She doesn’t sound like she’s having fun. She has the team captain, the cushion-cut diamond, the fans who will shell out for yet another branded cardigan—but Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, and the life it seems to portray, is a charmless chore. Swift spends her 12th album pondering familiar bummers: rivalries, regrets, the countdown clock of her own mortality. What’s new, narratively, is her football-player fiancé and the happily ever after he represents. But she can’t quite convince herself, or the listener, that she’s getting what she’s always said she wants. She’s become too cynical to sell a fairy tale.
Theoretically this is an interesting place for Swift, that ever-striving Sagittarius, to be: at the end of a checklist of goals and still unsatisfied. Her economies-quaking Eras Tour flaunted the power earned by years of hard work; her engagement to Travis Kelce appeared to fulfill the romantic quest she has long sung about.
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