DON'T BLAME ME

Taylor Swift's new album eschews vulnerability for revenge.

- BY AMANDA PETRUSICH

Swift has been slow to abandon the underdog mentality from her early years.

Since Taylor Swift launched the record-breaking Eras Tour, in 2023—a hundred and forty-nine dates, fifty-one cities, more than two billion dollars in ticket sales—she has been freakishly omnipresent in the cultural consciousness: a grinning lodestar in Louboutin boots. The tour ended last December, but, rather than ceding the spotlight, Swift doubled down on her mega-celebrity, first with a wildly publicized engagement to Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, and then by releasing “The Life of a Showgirl,” her twelfth studio album, and her second in less than eighteen months. It’s a cocky, temperamental record about power and insecurity. “What could you possibly get for the girl who has everything and nothing all at once?” she sings on “Elizabeth Taylor,” one of the album’s best and heaviest tracks. That paradox is central to Swift’s gestalt. She is equal parts formidable (“I’ll be your father figure / I drink that brown liquor / I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger,” she boasts on “Father Figure”) and bruised. “I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness / I’ve been dying just from trying to seem cool,” she sighs on “Eldest Daughter,” a doleful ballad. (“Terminal uniqueness” is a phrase used in A.A. or other recovery programs—a toxic belief in your own exceptionalism.)

Swift has been slow to abandon the underdog mentality she developed as an upstart. What she does for a living is surely gruelling, but relentlessly pointing out how fame is poisonous and burdensome isn’t exactly revelatory. (A lot of jobs are hard; very few make a person unspeakably rich.) On “The Life of a Showgirl,” Swift is occasionally tender—“Honey” is arch, delicate, lovely—but more often she is vengeful, eschewing vulnerability in favor of bombast.