From mirrorball to one-way glass: reflections on the life of a showgirl
I’ve been grumpy all weekend and it can’t just be because I’m not into the new TS album? Surely not. They’re just pop songs, and good ones at that. Sonically surprising, catchy, and with memorable lyrics (lol). She promised fun ear worms and she delivered. But the things is, I’ve never been into Taylor Swift just for the ear worms.
I love a good pop song. I think The Fate of Ophelia is probably her best lead single. It’s built for TikTok virality and I’m sure it’ll do well. I don’t hate any of the songs, some of them have the hallmarks of TS classics and they’ll probably grow on me, but I can only appreciate them objectively as a music listener, not subjectively as a TS fan. The feeling is akin to what I experienced when Game of Thrones ended. It was a TV show I loved. I used to get butterflies when the intro music came on. Then it was catastrophically butchered in its final season. I can’t bring myself to watch it again, even to experience the perfection of season 6.
I’m not that mad about The Life of a Showgirl, but my appreciation for Taylor Swift has grown over the years because of the TS narrative multi-verse—the worlds she’s built over 12 albums and 20 years. That’s where the disappointment stems from. I expected this album would bring about the ending of some of the key TS story arcs. In her music she’s been chasing a ‘happily ever after’ her whole life and she’s finally found it. Some of my favourite Swiftian songs of loss and heartbreak are about her efforts to own her music, and this year she managed to buy it all back.
These are the endings I expected and enjoyed – from Love Story to the Fate of Ophelia? That’s poetry. From My Tears Richochet to Father Figure. Mic drop.
But I found the narrative development in her other story strands dissatisfying and a little dystopian. It’s like she was trying really hard to make the most ‘Taylor Swift’ Taylor Swift album possible, but she did it in a lightless room. This is also the first time I’ve experienced thematic dissonance in her work. Cohesion has always been one of her biggest strengths. The lack of connection between the story she told us about the album, the imagery, the artwork, and the music and lyrics, is very confusing to me.
She wrote a poem about TLOASG hidden across 8 vinyl variants. It’s long, but it’s exactly what I expected this album to be about:
You woke up branded with the lines of pillow creases
Thunderbolted tree roots across your cheek
In turn, last night’s mascara stains
the ivory hotel pillow case
Each one leaving their mark on the other
Looks like you’re even.
You say ‘good morning’ to them when you walk in
and they don’t correct you
As they spray vodka
on the armpits of the dancers’ costumes
We learn these tricks along the way
The flesh toned bandage wrap
Covered by skin coloured fish nets
Because you will cover the wound,
No matter how deep it is.
No one ever knew.
And, baby, that’s show business for you.
Coffee. Stretch. Piano keys.
Vocal warm ups in a locker room shower.
Eyelash glue. A photo of him on the mirror.
Sweat and vanilla perfume.
The cracking of joints
and the distant beat of a drum.
The curtain call.
The monotonous thrill of it all.
Plan it out so it doesn't look planned
10 different backup plans
If your red bottomed heel breaks
you will keep strutting
Balancing on the balls of your blistered feet
Know your exits. Shoulders back. Eyes up.
Hit your marks. Your winks. Sparks.
Tell them a story like it's an intimate dinner party.
The looks on their wonderous faces
Their expressions like mood rings
Isn't it all so majestic? Of course it is
It's a lot of other things, too.
Remember this city?
You’ve been here before in another life
On another tour
Remember her?
She’s got a mortgage now
Straight teeth where there’d been metal brackets
Standing with her 8 year old daughter
You mouth, “I know you.”
In the millisecond gap in your choreography
To you, she will look exactly the same age
As the first time you saw her
She will always be 14 and a half
Remember!
Lock right back into the footwork
Any missed step is a misstep
You must remember everything
But mostly this: the crowd is your king
Who has ruled over you for centuries
Benevolently for the most part.
Perhaps someday they will despise you again.
Perhaps it’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’
They’ll re-assess your merits and then
Take a magnifying glass to the shiny bug.
Deflate all the heroes they had decided she was.
And maybe they’ll do it just because.
But you live by a strict code:
Never believe your own mythology
Never type your name into the search bar
Let the wolves howl all they want
The moon should never howl back
You know if you play, it’s a losing game
So you keep yourself too busy to ever learn
What’s-their-name’s name
And these are the reasons
You’re still somewhat sane.
He ran to his car from work to catch the flight
Missed the first act but somehow
It’s better this way. It’s just right.
Because you get to watch him make
His way through the masses
Parting the crowd like some neon Moses in a sequin sea
He is a magnet and a trampoline
The tiny bubbles in champagne
Haphazard but precise, he crash-landed next to you
Reckless, but never with your heart
If he’s in, you are too
You’ve begun to feel that
Every song before was just a prayer
A wish list
He is not what you’ve been waiting for
He's more.
Why you held out
Why you left
And nothing aches suddenly
He has that affect
Tonight all these lives converge here
The mosaics of laughter and cocktails of tears
Where fraternal souls sing identical things
And it's beautiful
It's rapturous
It is frightening
It's worth everything it has cost you
And even at your darkest or drunkest,
You wouldn't say any different
Would you?
You would choose all of it again
No matter how the story ends
With the ugliest boos or the loveliest bouquet
They say that love is a choice you make every
single
day
And that is how you love
The life of a showgirl.
This is the humanist ‘behind-the-scenes’ view of the Eras tour I expected to emerge from the mind of Taylor Swift in musical form. But I can’t map this to the way the album makes me feel. I went to the release party at the cinema and heard her explanations which did shed a little light, but the following day all that remains is what I hear and how I feel about it. I have this sense that she’s not being entirely truthful with herself in the poem above, because in this album she does seem to have fallen for her own mythology.
That’s why the stories are ones in which:
The victim has become the villain.
The bullied has become the bully.
The ‘misunderstood’ has become the morally void.
The self-aware singer songwriter has become the solipsistic superstar.
I appreciate this is just my experience and her fandom is vast and diverse. There will be a myriad of perspectives that don’t align with mine. Also, she’s a real person and doesn’t have to fit into the character I’ve created for her in my own mind. She can be a bad guy if she wants to. I’ve been lucky to experience 11 eras that have been super special to me, so it’s unsurprising and not a big deal to feel this way about one.
Taylor was falling in love when she wrote this album—which for the brain is akin to being on drugs. Speaking from my own experience, when you’re in the early stages of love/limerence, you feel like it’s the most powerful and important thing in the world. When you’re witnessing it from the outside? It’s both deeply boring and a bit insane.
Taylor’s always been relatable (to me), but the experience of limerence is impossible to share with anyone but the person going through it with you. This is the first time we’ve seen Taylor through one-way glass. She might have thought she was looking out at the world, but all she could see was herself and her person. I appreciate this is super condescending, but I feel like this album was written for an audience of one and then wrangled into a pop record for the masses.
When I first met my future husband I used to journal every night. I stopped about 3 months into our relationship, and this is what I said in the first entry I made a year later:
“I have been so happy in this past year. What I was thinking before? That my life has attained a level of joy that people don’t write about. It’s boring. In all my lonely wanderings I never could have imagined the reality would be this sweet.”
It’s so corny and cringe to look back on, but the memory of that feeling is the only thread of relatability in TLOASG for me. I understand why the stories are not making sense to me. They aren’t meant to. In Taylor’s own words, “And they should have what they want. They deserve what they want. Hope they get what they want.” She’s given me enough. I’ll be ready for the next chapter when the mirrorball starts reflecting again, in the meantime I have hundreds of songs that I love and the memory of Eras.