Why Can’t You Just Leave Taylor Alone?!
Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl is the victory-lap pop she’s earned
EVERYONE else in the world is writing about the future Mrs. Travis Kelce, and so I figured what the conversation really needs at this moment is the opinion of a 55-year-old gay white guy living in Indiana.
Right?
Some critics are pouting into their lavender matcha lattes over Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl. The Guardian calls it “dull razzle-dazzle,” diagnosing burnout and “frazzle.” The Atlantic frames it as the sound of a fairytale ending badly—ambition sated, spark gone. The New Yorker hears “cringey sexual innuendo” and too much fixation on haters.
But seriously, fuck these people.
Also, note that two of those three negative reviews were written by middle-aged white men. Just sayin’.
All of this whinging misses the point of this new orange era and the provenance, the terroir of this record. Showgirl is a deliberate, neon-lit pivot back to the most carefree corner of Swift’s pop toolkit—made with the two producers who built that toolkit with her in the first place: Max Martin and Shellback.
They’re not just on the album; they’re the spine of it—primary collaborators who co-wrote and produced the set, reuniting the exact team behind her most pop-superstar hits.
And the joie de vivre this album captures isn’t an accident; it’s the intentional design of it. If you hire Martin and Shellback to make a record, you’re not ordering a charcoal sketch; you’re commissioning a fucking fireworks display.
Their shared history with Swift is the pop canon you already dance to: “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “22,” “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” “Style,” “Wildest Dreams,” “New Romantics,” and the sleek pulse of Reputation. Those are the blueprints for pop-girl effervescence, and they’re Martin/Shellback to the bone.
So when critics sniff that Showgirl is “slick” or “light,” congratulations—that was the actual assignment!
After three jet-fuel years (Eras Tour, record-obliterating streams, buying her masters back, the Kelce romance and engagement, a cultural presence measured in GDPs), Swift made an album that smiles on purpose.
Reuters, cataloging the rollout and reception, calls this era what it is: peak-power Taylor, a pop phenomenon leaning into her strengths even as reviews land across the spectrum.
The burnout hot-take imagines fatigue where I hear ease. Variety hears it too, calling Showgirl a “contagiously joyful record,” the closest thing in her catalog to a sunbeam in a forest. That’s not complacency; that’s a veteran choosing clarity—concise structures, aerodynamic hooks, and the wry wink she shelved during her cottage-core and diarist phases.
Even Teen Vogue, hardly a stan rag, notes how the album courts risk by embracing play—Swift “unafraid to fail”—which is the opposite of comfort-zone stagnation. Millennial female joy as a creative risk is a refreshing frame, not a downgrade.
Yes, there are bawdy asides and raunchy innuendos. You know who else has done that? Chaucer. Shakespeare. CardiB. Georgia O’Keeffe’s Irises. Literally every poet and artist and writer and songsmith who has ever lived. That’s artistic and pop lineage, not a moral panic.
Martin and Shellback have always trafficked in the candy-coated and the cheeky—precisely the tonal lane Swift asked for when she moved from country confessionals to stadium pop a decade ago. See again: “Blank Space,” which weaponized satire into a No. 1 earworm.
If you come to Showgirl demanding the hushed intricacy of folklore or the spiraling sprawl of TTPD, you’ll mishear an intentional palate cleanser as an artistic retreat.
It is not.
It is sequence and seasonality: different muscles, same athlete.
She wrote it while she was on tour, baking into it the awe and joy she was experiencing nightly with tens of thousands of adoring fans. Hell, I might be able to write sunshine-filled bangers like this if I had cities full of people adoring me like that on the regular.
The records and receipts around Showgirl are not background noise; they’re the context for its mood. Swift just completed a $2B-plus tour run—one of the most successful ever done. She fulfilled her years-long ambition of reclaiming the masters to her six earliest albums, something that everyone knew was important to her.
She met an unlikely hero, and found in him not just romance, but the resolution to the lifelong quest she’s had to find a partner who could adore her, hold space for her, and not melt under the wattage of the klieglight glare that follows her everywhere.
If her response was to write “Wood”, an homage to his cock and the way their sex makes her feel like nothing else ever has? Gurrrrrl. I GET IT. Tell me more about your ah-matizement—I want all the juicy deets.
When TLOAS dropped, she rolled out a release-party film that opened No. 1 at the box office the same weekend the album arrived—because she treats a drop like a civic holiday. Showgirl broke year-of records on streaming platforms within hours and turned a one-weekend theater event into a global flex.
Do you pick up what I’m putting down here? The album is boppy and happy because she is. Allow me to scream from the rooftops this feminist rant: female joy isn’t a dodge; it’s a thesis, and Taylor has nailed hers to the church house door.
It’s a confection—by design.
It’s also a strategic reset that says: I can do the chandeliered bangers whenever I want, because I helped invent them. Swift let Max Martin and Shellback re-tune the spotlight to warmth, bounce, and bite, just like they did on the singles that turned her from Nashville prodigy into a pop supernova. That’s not backsliding; that’s remembering who you are at full wattage.
In a culture that often demands women performers be either suffering or silent to be taken seriously, The Life of a Showgirl opts for the third door: delight. It’s concise, catchy, and confident—happy on purpose, and she knows it.
After what are arguably the three best years of her life to date, Taylor Swift didn’t just deserve to make this record. She deserved to enjoy it.
And I do, too. Every last goddamn track.
And if you don’t, you can just leave Taylor Alison Swift the fuck alone.
I love every word of this!
Slam dunk, Lawrence! And I would LOVE to hear Swift do some Chaucer.