Taylor Swift, art, and the quest for personhood
At midnight on October 3, Taylor Swift released her 12th album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” Breaking Spotify history as the app’s most streamed album in a day, Swift’s newest creation sent a clear message to cardigan-donning fans and cautious skeptics alike: Her music will continue to influence the cultural landscape as we know it.
As its title suggests, “The Life of a Showgirl” is Swift’s most decadent album to date, complete with feathery headdresses, risque costumes, and a dazzling array of jewels. Far from being mere ostentations, however, such glamor is precisely the means through which Swift presents a distinctly modern vision of personhood, in which a glorified self stars in a drama of its own creation.
As successful as this narrative may appear to its cheering onlookers, Swift reveals that the “life of a showgirl” is far less attractive than it may initially seem. The only way for the show to go on is to ignore and reject embodiment altogether.
While we may be quick to dismiss this view (and rightly so), Swift goes on to reveal a frightening reality: Perhaps we desire the “showgirl” life more than we would like to admit. Realizing the deep irony of the duplicity of the stage, yet finding ourselves bound to the curtain with ties of our own creation, Swift’s album serves as both a mirror and a cautionary tale. We can (but shouldn’t) follow the egotistical, body-abandoning showgirl life she has chosen. Nevertheless, through the tensions it lays bare upon our own hearts, Swift’s album leaves us wiser about the ill-placed desires we still secretly harbor.
Since her earliest days as a musician, Taylor Swift has been a storyteller. Her uniquely diary-like style of musical composition has sparked both admiration and curiosity amongst fans, as they frantically rush to decode each new reference, while simultaneously feeling refreshed by the singer’s tone of relatability and candor.
In many ways, “The Life of a Showgirl” is no different. Nevertheless, this album continues a trend in Swift’s style of presentation, started nearly five years ago, in which the singer increasingly attempts to present the contents of her life not merely as isolated snapshots, but cohesive ‘eras’ within an integrated, and explicitly theatrical, framework. By presenting her work in terms of a literary stage, Swift makes both a clear and bold claim: Her life has become art.
In “The Life of a Showgirl,” Swift again explores the idea of life as art with detailed intentionality from the very beginning with her first track, “The Fate of Ophelia.” The music video for this song opens with a painting, which depicts a flower-strewn woman lying dead in the middle of a river. As the focus becomes clearer, the once-dead woman, now revealed to be Swift, sits up and walks about freely, revealing that the painting was really the set of a theatre the entire time. Posing inside another frame as a bird alights upon her arm, Swift gracefully moves from one scene to the next with a surprising level of command. No longer a mere passive actor in this drama, she reveals herself to be a person with direct agency in the way her story gets displayed.
Amidst the flowers, fire, and tossing waves, Swift argues we can each be the master and author of our own narrative. As she notes in an interview describing the meaning of another of her newest songs, “Opalite,” “I thought [opalite] was a cool metaphor because it’s man-made, and happiness can be man-made too.” To her, creating an entirely new self-image is as simple as merely “changing sets.”
Seeing one’s life as art has deep ramifications for materiality and the body. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a work called “The Life of a Showgirl,” much of the promotional materials, videos, and lyrics are intensely (and repulsively) erotic. As their sensuality draws the viewer’s focus towards a direct consciousness of the flesh, it seems at first as if embodiment in Swift’s conception is simply another stage tool for the dramatization of one’s own narrative.
And yet, in her title track, “The Life of a Showgirl,” Swift presents a slightly different and notably more nuanced view of embodiment than our initial preconception may have revealed. Beginning the song with the expected view of the body as another decorous item for the stage, Swift describes a fictional showgirl named Kitty, who, “dancing in her garters and fishnets,” appears “glowing like the end of a cigarette.” Nevertheless, as the song continues on, Swift reveals how Kitty’s glittery exterior as young, beautiful, and unconstrained is merely a mask for the difficult and often arduous existence that is the real “life of a showgirl”: Characterized by “pain hidden by the lipstick and lace,” such a life far less desirable in practice than its artistic expression would make it seem.
These conflicting messages reflect Swift’s own experience of tension between the life she wants to live in art and the reality of her embodiment. In an appearance on Hits Radio, she described her attitude towards her show during the Eras Tour, “My main goal for two years was to get myself to that stage and give everything to that crowd, where the crowd is for three and a half hours every night. You’re like ‘Don’t get sick. … If you’re sick, you’re doing the show anyway. If you’re sore, you’re injured, you’re hurt, you’re pretending that you’re not and doing the show anyway.” Swift wishes to be the fictional showgirl who can effortlessly perform without concern for her body beyond its mere appearance. The real showgirl does not have it that easy. Her life is a living irony.
Having had the past two weeks to reflect on “The Life of a Showgirl,” I find my thoughts best summarized in the following words, taken from Swift’s October 3 Instagram post: “It’s beautiful. It’s rapturous. It is frightening.”
Admittedly, I hesitate to use the words “beautiful” or “rapturous” to describe any product of pop music, much less “The Life of a Showgirl.” Nevertheless, there are attractive qualities about the album which it would be heedless to dismiss. At a very basic level, many of the songs are quite catchy. While there will always be the disgruntled subset of fans perpetually bemoaning Swift’s “modern” turn, it’s hard to hear songs like “The Fate of Ophelia” or “Opalite” (my personal favorites) and not nod along—even if only for the chorus.
Despite her glamor and fun melodies, however, it remains true that Swift is presenting a distinctly modern—and troubling—vision of happiness: Live your life as art, and free yourself (as much as possible, at least) from the constraints of embodiment.
Notably, even Swift’s expressed desire for marriage and family falls under this same self-directed drama. Certainly there is much to celebrate about one of the most successful women in the world stating that she desires more than just a life of wealth and comfort. Contrary to what some have claimed, however, Swift is far from embodying any sort of traditional values.
Under her vision, marriage becomes just another item on a personal “wish list.” Children, too, are reduced to an entirely subjective form of personal fulfillment, in which “you have your own set of wishes, and it doesn’t have to be like everybody else’s and theirs doesn’t have to be like yours … you just hope everybody gets their wishes.” Perhaps most strikingly, she replaces mutual, self-giving love with a life where you and your spouse live isolated from others and “tell the world to leave us the f— alone.” Such a vision is far from a model for conservatism.
In this light, “The Life of a Showgirl” stands in its most “frightening” character. As many of my conversations with peers over the past few weeks have shown, it’s easy to decry the “malaise of modernity” when referencing obvious issues with the album, such as Swift’s sexual promiscuity or her immature lyrics. Far more difficult, however, is to see the instances where the self-directed conception of life-as-art is so subtly embedded that we don’t even realize it is there—or perhaps don’t want to.
Our “wish list” might be different from Swift’s, but her music reveals that if we’re honest, we all secretly crave unlimited access to a life of our own design.
I’m all for enjoying “The Life of a Showgirl,” but perhaps we ought to approach the album with caution. We aren’t the directors of our own drama; our bodies come with limits; and even the height of “showgirl success,” it seems, is not enough to constitute true happiness. Though Swift ultimately claims she “wouldn’t have it any other way,” perhaps, cognizant of the inherent tension she raises, we can consciously forge a different path forward.
Elizabeth Mitchell is a junior majoring in the Program of Liberal Studies and theology. Reach her at emitche8@nd.edu.
Photo Credit: (People magazine/Mert Alas & Marcus Piggot)
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