this was a lot more clear-cut before the internet and social media gave fans the opportunity to interact with their faves. Shortening the distance between creators and fandoms isn’t inherently unhealthy, but these parasocial relationships can lead fans to confuse themselves with patrons. The result is a plague of entitlement with real-world impacts. Taylor Swift’s fans have stood out over the years for group mobilizations that, even at their most well-meaning, are still titanic oversteps: harassing Swift’s past lovers, doxxing critics who are insufficiently complimentary about albums, delivering an open letter to the singer demanding that she answer for her boyfriend’s past behaviors and remarks, and more.
At the intersection of late-stage capitalism and toxic fandom lies the misguided belief that spending money to be entertained is an investment that guarantees a return, and that’s a hard no.
Credit to Swift for putting in extraordinary effort to give her best to fans despite their menacing tendencies. On the other hand, it’s tempting to wonder if all the exclusive vinyl editions and bonus acoustic tracks function as a kind of hassle tax on her fans. But even if it’s not passive-aggressive, the fact that “Taylor’s version” has morphed into multiple limited-edition alternative packaging is a bad look. Just as ACAB includes Benson and Stabler, “billionaires shouldn’t exist” includes Taylor Swift.
A couple of action items here: Remember that just as you don’t owe an artist your time and money, they don’t owe you more than the art you have made the choice to enjoy. And Taylor, don’t take advantage of fan worship by squeezing extra money out of fans — it’s bad optics, and it normalizes an overly transactional dynamic.
Issue #3: Taylor Swift is reflexively centered in pop-music discourse
“Poptimism” was a good-faith concept when it first entered the lexicon in the early 2010s to help give critical context to Taylor Swift’s emerging body of work. A somewhat reactionary term from the jump, poptimism was situated as a corrective to “rockism,” a binary explored in Kelefa Sanneh’s influential 2004 New Yorker piece “The Rap Against Rockism.” In theory, poptimism gave critics — and it was mainly critics who used the term — a framework for countering long-prevailing ideas of pop music as insubstantial and empty, with no claim to importance. In practice, positing all pop music as deliberate pushback to rockism’s narrowly conceived authenticity ended up on a slippery slope into overcorrection, hyperbole and and the inadvertent big-upping of an exploitative industry.
With every drop of a new TS album, there are people strapping on headlamps and diving into the lyric sheets like they’re decoding ancient runes on a tight deadline.
Honestly, it takes nothing away from Swift’s songwriting to push back against the claim that Taylor Swift is the greatest pop lyricist of all time, in that the claim is evidence of a limited frame of reference. Her popular and critical ascent has already secured her place in music history. Meanwhile, streaming has allowed all of us to discover music we love without needing to slot that music into a hierarchy of genre and value dictated by critics. Putting disproportionate energy into dissecting every professional and personal move of a performer who is already very much inevitable just re-entrenches Swift as the standard to which every emerging woman artist is held. They deserve the chance to make us love them on a more even field. The main action item here is one that Taylor already does — shifting the spotlight to others — but I think she could go further by taking a creative break somewhere remote, with inconsistent WiFi.
Issue #4: Not everything needs to be a grand narrative
“We should all know less about each other” is a shibboleth that’s marked social media’s supersaturation. I’d amend it to say that we should all specifically know less about Taylor Swift.
Part of what makes Swift a compelling songwriter and performer is her ability to make the personal universal, but somewhere along the way, things started lingering in the realm of the personal, with Swift scattering each release with lyrical callbacks and Easter eggs meant to prompt avid close-reading. With every drop of a new TS album, there are people strapping on headlamps and diving into the lyric sheets like they’re decoding ancient runes on a tight deadline. This, in turn, creates a whole news cycle about beefs and backstories that further perpetuates all the previously mentioned issues. This not only makes Swift seem petty, it drags whomever she is wordily trash-talking back into something that’s likely not worth the effort to explain, much less relitigate.
Several months back, I thought the reactions to the news that Taylor and Travis were engaged — for instance, the University of Tennessee professor canceling an exam so everyone could process the news — was ample evidence that the parasocial investment into Swift’s life is more than just escapism. But Swift is part of this feedback loop: She had every right to jazz up the announcement with an engagement photoshoot, of course. (“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”) But that set her up for an inevitable counternarrative that’s emerged with “The Life of a Showgirl” — namely, that a happy Taylor Swift is a boring Taylor Swift. I hope I’m wrong in my hunch that a rogue band of Swifties has already been calling on Etsy witches to curse this union and release the tortured poet back into the heartbroken wild.
The action item here is very simple: Taylor, take a break and let us miss you a little bit. We know you’ll be back.
