Back in 2023, mega-artist Taylor Swift had conservatives concerned. She had achieved full cultural saturation. If you turned on the radio, you heard her music. If you had daughters, her songs were heard muffled from behind the closed doors of their rooms. When you went to the grocery store, magazine covers featured her on almost every one. When you turned on the television, she was in a commercial.
Even when you just wanted to watch football, the camera kept cutting to her sitting in a booth during Chiefs games.
The issue for conservatives was that she had the hearts and minds of too many, and there was real concern that her open and proud leftism would sway too many people in the voting booths to vote blue. Luckily, that ended up being an overblown fear, but the cultural issue remained. She still had too many women convinced that modern behaviors and choices, especially those regarding men and relationships, weren't just normal but heroic.
As I wrote of Swift's influence back in 2023:
If you dissect Swift's influence on the culture, you'll see a lot of women being coerced into wanting men while hating them, expecting failure when relationships are achieved, and believing that selfish psychopathy is okay both during the relationship and after it inevitably fails. For modern women currently in the throws of feminist influence, this kind of thinking is like crack. It feels really good to feel it. It gets you high. It lets you be emotional without apology.
You could really form an international, near-religious following around this kind of thing.
The solution to the issue, as I wrote then, was time. Given the path she was on, there were a few scenarios where Swift didn't self-destruct. She would have to be responsible for her own fan base falling off, because outside attacks only made her fan base rally around her tighter.
Well, it seems that day of self-sabotage has come, and the unraveling has begun.
Swift's latest album was released last week, and it's not been received with the same fervor as you'd expect. "The Life of a Showgirl," as it's called, is being met with mixed reviews, and I'm not just talking about by music critics. I'm talking about those in her fanbase.
While there are a myriad of posts online from Swift fans denouncing the album for various reasons, this one girl summed it up well, saying it made her "cringe" and that it sounds like an "R-rated Dr. Seuss book."
@laurenmaenner Ok I’m done #lifeofashowgirl ♬ original sound - Laurenmaenner
"Cringe" seems to be a common theme. Slate called it a "Masterpiece of Cringe" directly in their title, and hearing some of the song descriptions, I get it.
The album feels forced, out of touch, and oftentimes like it was written by a girl trying too hard to be edgy. There's a diss track to another artist that's described by the AVclub.com as a "psychosexual cat-and-mouse game." Then there's a song called "Wood" that talks about her sex life with Travis Kelce, and it apparently brags about how well-endowed he is. Another song called "Father Figure" has Swift bragging that her "d**k's bigger" than everyone else in the music industry and warns female artists who were brought up in her shadow that betrayal from any of them will have them “sleeping with the fishes before you know you’re drownin’.”
While Swift's career has matured, apparently her mind hasn't, and she seems stuck in some sort of adolescent thirst for drama, even as she hits her mid-30s. For comparison, Adele and Swift are the same age, and despite this, Adele is often thought of as older because she's far more experienced in her life with love, relationships, and grief, whereas Swift is still behaving like a high school mean girl who started dating the captain of the football team and is lording her sexual exploits over her less experienced, less popular clique.
And I want to bring up a deeper issue related to this.
Swift spent a very long time convincing young women that being single was fantastic. She often created songs that make men out to be the bad guys in any given situation. Her lyrics often revolved around being the victim of a bad relationship, either because the man was a villain, or she was a victim of her own emotional quirkiness that men are too weak to get over to love her properly.
There were confessions from women that they'd break up with their boyfriends after the release of Swift's albums because the lyrics convinced them they deserved better, or even just to feel and experience her music more deeply.
Swift also pushed back against JD Vance's cat lady comment by posting a picture of her and her cat while endorsing Kamala Harris.
Now, Swift is singing about having sex with her fiancé and singing about creating a family with him. For Swifties who were on this childless cat lady ride with her, they're suddenly finding themselves unable to relate to their man-bashing head witch. They believed her when she told them men were the problem, and that they lived in an unfair patriarchy... and now she's suddenly attaching herself to it.
It's my opinion that Swift's appeal came from the fact that she was the Western world's most popular victim of high-profile relationships gone wrong and celebrity drama. Now that she's in the midst of romantic contentment, the edge she had worn off, and she knows it. She's trying to make up for it with references to penises (both physical and metaphorical), threats to other celebrities, diss tracks, and trying to tie it all up with her usual flair for victimhood.
And it just didn't work. The edge is gone. Swift is in a new stage in her life, and it's just not going to have that same dramatic appeal as her previous work. Her die-hards will still be die-hard, but for many others, this comes off as detached, unrelatable, and self-aggrandizing. That's not to mention the songs are just boring musically.
@jia_yaps adding to the dogpile, i’ve been waiting for vindication #taylorswift #music #musician #women ♬ original sound - dr. jia
I sense one of two things happening.
Either Swift will double down on this and become the next Madonna; an old woman still trying to cash in on an era that passed her by a long time ago and looking more and more ridiculous as she does it, or Swift will walk away from music for a while to do as she said she wanted to in the album, and start a family with Kelce.
Either way, I think Swift's greatest days as a pop star are now behind her, and the fading has begun.
