The societally mandated Taylor Swift post

There's pretty much no chance you haven't heard, but Taylor Swift released her 12th album last Friday. The week since has been an absolute wasteland of dunks and takes and takeaways from the dunks and the semi-annual declarations about how much people are sick of Taylor or that they hate her or that they resent her being labeled as the voice of a generation or that they are declaring her career officially over or whatever gripe it is that they need to fling into the discourse maelstrom. It's all exhausting, no matter how often it happens (and it happens often).

So here I am, flinging my opinion into the discourse maelstrom, as is the custom.

The Life of a Showgirl answers the question, "What would a Taylor Swift album sound like if she was in a healthy adult relationship with a non-artist who wasn't deeply jealous of her?" It wasn't a question I asked, and the result isn't necessarily what I want out of a Taylor Swift album. Her last album, The Tortured Poets Department, was largely derided, but it was easily a Top 5 Taylor Swift album for me personally, because of how deeply I identified with so much of the content of the album. Life of a Showgirl underwhelmed me on first listen, but then I tossed the CD (yes) in my car and went for a drive, and this is implicitly a Car Album. Shellback really hit the Bass Boost on these tracks, and just as with his production on 1989, they THUMP. Again, this is not necessarily what I want out of a Taylor Swift album, but the front half is pretty great – gets better each time around, actually – and "Ruin the Friendship" will probably eventually go in the pantheon for me. One all-timer Swift song on a new album? I'll take that.

Many people have been pointing out that this album appears to mark the end of the pretense, where Taylor has stopped being relatable and started being more overt about how she's a billionaire dating a guy with a massive hog. But ever since she started being an adult, that stuff has always kind of been there. Reputation had multiple songs about how guys only hand around because she picks up the tab, or that if a friend does her wrong they'll stop getting the monetary or luxury perks of being in her orbit. And Swift has really never been a relatable human; she became insanely famous in her mid-teens and only kept getting more famous and successful and the focus of parasocial relationships with each passing year. It's a testament to how good she is at tapping into a feeling that so many of her songs were malleable enough to trick people into thinking they shared an emotion or experience with her – myself very much included.

I don't hate The Life of a Showgirl, but I also don't love it – at least, not yet. (I'm not even going to talk about "Wood," because why bother? Those jokes have already been written.) It's fine, leaning towards good. I like it better than Midnights so far, but I've also spent almost no time with Midnights and always mean to get back around to it.

Anyone with a bent against Swift or her fans or The Discourse has been gleefully devouring bad reviews and proudly proclaiming the end of Swift as the dominant pop culture icon/pop musician, but the horse is already out of the barn. Her album release movie topped the box office. TLOAS has already sold three million albums, breaking the fast-selling all-time records that her last two albums previously broke. She's not really going to make any new fans at this point, and that's largely because she's reached her saturation point. You're either in or you're out, and a whole lot of people are still in. The Discourse at this point is largely a function of everyone being way too online and feeling like every individual's opinion is worth screaming into a megaphone (he typed on his personal newsletter). I often wonder what incredibly stupid things would be written about Madonna or Michael Jackson today that weren't worthy of people splashed across the front page of People or The New York Post.

I've written before about Taylor Swift, and how I both adore her music yet find her incredibly wack, and how that god-tier wackness is itself something I deeply identify with. Nothing has changed between my writing that post and writing this one, apart from a somewhat-underwhelming album being released. Some people opined the curious timing of her going back to a full-bore pop album after the extreme success of Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Charli XCX since Tortured Poets Department came out, and maybe there's some truth to Taylor wanting to get in on the fun, but regardless of what the critics have to say (early returns are that they aren't high on it), the sheer commercial success of The Taylor Event is proof that she hasn't ceded any ground to them whatsoever. Maybe they're cooler than she is now, but she's in a whole other stratosphere compared to her ... well, they're certainly not peers. Contemporaries, let's say.

We'll see if The Life of a Showgirl is enough of a dud among the populace to put a dent in her next album, but I'd never count out her ability to read the room and shapeshift again, if necessary. She may not be the voice of a generation (and likely doesn't want that label anyway), but she's undeniably the savviest pop star of my lifetime.

Just, please: no more songs about that luscious hog. It's clear that nobody wants that.