Taylor Swift Chooses Chaos

The Life of a Showgirl may be her most polarizing album yet.

- MUSIC / CRAIG JENKINS

Craig Jenkins on Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl ... Alison Willmore on If I Had Legs I'd Kick You... Nicholas Quah on The Chair Company.

ACROSS FIVE YEARS of tireless activity, Taylor Swift has repeatedly envisioned herself in the shoes of doomed women in history and literature. Last year’s The Tortured Poets Department, which recounted Swift's breakups with rocker Matty Healy and actor Joe Alwyn, disappeared into fantasy. She played a gun moll on the run; she was a diabolical mathematician. The pithy “Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?” suggested she'd rather keep to herself and terrify neighborhood children like To Kill a Mockingbird's Boo Radley than observe any cookie-cutter standards of living. But lately, she’s been getting her way: She bought the masters for her first six albums and bagged a football-player fiancé.

Yet Swift’s latest release, The Life of a Showgirl, her most combative work since 2017's Reputation, captures a millennial at the doorstep of traditional American family life with reservations about plunging into stability. Instead of focusing on the joys of cohabitation or an allergy to controversy, like Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco did in their album, Swift has chosen chaos. As she continues to work through residual resentments from last year, her lyrics often clash with the careful slickness of the production. She wants us to know she’s happy but also hated. Though Showgirl is more streamlined than Poets's exhaustive sprawl, it’s not entirely free from that album’s frustrating self-aggrandizement and headline-grabbing snark. Swift still feels a bit too in the comments section.

Opener and lead single “The Fate of Ophelia” tells of Swift’s relationship with NFL tight end Travis Kelce in storybook terms. Unlike the noblewoman in Shakespeare’s