Under Australian law, if you added up the time, money, and years Taylor Swift and I have spent together over my 25 laps around the sun, we’d be considered to be in a de facto relationship.
I knew I was done for, the minute I first heard country Taylor belting out about her unrequited love for the quarterback in ‘You Belong with Me’ (who she was much better suited to, despite being geeky and clumsier than the popular girl who had his attention) and yearning for a fairytale life filled with ballgowns and white horses in ‘Love Story’. Forgive me, I was eight.
But as I grew from an awkward teenager into a young woman reckoning with my own complicated identity and worldview as a mixed-race Black woman, the intersection of our experiences and desires began to wane. I quickly learned to separate my love of her ever-resonant melodic journal entries from my distaste for her overwhelming attachment to whiteness. I had memorised my defence of America’s sweetheart to a tee, and accepted that the artist I’d grown up alongside was problematic and imperfect.
But with the release of Taylor’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl — her most controversial yet — has our toxic relationship finally soured past the point of return? Are Sunny and Taylor finally consciously uncoupling?
The Life of a Showgirl follows the finale of Taylor’s white-girl magnum opus, the universally acclaimed blockbuster Eras Tour: a more than three-hour feast journeying through the singer-songwriter’s nearly 20-year career. The 21-month-long tour cemented her status as one of the world’s biggest and most profitable superstars, in the aftermath of the non-consensual sale of her life’s work to U.S. record magnate Scooter Braun.
Since then, Taylor has reacquired her master recordings and the rights to her first six albums, and announced her engagement to the Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce. Seemingly every single one of her adversaries has fallen at the end of her sword (Kimye, Katy Perry, Braun and Borchetta).
There’s no reason why The Life of a Showgirl shouldn’t be a victory lap — and it is — but it’s also a strange and nonsensical doubling-down on Swift’s attachment to playing the underdog despite holding the entirety of the music industry in the palm of her perfectly manicured hand.
Swift might be 35 and well past experiencing the benefits of a fully developed frontal lobe, but she shows no signs of slowing down the juvenile and under-baked victimhood narrative that was set into motion when Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech on stage at the MTV VMAs in 2009.
The closest Taylor gets to reckoning with her own power is in the cringey and hyper-masculine track ‘Father Figure’, where she proudly proclaims to an imagined foe that “this empire belongs to me”. This admission comes after she brags to a “dear protégé” that she’s able to “make deals with the devil because [her] dick’s bigger” while paying expensive cheques before they even hit the table. (We got masc Taylor — but at what cost?!)
In ‘Eldest Daughter’ she confuses a movement made to shine light on the burnout and mental health struggles caused by the parentification of (mostly ethnic) firstborn daughters at the hands of their parents, as a platform to reheat her own nachos about being a (white) woman in an industry that loves to tear women apart.
Never mind that she appears to use the same track to compare herself to Kelce’s ex-lovers (the majority of whom are Black women) who she describes as “bad bitches” and “savage” — heavily racialised terms reclaimed by Black women in the hip-hop industry to denote inner strength, assertiveness, bite and resilience. Instead, Taylor, by contrast, claims to be unaggressive and uncool, but “will never let [him] down”.
Her attempt to distance herself from Black culture is strange given that this song — one of her most try-hard — features AAVE (African-American Vernacular English, or alternatively Travis-Kelce-accessible language) in lines like “we looked fire” and is nearly unrecognisable from the introspective and Shakespearean lyrics that made albums like Folklore and Evermore so critically acclaimed. This album is also unquestionably her most sexual to date, and until the advent of Sabrina Carpenter, only hyper-sexualised Black women were allowed to talk about enjoying sex.
These racial undertones are further on display in ‘Opalite’, where Taylor sings about a lover who overcomes sleepless “onyx nights” in his romantic life and is rewarded with “opalite” skies. It’s not hard to interpret these lyrics literally, given that Taylor — Travis’ white fiancée — is also milky white and iridescent like opalite. And while I’m nearly certain that Swift didn’t intend to reinforce white supremacy and eugenics with the comparison, it’s particularly tone-deaf given the cultural climate we now find ourselves in.
The world has gone from the progressive promise of joy that characterised the Lover era to a Republican era. White tears and white fears are the fuel that keeps the engine going on President Trump’s divisive and oppressive regime. You can be a peddler of hate and die a martyr. Wanting to have a white man’s white babies is the most empowering and significant thing you can do. There’s no longer a pretence of progressiveness as racists, homophobes and misogynists aren’t afraid to leave their echo chambers and tell us exactly what they think of us.
Is this Taylor’s fault? Absolutely not. Had this album — or even the similarly controversial album cover for Sabrina’s Man’s Best Friend — hit the charts three or five years ago, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. But it’s Taylor’s inability to read the (increasingly hostile) room that makes joking about “liking” your friends cancelled, when these friends have been “cancelled” for aligning themselves with MAGA, not the flex she thinks it is.
Taylor has aged out of the little-girl card she so famously likes to play — not just because she’s an apex predator at the height of her fame, but also as she’s now closer to 40 than 15. This makes her Charli xcx diss track ‘Actually Romantic’ actually embarrassing, especially when compared to its catalyst ‘Sympathy is a Knife’, which is evocative in its brave depiction of a genuine underdog battling insecurity and envy when asked to stand alongside her more successful peers.
Quite frankly, Taylor has little left to complain about. The masters’ dispute that once garnered her universal sympathy and support is settled, and her re-recordings gifted her the opportunity to revitalise her branding after years of trial and error. Her power — the product of genuine talent and formidable white privilege — is both revered and feared by all. Just one look at the exhausting list of artists who released albums or singles the Friday before TLOAS’s release to avoid their work disappearing into obscurity, confirms that her peers have given up resisting the well-oiled white capitalist machine that is Taylor Swift.
But it’s because I love Taylor, against my will and better judgement, that The Life of a Showgirl is such a colossal disappointment. By showing no signs of growing up herself, many of the singer’s young fans (myself included) have no choice but to outgrow her. And unfortunately, Taylor’s unrelenting hold on whiteness may just be the third party that puts the nail in the coffin of our otherwise dysfunctional two-person parasocial relationship.
Top photo – Pictured: Taylor Swift, Source: Tas Rights Management via Instagram/taylorswift