1. The Idea of the Audience
On the third of October, 2025, Taylor Swift released another yearly album—the Life of a Showgirl. Of course—as with all of Taylor Swift’s yearly albums—it was very much about her and her life and her experiences. Now Taylor is the showgirl, as she earlier was the tortured poet and a few years before that the lover.
A friend of mine said that’s a large part of her appeal: she’s built a reputation through largely singing about her personal life—and her boyfriends (Joe Jonas on “Forever and Always,” John Mayer on “Dear John,” etc.)—but she has another talent in that she can turn very personal songs into catchy numbers universal enough for a generally large demographic to relate to.
Taylor Swift knows that she represents a type of identifiable singer-songwriter personality and has naturally changed her style over time as she matured. The new Taylor looks away from her old pop/country fame and towards literature, metaphor, reference. She remarked that her engagement to footballer Travis Kelce was like if “your english teacher and your gym teacher [were] getting married.” She packs surface-level metaphors into her music unintentionally or intentionally in the most elaborate balancing act of all time—that makes her music feel literate, sound catchy, and embody her personality. Before Life of a Showgirl it seemed she was succeeding too—who hasn’t heard of the ubiquitous Swiftie: someone loyal to Taylor’s music but also her person in general?
These Swifties get flak for being strangely loyal to Taylor but really—groups form around personalities all the time. Jordan Peterson is barely a psychologist but he’s a very effective public influence. On his Jubilee debate, he wasn’t listed as a psychologist but instead as a Christian because that’s simply part of what he became known for and what his audience rallied around.
Concessions to the audience are the biggest similarity among public figures because all partially shape and are shaped by the expectations of the audience. As Taylor has pushed through her “eras,” as she calls them, the audience has followed and they have begun to expect a certain product from her, a vibe. As Peterson fans expect take-downs of liberalism and postmodernism and whatever terms Peterson is obsessed with at the moment, Swifties expect relatable pop music with a hint of artistic sophistication that confirms their struggles while giving Taylor the privilege to write about whatever is bothering her. Just as Peterson fans may be dissatisfied with the status-quo and want to relate to him as a “logical” person, so do Swifties who wish to relate to Taylor as an underdog or a normal person (“she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts, she’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers.”).
In part that’s due to how influential the Internet has become. Taylor Swift is now the artist with the second most weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot-100 between the Beatles and Elvis Presley. She has profited extremely from the greater reach the Internet has given her, and her audience has benefited from finding ways to interact with each other. Once they found ways to interact, their expectations of Taylor Swift became more unitary—and their reactions more unified.
2. Life of a Showgirl
Taylor Swift the country star lost most of her audience when she jumped ship to become Taylor Swift the pop star, which we often tend to forget because her country audience was always small. Now of course in the 2020s country music has re-arisen to become one of the country’s biggest genres: country star Morgan Wallen had at one point 37 songs all charting at once on the Hot-100.
While Swift’s work like we said is mostly just focused on herself—Morgan Wallen is different from that because it’s just so explicitly country. Zach Bryan—another country star— however, has recently been under fire from the (mostly conservative) community for song lyrics denouncing ICE. Even Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem got involved to condemn his “anti-Trump” song “Bad News.” It’s safe to say that country music is one of those unified audiences we were talking about earlier—an audience that’s gotten so big that it affects federal policy.
The unification process around a demagogue (let’s use this term to describe any person who rallies an audience like Taylor and Jordan and Bryan do) suffers when the vibe they created changes. Bryan’s vibe changed when he went against the country consensus and Taylor’s changed just recently from her engagement to Travis Kelce. Her most recent album—the Life of a Showgirl—was described by many even in her own audience as her worst album ever. Musically it’s not very different from her other ones, but the lyrics feel off. But why do the lyrics feel off? They’re packed with the same words and surface-level metaphors as they’ve always been.
It’s because Taylor’s vibe changed too quickly for her unified audience to react to. “Their” anti-boyfriend, self-strong Swift switched to the domestic woman who marries the football player. She’s left the bleachers and become the cheerleader. One Internet fandom who call themselves the Gaylor Swifties took the fact that Taylor Swift wasn’t secretly gay so badly that they’re still actively in denial over the fact that Swift really does like Kelce and isn’t either pretending or being forced into it. Some are so stunned by the fact (not even a vibe) Taylor has made the choice to settle with Kelce that they call it a “psy-op” from the conservative government to encourage women into domesticity. Some have accused Swift of being MAGA because she celebrated Brittany Mahomes’ birthday or was pictured with podcasters Taylor Lewan and Will Compton despite the fact that Taylor has her own face-off with Trump on Twitter. They’re ignoring facts for conspiracy theories—they being Taylor’s own audience.
This is new. Other Swift albums also weren’t well received by a general audience, but were canonized by Swifties either way. That’s how decisive an alienating vibe can be. Really—just a vibe.
In the same way I’m not going to pretend Taylor Swift is high-literature because that’s the vibe she is going for—I’m also not going to pretend Taylor Swift is a regressive symbol because that’s the vibe she isn’t going for. Especially when she has numerous times denied that she is a conservative of any sort. She’s a woman demagogue writing about her own experiences and it’s just a moment where her own experiences do not converse with politics or culture. But it’s one of her yearly albums—what can she do? (Maybe she can consider giving herself more time to make better music).
But I feel that from an artistic point of view, Taylor should be allowed to write about herself. Not only is it inherently expressive—it clearly is something others enjoy, and that’s reason enough to make art. My friend clearly at one point found it enjoyable, didn’t she? This album should not be considered bad because of its “vibes”—it should be considered bad because it has surface-level lyrics, production, and general quality. If someone disagrees with its themes that’s one thing—but Taylor Swift as a personality shouldn’t be accused of holding regressive political beliefs she’s very clearly denied because of one specific interpretation of her work. Vibes are also felt differently per individual listener in the same way every person can understand a book differently. Unitary audiences amplify the most enraged and extreme reactions. Denying Taylor the choice to express her own feelings, developed by her own experiences, in her own work which everyone at one point agreed was expressly hers—simply because a certain set of people feel it is not the correct expression she should be doing at this time—is bad for the artistic field.
Some say that Taylor writing an album focusing on domesticity is also bad for the artistic field because it perpetuates the wants of the current regressive administration—an administration that has taken action against certain styles of art. Whether or not this is true does not matter, because effectively forcing Taylor to make music that doesn’t fit her own experiences is also bad for the artistic realm. The artistic realm is not some large labor union where every artist should be making decisions that are generally perceived as “good for the field,” because that just lowers the individuality of each artist and their art. This view that art should be unitary in a “movement” against one force is in some ways a growth from the wider growth of unitary audiences—and should be seen as completely invalid. Again: art is not just interpreting the vibes of a piece and testing its quality by the merit of whether it supports the goals of a wider interest group, it’s about expressing the experiences of the creator, and denying the expression of that creator’s experiences demeans art more than anything else because it pretends its looking for the greater good.
An excuse I’ve heard a lot is that art is inherently political—thus that Taylor should be held responsible for the themes of her album.
But nowhere in her album did Taylor write any lyrics which were in any way influenced by anything beyond her own experiences. What the nuanced repetition of that above line does is once again denounce the “vibes,” of a clearly still-liberal Taylor Swift. Even if we do judge all art to be political—it’s up to the artist to perpetuate political beliefs they do not agree with. Just like it’s not valid to judge her work based on the unitary audience’s interpretation of it.
…
What’s worse? The bad scenario where Taylor Swift—unable to change her style due to immense audience pressure—gets forced into the same unoriginal, unimpressive, uncreative pandering Jordan Peterson does to appeal to his audience? Or the bad scenario where the backlash is so unitary that Taylor is suffocated into becoming something else?
It doesn’t matter because we shouldn’t want either. What Taylor has effectively done is played a stupid game and won a stupid prize, and that’s alright. She did something, after all.