"Between the Eras Tour, her engagement to the football star Travis Kelce, and now two original albums in less than eighteen months, Taylor Swift has become "freakishly omnipresent in the cultural consciousness: a grinning lodestar in Louboutin boots," the music critic Amanda Petrusich writes today in her review of "The Life of a Showgirl." And yet, even amid all this crazy success, the singer has stuck to her underdog mentality. On her latest album, she sings about the struggles of being famous, adopting a tone that's, at times, more vengeful than tender, Petrusich writes, to mixed results. "Sometimes it works; often it doesn't.""
"I'm liking it so far, but I'm not really seeing that much of a connection to the showgirl theme! It's kind of hilarious how she spends so much time crafting and pushing forward a particular aesthetic for each album (like the whole seventies thing she did for "Midnights") and then the music doesn't match at all. It would be actively strange to watch her perform some of these songs wearing, like, a sequinned headdress."
Taylor Swift remains omnipresent through touring, a high-profile engagement, and rapid album output. The Life of a Showgirl centers on the difficulties of fame, often switching between vindictive and tender tones. The album delivers mixed outcomes: some tracks land, while others feel awkward or incongruent with the marketed showgirl aesthetic. Marketing and visual presentation are highly deliberate, but the music does not always align with that imagery. The Tortured Poets Department appears more attuned to the onstage/offstage cognitive disconnect. Early reactions note a loose connection between the album's look and its sonic content.
Read at The New Yorker
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