Taylor Swift’s newest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” is a representation of her desperate, failed attempt at a rebranding. Throughout her career, Swift has built and maintained a brand highly dependent upon the idea of being the “innocent white girl.” She relies heavily on this image to maintain the fan base she has catered to for so long.
Her relatability is what keeps her relevant and is a testament to her undeniable success. This success, however, cannot thrive forever if it is dependent on this format. At 35, Swift is aging out of the very brand she established for herself. Her attempt to stray from this brand and, subsequently, her relatability, may be the beginning of her falloff.
In her most recent album, it is clear that Swift aims to differentiate herself from this brand — to break the mold she has constructed and confined herself within. She makes a troubling attempt at maturity in hopes of proving that she is no longer the same sweet girl who kicked off her career as a country singer all those years ago. Her career has always been synonymous with her performance of appropriate white girlhood.
During the early 2000s, a time when hip-hop dominated the music industry, Swift found that country music offered a comfortable place to start her career.
At the time, hip-hop was dominated with highly sexual content, so her decision to introduce herself to the industry with a faux Southern accent and a confident leap into the country music world was a strategic move to uphold her image of innocence.
Swift established herself as a virginal all-American sweetheart, writing songs about fairytale romance and heartbreak without ever addressing her sexuality in a direct manner.
In comparison to other female artists who rose to fame in the same era, Swift didn’t take the step of rebranding herself as she became a young woman, but rather now, much later in her career.
Miley Cyrus, for instance, made a deliberate, dramatic switch in the trajectory of her career when she left Disney, removing herself from her Hannah Montana image. According to an informational video, this disregard of her wholesome image took place through various stylistic and musical evolutions, which started with her “Can’t Be Tamed” album, released in 2010.
Paul Joseph, a senior at California Lutheran University, recently went on air for iCLU Radio, on his show “Cancel Culture Radio,” where he spoke about his thoughts on Swift’s career.
“I feel like Miley jumped into the edgy stuff first because she wanted to instantly make that separation from Disney girl,” Joseph said. “I feel like Taylor’s always just been kind of like the sweet, elegant … and then she’s gone really hard at this now. It’s just like, ‘Whoa, what has happened?’”
Ariana Grande made a similar shift with her release of “Dangerous Woman” in 2016. There was a stark contrast in her new work — one that let the audience know that she was no longer the innocent Nickelodeon girl she was most commonly known as. Her new work marked the beginning of a new era for Grande, an era in which she is confident and comfortable in her sexuality as a woman.
As part of this shift, Grande adopted many new styles into her music, many of which were typical of Black artists. During this time, she spent considerable amounts of time with rappers, taking inspiration from and implementing ideas from those around her.
This is significant because, by mirroring Black artists, Grande was distancing herself from being the typical “white girl.” It was accepted in the industry that Black women be openly sexual, so in order to feel comfortable introducing these themes to her brand, she took after Black women.
According to a research article by Elizabeth Otto, “Music’s Impact on the Sexualization of Black Bodies: Examining Links Between Hip-Hop and Sexualization of Black Women,” hip-hop not only originates from Black people but also has portrayed Black women in “sexually stereotyped ways for decades.”
Swift, on the other hand, never attempted to stray from her tried and true “good girl” image until now.
In a thesis paper by Valerie Pollock at Georgia State University titled “Forever Adolescence: Taylor Swift, Eroticized Innocence, and Performing Normativity,” Pollock explores the significance of Swift’s choice to portray her in this way.
“Her image as the sexless twenty-something is Swift’s most valuable and profitable tool. For Swift to succeed as innocent, she has to represent an unattainable ideal of ‘pure’ innocence that is alluring yet denies blatant sexuality,” Pollock said. “Swift’s “appropriate” whiteness depends on her not being an explicitly sexualized object. By omitting any information that could tarnish her “good girl” reputation, Swift’s lyrics and coy interview style maintain her validity as the true ideal girlhood symbol, the eroticized white innocent.”
“The Life of a Showgirl” is her disjointed attempt to disrupt this brand.
The album is intended to showcase Swift’s embrace of her sexual energy. Instead of owning her sexuality on her own terms, the picture she paints in her album is framed only through her relationship with Travis Kelce, her fiancé.
The most prominent example of this is in Swift’s song “Wood,” which, despite the heavy sexual innuendos, is not about sex at all but rather a justification of why it is suddenly okay that she has sex.
The song begins with Swift picking petals off of a flower, something typical of an insecure girl, until she said her fiancé “opened her eyes.”
Another lyric said, “The curse on me was broken by your magic wand.” This begs the question of what Swift means by ‘curse’—her autonomy? Her own desires?
It seems as though Swift attributes her comfortability in speaking about sexual topics to love being the missing key, allowing her to portray herself as sexual. This effectively disregards her own agency as a sexual person, which suggests that she is still a ‘good girl’ because instead of having sex because she wants to, she gets to have it only because she is loved.
Ryan Byrne, a senior at Cal Lutheran who is strongly opinionated about Swift and has followed her career for years, provided a more positive interpretation.
Bryne suggested that perhaps Swift “never felt like she could” express her sexuality publicly while she was in past relationships. He questioned whether she needed “someone at her level” in order to feel she could write about these topics in an authentic way.
While a sound argument and definitely thought-provoking, this potential explanation still centralizes Swift’s sexuality around the validation of a man as opposed to her own desires.
In another song in her album, this one titled “Wi$h LiSt,” Swift said she wants “a couple kids, for the whole block lookin’ like you,” and “a driveway with a basketball hoop.”
This is her attempt to jump straight to the wife and mother phase of her life without giving the sexual freedom phase of her life the time and energy it deserves.
“She’s really trying to shift into this new thing because she knows she has to mature because everyone else is maturing with her because her fans are not these little girls anymore,” Joseph said.
While the idea is there, her execution is lacking and feels inauthentic. Joseph said that the album was “so sexually charged and so… jarring from what you’re expecting.”
He compared the album and what Swift was attempting to do with it to the way other artists of the time had evolved.
“Everyone shifts their genre at some point…but that hard change is just so dramatic,” Joseph said.
Swift built her brand on authenticity, which is why “The Life of a Showgirl” feels so disingenuous, as it is a drastic tone shift from what her audience is accustomed to.
The issue is not that Swift is finally choosing to tackle sexuality in her music, it is the way in which she is choosing to go about it. She has established her sexuality in a way that centers male validation and only reinforces outdated ideals surrounding sex and the “good girl” act.
Swift is likely at risk of losing not her fame, but rather, her reputation. She has all the tools to model a more empowering view of female sexuality.
Instead, we have ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ which makes clear that even as she ages, she is trapped in the same framework responsible for her fame. She remains unable or unwilling to imagine her sexuality independent of male approval.
As an artist as successful as herself and an inspiration to so many young women, Swift should be more thoughtful with her decisions, as they perpetuate undeniably problematic ideals.
