"My biggest gripe with Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl is that she promised us an album that reflected her "exuberant and electric and vibrant" inner and backstage life while traveling the world on her record-smashing Eras Tour. Instead, we got a soulless and incoherent album about Travis Kelce's "manhood," featuring another metaphor for what the sky looks like when you're in love. My second biggest gripe? Taylor's tradwife lyrics."
"Obviously, this is the artist who wrote "Love Story," so marriage and weddings and "happily ever after" have always been a piece of her music. But she was also a literal teenager when she wrote "He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring" in 2008-and traditional cliches aside, that song's dramatic storytelling and alternate Shakespearean arc are, to use one of her own adjectives, "exuberant.""
"And I have nothing against marriage; I have nothing against weddings; I have nothing against being so fucking happy and drunk in love that you want to sing corny sexual innuendos from the rooftop. But at least write about it well. I recoiled when I first listened to "Eldest Daughter" and heard "When I said I don't believe in marriage/That was a lie.""
The Life of a Showgirl emphasizes domestic and tradwife-oriented lyrics that foreground marriage, settling down, and conventional romantic metaphors. The album presents a soulless and incoherent focus on male masculinity and repetitive sky-as-love imagery, rather than backstage exuberance and electric touring life. Earlier songwriting exhibited dramatic storytelling, theatrical arcs, and vulnerable nuance in finding love without erasing past identity. Specific lyrics reference recanted disbelief in marriage and dreams of driveways and basketball hoops, signaling domestic settling. The lyrical turn toward traditional domestic themes raises concerns about cultural narratives positioning marriage as the primary purpose for women.
Read at Jezebel
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