Before I dive into this recent hyperfixation of mine, let me concede that I was in the top 0.5% of Taylor Swift’s listeners on Spotify in 2023. At one point, my best friend and I even contemplated getting matching tattoos inspired by one of her songs – today, I’m glad we didn’t get around to it. Swifties, I hear you. However, The Life of Showgirl is the last in a long list of disappointments from Taylor Swift, not only lyrically. Perhaps I’m biased, perhaps I’m on another planet since only listening to Fleetwood Mac the last couple of years – but when the most celebrated lyricist of her generation begins to echo the empty syntax of the internet, the problem is not solely an artistic one. It is cultural and political. The Life of a Showgirl isn’t just a weak album – it’s a symptom of wider cultural decline, from a billionaire’s detachment from reality to the rise of anti-intellectualism.
When Taylor Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce in August this year, she wrote: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,’’ a nod to his football career and her fan-acclaimed lyricism. Before their engagement, the pair appeared on Kelce’s brother’s podcast, during which he admitted to finding her “so hot when she says big words” as well as praising her as the “greatest songwriter of all time.” She remarked how ‘’he’s so fast and he can jump so high.’’ Those are not big words, to start.
Lyrical Shortcomings
The lyric that comes to mind is ‘’you know how to ball, I know Aristotle’’ from ‘So Highschool,’ a song from Swift’s previous album, The Tortured Poet’s Department. This song’s title rings true for The Life of a Showgirl, but probably not in the way it was intended. What ‘So Highschool’ achieves with surprising charm is the evocation of adolescent infatuation: the excitement of a budding teenage romance, rendered with the nostalgic gloss of the early 2000s yet tempered by a mature and reflective voice, as if inspired by Swift’s own experiences. That balance of youthful imagery and adult perspective is precisely what Showgirl lacks. Instead of Swift’s trademark decorum and lyrical sophistication, Showgirl confronts listeners with cringeworthy and pitiful attempts at staying ‘hip,’ erasing all traces of the emotional resonance she is known for.
In ‘Wood,’ Swift departs from her typically vivid but thoughtful imagery, invoking a striking crassness through an extended wooden metaphor for Kelce’s genitals – a “redwood tree” positioned as “the key that opened [her] thighs.” Swift has previously proven herself adept at conveying sensuality through suggestion and atmosphere, as in ‘I Can See You,’ from Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). In contrast, ‘Wood’ abandons that subtlety, leaning on a laboured wooden metaphor for male genitalia. What once read as sultry now lands as lewd, even grotesque, in its explicitness. Why, you ask? Because of the weakness of, and insistence upon, the metaphor.
Such shortcomings recur throughout the record – at least in what I could endure of it. Swift jokingly refers to herself as an “English teacher’’ but in ‘The Fate of Ophelia,’ for example, she reimagines Shakespeare’s Hamlet not as a harrowing account of a woman destroyed by the men around her, but as a damsel-in-distress narrative wherein her male love interest saves her, a revision that flattens the original tragedy and completely disregards the crux of the narrative.
Beyond its weak lyricism, Showgirl is also drawing criticism for its unoriginality, as it has become a trend on social media platforms such as TikTok to identify and list which songs resemble preexisting hits. ‘Actually Romantic’ has the same chord sequence as ’Where Is My Mind?’ By Pixies, a song over 30 years old and so popular, still, that any attentive writer would have noticed the extent of the similarity, had one been present. ‘CANCELLED!’ is reportedly reminiscent of Lorde’s ‘Yellow Flicker Beat,’ and ‘Wood’ opens near enough identically to ‘Want You Back’ by the Jackson 5, just to name a few.
No sources are confirming the numerous speculations circulating on the internet regarding pending lawsuits. Still, comment sections on TikTok and Reddit are not oblivious to the irony of the situation, given how Swift was retroactively given credit and royalties for a handful of Olivia Rodrigo’s songs in recent years, after Rodrigo was accused of copying tunes from Swift and others.
Showgirl is as lazy as it is unoriginal, and I have greater grievances still. India Block writes for The Standard that halfway through Showgirl, she wondered if she ‘’was accidentally listening to a parody album hallucinated by some porn-addled AI.’’ (I couldn’t have said it better myself.) She is not alone in voicing the possible involvement of Artificial Intelligence, as people on TikTok, Twitter, and Reddit are readily speculating that ChatGPT, specifically, had a hand in writing and producing the record, even in its promotion, featuring disappearing hands and wonky shadows. A real English teacher would recoil at the mere mention of such software, in my experience. While it may be pure, baseless speculation, it has highlighted the generic, lifeless quality of much of the album.
If AI did not play a part in the creation of Showgirl, there’s another harsh reality to confront. That is to say, if AI is not responsible for lyrics like ‘’Everybody’s so punk on the internet, everyone’s unbothered ’til they’re not, every joke’s just trolling and memes,” then we must conclude that Swift and her team are the unimaginative source behind what is, essentially, brainrot with notes. We’re caught between Scylla and Charybdis, which is the lesser evil?
Brain Rot
Brain rot, the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024, is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.” The lyric ‘’girlboss too close to the sun’’ is not just reminiscent of TikTok, but in fact plucked from a video by Caroline Timoney, the audio from which has trended on the app since 2021.
Swift and her writing team lean heavily on recycled social-media brainrot, and it comes across just as well as your uncle quoting memes at Sunday dinner in a sad attempt to connect, not the work of a self-proclaimed English teacher and fan-acclaimed poet. It’s nowhere near the standard we’re used to seeing from Swift. I bet she doesn’t want us asking why, but we must.
Showgirl is not merely a disappointing album of recycled meme-speak and brainrot; it also marks a fall from grace that illuminates a broader issue – the rise of anti-intellectualism.
Brainrot is much more infectious than memes, and far more sinister in its effects. The fragmented, reiterated language is comparable to newspeak, the simplistic fictional language from George Orwell’s dystopia, 1984.
Excessive consumption of memes, clickbait, and endless scrolling through social media has a drastically negative effect on our attention spans, decreasing our capacity for processing information. It is well known that most of the human body, the brain included, operates on a “use it or lose it” policy: if you do not engage your cerebral cortex for complex thoughts, instead relying on Artificial Intelligence, for example, neuroplasticity will allow your brain to get accustomed to inactivity. It’s the same principle as trying to run a marathon after a period of bed rest.
Brainrot, as I’m sure you remember, is the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,’’ often a result of “overconsumption of material (now particularly online content)” – in common vernacular, however, it connotes popular content regurgitated among people and social media users. One of the many definitions on Urban Dictionary defines it as “When someone has a crippling addiction to low effort content, lobotomized, likely grew up on cocomelon.’’ It’s no surprise brainrot thrives on TikTok, as most instant-gratification dopamine-oriented activities will do the very same damage to your attention span and, ultimately, affect your critical thinking skills.
Returning to Orwell, Newspeak is not an addiction to doomscrollling but a government-imposed and enforced dialect of English in which certain words have been strategically removed, including words that offer any nuance to a conversation and replaced with simplistic, general terms instead. While the English language continually expands to accommodate linguistic development and allow a greater range of expression, Newspeak achieves the exact opposite. For example, all positive adjectives, be they “pleasant,” “comfortable,” or “delicious,” are all replaced with the plain “good”. The limited vocabulary is a tool by which the government reduces its subjects’ ability to think critically, about politics or anything at all, let alone discuss those thoughts amongst themselves.
Of course, the two are not the same. Not exactly, at least. Brainrot is not enforced upon us as literally as Newspeak was enforced upon the fictional subjects of a totalitarian regime, but intentionally or not it is beginning to limit our capacity for critical thought – the loss of which is a central theme to two other famous dystopias: from the banning of books and reliance on bright screens in Jay Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to conditioned passivity and mind control in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Anti-Intellectualism and Politics
Swift’s recycling brain-rot in her lyrics is more than a poor stylistic decision. She is, of course, not single-handedly orchestrating the rise of anti-intellectualism, but her decisions do not exist in a vacuum. Releasing an album as superficial and full of recycled material as Showgirl, in the midst of an attention span crisis and an increasingly incoherent political climate, is problematic. When one of the most influential lyricists of her generation leans into intellectual decay for mass appeal, the cultural consequences extend far beyond the music itself.
The rise of anti-intellectualism is deeply entwined with our political landscape, where incoherence and misinformation thrive. Consider Donald Trump’s never-ending nonsensical gibberish – his fragmented, self-contradictory speech patterns and tweets, which often defy logic or syntax. Such rhetoric may appear harmlessly absurd, yet it serves a purpose. Governments, real and fictional as in Orwell’s, Bradbury’s and Huxley’s dystopias, benefit greatly from citizens who meekly consume and accept incoherence rather than question it.
William Davies writes for the Guardian that “the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies as one of stupidity”. Furthermore, he describes Trump as a “deranged man’’ in “the highest office, backed by a coterie of dim and unqualified cronies.’’ It is no surprise that those encouraging his claim to power are described as “dim’’: totalitarian and authoritarian systems thrive when their subjects are too distracted, too dulled, or too disoriented to think critically. And few are as distracting as Donald Trump.
Swift’s recent work, though not immediately related to the political sphere, echoes this dynamic in unsettling ways. In Swift’s ‘CANCELLED!,’ she sings how it is a “good thing [she likes her] friends cancelled,’’ clad in Gucci and scandals – at one point implying they share matching scars. Whether or not the song references the controversy between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, its message trivialises accountability. Swift attempts a tongue-in-cheek defiance, but to suggest that being “cancelled” is a rite of passage or badge of honour is to display a troubling lack of moral backbone – one which is becoming more apparent as Swift is reportedly mingling with MAGA, undermining her once carefully curated image of liberal feminism and social awareness.
The same shortcoming extends to ‘Opalite,’ a track criticised for its racial undertones in which Swift contrasts “the onyx night” with “the sky is opalite,” positioning herself as the light after Kelce’s “dark” past. Given that his former partners were women of colour, the imagery reads uncomfortably colourist, implying purity and redemption through whiteness. Swift’s success is inseparable from her privilege, from wealth to the racial variety, and ‘Opalite’ exposes how that privilege seeps into her art.
To be perfectly blunt, Swift is not an underdog, though the narrative may have suited her once. It has been over 15 years since Kanye West interrupted her MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech in 2009. Furthermore, as of May of this year, Swift finally owns the rights to her master recordings, assets which were previously acquired by Scooter Braun in 2019, resulting in the high-profile re-recording and re-release of several earlier albums.
Meanwhile, social media is ripe with discourse suggesting Swift was retroactively granted writing credits on Olivia Rodrigo’s songs through the threat of legal action, and accusations of being the antithesis of the feminist image she has carefully curated, allegedly interfering with the successes of other young female artists by “blocking’’ their path onto the charts. Ilana Frost writes for Betches that Swift “often happens to release new music or make a major announcement the same day as another pop girlie is having a special moment.’’ It is worth mentioning that at the time of writing, upwards of 30 variants of Life of a Showgirl have been released – a saturation that, for better or worse, underscores Swift’s command of the music industry.
Swift is one of the most successful musicians on the planet, having amassed wealth beyond imagination. The growing sentiment that “there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire” is not inapplicable to her. Her wealth and privilege afford her a private jet, which she uses so frequently that it became a topic of national debate – one that lawmakers even sought to suppress. It seems that as casually as the average person might board a bus, Swift boards her jet. Her ecological footprint, however, is anything but casual.
All of this is relevant as the much-publicised 2020 Taylor Swift: New Americana documentary project portrays Swift as a socially conscious artist with a need to be “on the right side of history.” Yet she remains conspicuously silent about her own enormous ecological footprint and atrocities beyond America’s borders. There are ongoing debates about whether public figures are morally obligated to use their platforms and, if so, how. Still, when an artist capitalises on the language of activism while remaining silent during global crises, including genocide and war crimes that are occurring before our eyes, the result reeks of hypocrisy, even apathy.
Her declining lyricism mirrors this detachment: now manifesting in nonsensical phrases and borrowed instrumentals that expose a deeper disconnect between artist and audience, between facade and reality. Though the album was dulling, it was not distracting enough to prevent criticism, despite the theatrics of it.
Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, her public persona, and the surrounding discourse reveal more than the decline of a once-celebrated lyricist. Paired with Swift’s immense wealth, privilege, and selective social consciousness, her work reflects a broader cultural trend in which attention and critical engagement are deprioritised – an environment where figures like Donald Trump thrive because audiences are distracted, dulled, or conditioned to accept incoherence and misinformation uncritically.
The irony is that Swift’s lyrical deterioration coincides with an era defined by brainrot – a linguistic and cognitive decay in which critical engagement is supplanted by passive consumption. The lazy and problematic writing on Showgirl exemplifies this, further entrenching cultural complacency. Swift, whether intentionally or not, demonstrates how media, power, and spectacle together contribute to the ongoing rise of anti-intellectualism.
Finally, a real English teacher would not fail to recognise a dystopia in progress – much less encourage it.
Featured Image Credit: Paolo Villanueva on Wikimedia Commons.
Sleep-deprived fourth-year Literature, Film, and Media student. Cat enthusiast, Fleetwood Mac devotee, and avid collector of hobbies and obscure facts. Occasionally finds the time to paint, crochet, and write stories.
