In a sense, Taylor Swift’s Showgirl era actually began two albums ago—with “You’re on Your Own Kid,” a revealing track on her 10th studio record, Midnights (2022). In the song, Swift charts her coming of age in the spotlight: first escaping her small town by writing music, then searching parties full of “better bodies / just to learn that my dreams aren’t rare,” and ultimately deciding that “there were pages turned with the bridges burned” during her so-called cancellation chapter. It’s where she, Swift, first sang of the friendship bracelets that became currency on her Eras tour—even helping to bring her now fiancé, Travis Kelce, into focus. All of it would coalesce into the biggest creative chapter of Swift’s career.
Two years, $2 billion in ticket sales, and 11 reprisals of “You’re on Your Own Kid” (the most repeated surprise song on her live set list) later, Swift promises a look “behind the curtain” of that blockbuster tour with her new album, The Life of a Showgirl.
Look no further than the cover art—shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot, who also worked on her Reputation (2017) imagery—meant to represent Swift’s mood getting into the bath after a night of performing during the Eras tour. “When all this has gone down, you won’t be able to get to bed until 4 in the morning,” she said while announcing the album on Kelce’s New Heights podcast, “but you had to jump through 50 million hoops in this obstacle course that is your show. And you did it. You got two more in a row, but you did it tonight.” Swift added, “This album isn’t really about what happened to me on stage. It’s about what I was going through offstage.”
That’s also true of most great showgirl movies, where Swift has been known to find inspiration. In fact, three of cinema’s most famous showgirls—as played by Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls, Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl, and Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl—tend to foreshadow The Life of a Showgirl as first outlined in “You’re on Your Own Kid,” and hint at what may come on the twelfth album.
The small-town “Daisy May” who longed for stardom in “You’re on Your Own Kid” sounds a bit like Nomi Malone, the bright-eyed heroine of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, who hitches a ride to Las Vegas to become a dancer. Once there, she’s deceived and betrayed in both business and love. All of Nomi’s naivete is stripped away in her pursuit of fame. And she abandons her once steadfast ideals to replace Gina Gerhson’s veteran showgirl Cristal Connors, whose line, “There’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you,” sounds like a lyric straight out of “Nothing New,” in which Swift and Phoebe Bridgers sing about the passage of time in the spotlight. “I know someday I’m gonna meet her, it’s a fever dream / The kind of radiance you only have at 17,” the two sing of their imaginary successor. “She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me / I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep.”
Source link
