Uh Oh, Not Even Taylor Swift Can Save Us from the Slop-Scape
by Kate Martin
How does a Taylor Swift fan grapple with recent events? The phrase “Taylor Swift fan” itself feels strangely confessional. I find myself gazing wistfully upon previous records, even the ones I didn’t love, not knowing at the time just how good we had it. For example, before there was The Life of a Showgirl, there was The Tortured Poets Department. It was sprawling, overwrought, and referred to Matty Healy as a “tattooed Golden Retriever”—but it also captured a Swiftian heartbreak more honestly and vividly than ever before. From a brand-management standpoint, it was an album she probably shouldn’t have made—the heavy-handed ramblings of an overexposed popstar in the throes of situationship-induced psychosis. But she made it anyway, because, as she has explained, that’s just what poets do when they experience pain. The words come pouring out, pretty or not, for the shrewd businesswoman to capture and release in the form of a bloated double-album.
Flash forward to The Life of a Showgirl, and the situation is entirely the opposite. Instead of being heartbroken at the hands of a pretentious indie frontman, she is engaged to be wed to a football player who almost got canceled one time for posting a grammatically incorrect tweet about squirrels. With her old tried-and-true collaborators, Max Martin and Shellback, she set out to write exactly 12 songs for an album of pure, lovestruck and luxurious pop. It was supposed to be everything Tortured Poets was too tortured and poetic to be, the bulletproof pop chart-topper that 2025 had been itching for. So—what went wrong? How could 12 simple songs ignite so much anti-Swift commotion, when she just came out to have a good time?
Clearly, whatever Taylor was going for from a songwriting standpoint didn’t land. Instead of addressing the criticism of Tortured Poets by returning to the more subtle poetic leanings of her back catalogue, she attempts to squeeze roundabout articulations into tight pop prosody, and balances them with groan-inducing slang straight from the internet brain rot slop bucket. Max Martin doesn’t fire on his cylinder either; the production is unoriginal and vague. The best hooks are catchy, but not world-dominating earworm material, lacking the melodic sensibilities that long ago landed him all those number one hits. It’s an album of content moreso than art, songs designed either for TikTok cringe reactions or Instagram Reels background noise. I regret to say that only a couple tracks jump out to me as contenders to be true gold-plated Taylor Swift classics, the rest ranging from forgettable to egregious.
Perhaps the brunt of public disappointment has to do with the bait-and-switch of the album’s marketing. Fans were ecstatic at the prospect of a Showgirl era—getting to see Taylor Swift at her most glamorous and godlike, at the height of her fame, slogging through the last leg of the Eras Tour while navigating new love. All of it was rich grounds for emotional reckonings as well as grade-A pop bangers. Yet the actual content is largely unrelated to that theme and, in a word, unsettling. Why, in an album supposedly about the unattainable lifestyle of a performer, would she dream up the traditionalist suburbia of “Wi$h Li$t”? Is it to try to seem relatable? Is it to appease the tradwife clan that she is now scarily adjacent to? This woman surely wants more than just a neighborhood full of kids that look like Travis Kelce; her career has told us that much. “The Fate of Ophelia” ignores the actual themes of female subjugation in Hamlet to shoehorn in a damsel in distress narrative, where Travis swoops in to save Taylor from Ophelia’s tragic demise. Is she recycling the Shakespearean subversion tactic that endeared her to us in “Love Story”? If so, this go-around is much clumsier and more reductive. She also uses the word “bitch” derogatorily multiple times throughout the record. Oh, and she disses fellow female artist Charli xcx like she’s in a 2000s high school comedy movie—you know, back when it was kind of okay for the hot mean girl to dabble in homophobia.
Taken as a whole, it’s hard not to feel like these entries are an eerie reflection of the present cultural climate. Many internet-goers have noted their concern with Taylor’s new social circle, which involves more sports podcasters and CTE-afflicted male howling and general straight culture than many of us ever imagined for the woman who wrote “ivy”. Her friend group is even said to encroach into the MAGA-sphere. Is this Taylor taking stock of the right wing-post-Trump-AI slop-scape and finally making a conscious, though somewhat concealed, effort to extend her reign to the dark side? Does she feel like the cool girl she’s never quite been before, now that she is less immersed in the industry of pretentious art bros and Pitchfork reviewers and constant threats of younger, hungrier talent? When your immediate soundboard is Travis Kelce, is it enough to just evoke a Shakespearean play and then ignore its every plotpoint? I can almost hear the echoes of him croaking “You’re so smart, babe.” It’s chilling. So Taylor seemingly allies herself with the problematic in “CANCELLED!” and proclaims once and for all how much she loves dick in “Wood”. Listening within the hallowed halls of Oberlin College, you could sense the spirits at odds.
The internet descended into a frenzy on October 3rd. People’s highest hopes and deepest fears that Taylor would produce something truly bad had seemingly come true. Wild speculations about the history and present of Tay-ethos are still being thrown in all directions, with some even alleging that her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, best known for staring at ceilings and being an unemployed actor, ghostwrote most of folklore and evermore. The truth is—it’s one bad album. A swing and a miss. Happens to the best of us. And it’s not even completely abysmal, either. She clearly tried to play around with persona, and, though it doesn’t work in a song like “Wood”, “Father Figure” is actually a compelling character study of a shady industry executive morphing throughout the narrative into Taylor herself. It’s smug, spiteful, and pretty well written.
Taylor Swift is an out-of-touch millennial white woman billionaire, surrounded by yes-men and, in the present moment, a lot of scary, even artistically stifling ideologies. Some of these things she will always be, and they will always color her work in curious, cringy ways, for better or for worse. But she’s also proven herself time and time again to be more than capable of reinvention. Whether that will come in the form of a breakup with the NFL, getting bullied into hiding again, or just taking some time to recalibrate, I think Taylor will eventually find her way back to us, right when we need it most.
