One of, if not the biggest, pop star of our modern Era, Taylor Swift, dropped her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, on October 3rd, 2025. Her albums throughout the year have had incredible commercial success, topping the charts multiple times and winning numerous Grammys. This album was no exception, with all 12 of the album’s songs making top charts for 4 consecutive weeks and still ongoing. Even so, this album has been strung in numerous controversies that frankly negates the commercial success it deserves.
“The Fate of Ophelia” and “Opalite” are two songs that do deserve some of the credit and popularity they have gained. “The Fate of Ophelia” is the opening track of Taylor Swift’s album and was a great way to set the album off, with Taylor telling a story of how her fiance, Travis Kelce, saved her from the “fate of Ophelia”. In comparing herself to Ophelia, she is essentially saying that she was saved from “descending into madness” and “drowning in heartbreak” by finding her love with Kelce. “The Fate of Ophelia” is a synth pop song in comparison to “Opalite”, being a combination of a few different pop, rock, and disco genres, giving the song a different groove that other songs in the album don’t provide. Reading between the lines, “Opalite” is a song about past love lives that Mrs. Swift has had, along with her new one with Kelce, with the song actually being named after Kelce’s birthstone, which is Opal. This song was the second most popular, right behind Fate of Ophelia.
These two songs were the most commercially successful, with other songs strung into the mix like “Elizabeth Taylor” and “The Life of a Showgirl”. These are the types of songs that she is known for: songs with a good hook, a nice background track, and about topics that people could relate to. The times where she strays from this style, however, is where the controversy comes into effect, as people find the songs inappropriate, or just completely underwhelming for the level of artist that she is.
For starters, one of the problems with the album is that Taylor Swift seems to have lost some of her poetic touch compared to her previous work. When she first came onto the scene in the 2010s, Swift was known as being a more interpretive singer, with her lyrics having several meanings and deeper layers stacked into her songs. Even later on in her career, when she was coming out with folklore and the Tortured Poets Department, Taylor encouraged her listeners to read deeper into the lyrics and listen for hidden interpretations that she worked so hard to write. But with this album, her lyricism has almost fallen off completely compared to the high standard she set over the years. With lyrics like “But I’m not a bad b****/ And this isn’t savage” as well as “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?,” these songs just don’t fit the vibe that she’s known for, and frankly, have TikTok undertones, considering the use of popular online slang. It feels as if, during the writing of some of these songs, she was trying to appeal to an audience that she normally doesn’t, or even should be trying to appeal to. This directly plays into one of her biggest controversies of the entire album with her song “Wood”. This song is directly about Travis Kelce and all the joy she feels about being with him, but it specifically talks about Kelce’s “wood”, which is completely inappropriate for Taylor to put into a song, considering who she is and the context behind it. Over her career, she has alluded to sexual activities, and of course, she can do what she wants; she’s a grown woman, but that is not the real issue. This song uses a very familiar track as a part of the background music, and it’s a popular song by the Jackson 5, “I Want You Back”. It is entirely inappropriate to be singing about Travis Kelce’s “wood” while singing over a background track made by 11-17 year olds. This doesn’t represent the caliber of artist that she holds herself to, and for someone who refers to themself as an “English teacher,” the writing is poorly done and won’t age well into being a “timeless” album, which is what Taylor normally strives to make.
Another one of the more touchy subjects when it comes to this album is the purpose of the Life of a Showgirl was to give a backstage view of the life of a performer, like a behind-the-scenes look. This led her fans to believe they would get to see the nature of her fame and her takes on it, as well as how life being in the cameras has maybe exhausted her. But to their dismay, the album was anything but that, and didn’t even explore the topics of her fame to any extent. Many have started to believe that the album was a scheme to get more money, turning some of her fans away. Taylor Swift, while she is a great artist, is notorious for re-releasing albums in different versions. In fact, this album alone already has 16 different versions. A few years ago, she re-released one of her old albums, 1989, titling it Taylor’s version, and while the effort was great because she was breaking away from a corrupt record label, it was literally the original album just re-released. And with this new album having a quick turnaround from her Tortured Poets Department, it seems like she is fishing for money because of how underdeveloped the album is for her usual work.
Overall, after listening to the album and taking in other people’s opinions on it, it’s clear this album isn’t one of her best works, Even having an overarching theme of finding the love of her life, including other aspects that make Taylor who she is, doesn’t help change the fact that the latest album is underwhelming, bad and lacking the poetic aspects that people love about Taylor’s music so much. Nevertheless, she will remain one of the best pop singers of our generation, and people will always look forward to seeing what she drops next.
