Taylor-mania takes its final bow on ‘The Life of A Showgirl: The Encore’

Album art for ‘The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore’ by Republic Records. Taylor Swift’s latest LP, The Life of a Showgirl, was a pyrrhic victory if there ever was one. It topped the Billboard Hot 200, sold more than 3 million copies in its first week and occupied the entire Top 10 . However, despite the chart domination, public perception of Swift began to shift toward the negative. Swift has been incrementally losing the goodwill she shored up with folklore and evermore , and with The Life of A Showgirl , the pendulum has swung all the way back, with Swift regaining her status as ontologically uncool. Perhaps spurred by the idea that snagging another number one single or breaking another streaming record would turn public opinion on this record around, Swift has returned to the stage with a reissue: The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore. On the standard edition of The Life of a Showgirl , Swift gives in to all of her worst impulses; her reactiveness and victim complex are on full display, as is her inability to self-edit. Below the sequined costumes and the insipidly peppy Max Martin and Shellback production lies a deep sense of resentment. Swift spends a confounding amount of this record focusing on her haters and enemies in a way that makes it impossible for the listener not to picture her apoplectically jotting lyrics down with a white-knuckle grip on her pen. Even when the record isn’t outright spiteful, it’s full of baffling decisions, from the meandering purple prose of “Eldest Daughter” to the sheer existence of the two-and-a-half minute long “that’s what she said” joke that is “Wood.” The cracks in Swift’s artistry that began to appear on The Life of A Showgirl become mile-wide yawning chasms on The Encore. Never has Swift’s music felt more like a parody of itself; even her satirical “Saturday Night Live” monologue song took itself more seriously. This iteration of Swift presents less like an authentic progression of her artistry and more like what a large language model would spit out if it were trained on nothing but Bart Baker parodies . Not only has Swift become a flanderized version of herself, the record’s contributors are also clearly on autopilot. Martin and Shellback turn in production so dull it’s a shock the credits say their names and not “music courtesy of Adobe Stock.” Swift’s writing is at its most perfunctory, like she thought up four titles and remembered they all needed lyrics and melodies the night before they were due. The song “Babylon,” which is actually the most listenable track this reissue offers up, is still bogged down by clunky redundancies that only exist so Swift can drop five-dollar words that distract from the rest of the corners she’s cutting. The ill-conceived lyrics and royalty-free instrumentals could perhaps be excusable if there was an interesting vocal performance to cushion their fall. However, Swift sounds utterly sedated. She seems to have a torrid affair with talk-singing, something that does both “Patient Zero” and “Cleveland!” absolutely no favors. When the lyrics have to stand on their own without any melodic flourishes, it’s hard not to notice how weak they are. While Swift has never been the strongest vocalist, there was always at least an emotive quality to her voice that is relatively absent here, making this slog of an album even harder to sit through. The one thing the standard edition of this record did expertly was serve as a character study of a woman overwhelmed by ego. Sometimes it’s unintentional, sometimes it’s unflattering, but there is something commendable about Swift chipping away at her gilded exterior. The deluxe has no such redeeming qualities. The Life of A Showgirl : The Encore feels like nothing more than an elaborate round of unwanted exposure therapy to prime the public for the next Swift era. It’s wildly disjointed from any of the themes of the initial record, and the only connective tissue between them is the pulseless synth-pop sludge Swift sings over. Unfortunately for Swift, in her endeavor to deliver an encore, she unknowingly performed her swan song. Daily Arts Contributor Chris White can be reached at chriswwhite@umich.edu .