This past weekend, the internet was overrun by takes—thoughtful takes, sloppy takes, bad takes, lazy takes about Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl. By Saturday, the discourse had devolved into fragmented skirmishes over the Max Martin vibes, the Motown callouts and modulations, and the lyrics. “Is Taylor Swift becoming a trad wife?!” “This song is so clearly a rip-off of ____.” “This is dull, mid pop.” “This is an album by an artist who obviously isn’t hungry anymore.” (I concede that the title track does sound a lot like “Cool” by The Jonas Brothers.)
This collective bonding ritual happens on social media every time Taylor Swift drops an album, bringing together fans and anti-fans alike. When we publicly perform our relationship to the pop star, it’s at least in part about our own self-construction.
I used to be a vocal anti-Swiftie, an obnoxiously performative one. In college, as a DJ at an alternative radio station, I would have confidently told you, “I don’t listen to Taylor Swift.” I was insufferably concerned with crafting a contrarian persona, and this disavowal was a quick way of identifying myself as cool. I scoffed at Swift’s 2014 pop pivot, though I couldn’t deny that “Shake It Off” was irresistibly fun (except for that bridge).
I should mention that I was trying to impress my co-DJ, who was in a metal band. It worked. We now have three kids.
My objection to Swift, at the time, was that she stood for a dominant culture I didn’t want to be associated with—mainstream pop. My rejection of her music was based on my own interest in identity construction. I wanted to be the sort of person who listened to bands my friends hadn’t heard of. (I was a real pleasure to be around.)
Over the years, my aversion to Swift’s music has mellowed. In part, this is because I grew out of the insecurity that drove me to meticulously curate playlists and a collection of hipster band T-shirts.
I’m now a casual and friendly listener: When Swift’s language gets too crude for the kids in the back seat, I play the clean versions of her songs. What’s the point in trying to resist the magnetism of “Style,” “Cruel Summer,” “Anti-Hero,” and “The Fate of Ophelia”? I used to think it was admirable to refuse to see their merits. Now I sing their praises and belt them out in the car.
(At this point, a content warning for Christian readers: Showgirl is an explicit album, full of bad language and raunchy jokes. Many of the songs are earworms, so if you do listen, be prepared to be stuck with them for a few days. Clean versions are always a good option.)
As I listened to The Life of a Showgirl last weekend, I found myself thinking a lot about performance and identity construction. Swift, like all of us, has a version of herself she wants to craft for public consumption. For a celebrity of her fame, curating a public persona is necessary. Even though Swift is famously good at cultivating parasocial relationships with her fans, she also performs for them.
Most of us will never know what it’s like to have a public persona evaluated by millions we will never meet. Most of us are called to a quiet, humble life in which only those we most care about have access to our unfiltered selves. Endless performing gets in the way of knowing, and of being known. This kind of public pressure is the antithesis of the intimate knowing we experience from God—the Maker who searches and knows us—and long to find in loving human relationships.
The Life of a Showgirl is a continuation of Swift’s public self-construction. This is what it sounds like when she is having fun—cracking dumb jokes and singing hummable melodies. While people on the internet perform their reaction to her, Swift is owning the cringe, the silliness, the sex, the feuds, and it seems that she’s enjoying herself.
The album’s opening track, “The Fate of Ophelia,” plunges listeners into a moody, dance pop trance that contrasts sharply with the more plodding, melancholy opener for 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, “Fortnight,” in which Swift laments, “I love you, it’s ruining my life.”
Love is no longer ruining Swift’s life; she’s been rescued. She’s trying on a new version of herself, apparent from the first release of Showgirl’s album artwork. The rhinestone showgirl getup Swift wears on the album cover is uncharacteristically revealing.
No surprise then that Showgirl is a self-conscious performance. It’s “sexy” in the way a Vegas showgirl is “sexy”; there’s safety in the very obvious conceit of it all. There’s a lot of razzle-dazzle, rhinestones, and feathers, but the performer has the security of the stage, and she doesn’t seem all that interested in seduction.
“Wood,” an audible homage to the Jackson 5 with a few vocal moments reminiscent of ’90s Mariah Carey, is lyrically an endless series of double entendres about sex and male anatomy. It feels like a bachelorette party joke. It’s the phallic cake your sister-in-law brings to shock your unmarried sisters. It’s a hyperpalatable pop song that just isn’t that serious.
Christians should still consider whether Paul’s injunction to think on whatever is “noble, right, pure, and lovely” precludes listening to this track (Phil. 4:8). But understanding the song as more bawdy than erotic does tell us something about what Swift is trying to achieve with this album—successfully or otherwise.
“Actually Romantic,” Swift’s diss track apparently aimed at fellow pop artist Charli XCX, is similarly lighthearted, poking fun at negative attention with a Weezer-esque guitar-driven groove. “CANCELLED!” is a Reputation-reminiscent, prickly statement of devotion to scandal-plagued friends: “Good thing I like my friends canceled.”
Despite writing songs about love and sex and adding more free-flying expletives to her catalog, Swift has managed to preserve a veneer of “good girl” innocence. Unlike some of her pop princess forebears—Britney, Christina, Mariah—Taylor has always performed her sexuality somewhat awkwardly. Even when she’s slinking across the Reputation tour stage in a one-legged catsuit, she seems like she is trying on a character rather than embodying the pop bad girl.
A decade ago, Swift said publicly that she doesn’t think of herself as “sexy.” Her ambivalent relationship with her perceived sex appeal perhaps endears her to her female fanbase. Videos of her clumsy dancing seem to only strengthen Swifties’ devotion: She’s just like us!
There’s a strong contingent of Christian women on the internet—lots of millennial moms like me—who unapologetically wear the label of “Swiftie” with no caveats about the lyrical content of her music. They participate in the fandom with zero-irony gusto. I spoke with some of them about their spiritual experiences at the Eras Tour.
Perhaps millennial women are the quickest to forgive Swift’s overuse of cringe internet-speak (“Did you girl-boss too close to the sun?”) because many of us are moms who spend at least some of our waking hours listening to the “Spidey and His Amazing Friends” soundtrack. We’ve learned that sometimes it feels better to enjoy something than it does to be cool.
But I also get the impression from some of these peers that the embrace of Swift, along with her sex-positive anthems and salty language, is an act of self-construction. It’s shorthand for “I’m a cool Christian mom,” or “I’m a former evangelical good girl spreading my wings and freely enjoying the pop culture I was denied as a child.”
Many of these women probably grew up hearing sermons with illustrations from movies like Braveheart and The Matrix. If men are free to find inspiration or feel understood through these violent films (as books like John Eldredge’s best-selling Wild At Heart suggest they should), women wonder: Why can’t we feel free to find the same thing in the music of a pop star singing about love and sex and the trials of womanhood?
Braveheart and Showgirl overidentification is risky. American Christians, often intentionally, look to films and music to construct individual identities and to find examples of masculinity and femininity. Powerful and sometimes moving, mass media falls short when it comes to offering models for what it looks like to move through the world in a Christlike way. Movie and pop stars aren’t the kinds of “icons” a Christian can rely on to better understand themselves.
Instead, a healthy relationship with pop culture requires a certain amount of “disinterested interest,” of observation without asking too much of it. Our self-definition comes through a life “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3)—less concern with how the world is asking us to sort ourselves, more prayer about who the Lord is calling us to be.
Swift tries on a few different personas on The Life of a Showgirl—the rescued “Ophelia,” a “Father Figure,” a fragile starlet (“Elizabeth Taylor”), a world-wise “Eldest Daughter.” The throughline is the performer, the showgirl, the persona that Swift can’t put away at this point in her career.
Swift has just wrapped up one of the most extravagant, lucrative tours in history. She’s in a very public relationship, now engaged. The 35-year-old superstar has probably never been more aware of how much her life requires an endless performance. Under the weight of that knowledge, what’s a girl to do?
Perhaps Swift is surviving by finding ways to take the spotlight less seriously. The Life of a Showgirl is more party than diary. She’s not doing it with a broken heart anymore, but there’s no doubt that she is performing. The Eras Tour is over, but the show goes on.
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today. Her book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families, cowritten with Melissa Burt, will be released this October.
