I used to be one of those Never-Swifts; a catty gay boy poisoned against Taylor Swift and all she stood for. I denied her undeniable hits, which back then, in the thick of the 1989 album cycle, were stacking up at a seemingly unprecedented rate. She was inescapable and beautiful and successful, and she was grating and earnest, and it was popular to hate her, so I did.
In public, that is. In private, I owned the 1989 CD and treasured it. It was the first piece of physical media I came to adore—an adoration that has tumbled into an extensive vinyl collection including and extending beyond Swift’s catalogue, which has spelled doom for my savings. And goddamn, the music, so shimmery and cathartic and perfect. I cried to “Clean,” mourning a relationship I’d never had; I fell into “Style,” anticipating a passionate love affair that hadn’t come.
My proper infatuation with Swift started in university. At some parties, when the moment is right, you meet somebody and the chemistry between you is so electric that the clatter and hip-hop around you melts away, and there is just the two of you connecting on a carpet soaked with Fireball. This happened to me in second year when I met my friend Hope, a fellow journalism student who shared my wry sense of humour and love for Carly Rae Jepsen. Something we didn’t share: her passionate, all-consuming love for Taylor Swift. When I said (lying, somewhat) that I couldn’t stand her, Hope invited me over to her house the following weekend for a lecture on Swift. We made Kraft Dinner, descended into her basement and played Red from top to bottom. By the time its final track, “Begin Again,” ended, I was hooked.
We continued this tradition for a few weeks, listening to a new Swift album each time until the whole discography was unlocked. It culminated in the Friday release of Swift’s 2017 record, Reputation. Though the album hadn’t been out 24 hours, Hope was already off book and replete with trivia about the album’s composition, the kind of factoids Swifties hoard like squirrels filling their fat cheeks with acorns. Halfway through track three, the dubstep-tinged slammer “I Did Something Bad,” Swift makes a noise that sounds like an abortive car engine left in the winter snow too long. Hope’s eyes went wild. “That came to her in a dream!” she roared, thrilled to share this secret of Swift’s subconscious brilliance.
Today, caught in the stinky second wind of her putrid 2025 album, The Life of a Showgirl, via its Encore, I look back at that time with longing. Even in 2017, her discography was extensive, but back then her music was so consistently good that each new release felt essential. Swift has—had—an unparalleled ability to mine her emotions for big feelings, translate them into evocative lyrics and arrange them into glistening hooks. This is the woman who wrote “august,” “ivy,” “Fifteen,” “Holy Ground,” “All Too Well,” “Enchanted” and “Out of the Woods.” “If clarity’s in death, then why won’t this die?” she wrote on “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.” “I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet/ ’Cause I haven’t moved in years,” she wrote on “the lakes.”
Though I loved her, I wasn’t totally naive. Alongside her best lyrics, she has always penned clunky bars. “I come back stronger than a nineties trend,” from “willow,” is rough, as is “They’d paint me out to be bad/ So it’s okay that I’m mad,” off “The Man.” I knew these were shoddy at the time, but these kinds of speed bumps were outliers in her otherwise solid discography. Now she’s all speed bumps.
I won’t bury the lede any further. Last year’s The Life of a Showgirl and last week’s insipid, vile, unlistenable addendum The Encore contains the worst music I have ever heard, and that’s coming from a homosexual who attended the Pink Friday 2 tour. I listened to Showgirl for the first time on a road trip with my boyfriend last fall, and I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder in my life.
Its first four tracks are flavourless but contain suggestions of melody, resulting in songs that can be heard without scooping out one’s eardrums. The same cannot be said of the remainder of the record. I won’t retraumatize myself too much by running down the entire track list—even though I subjected myself to this album, I’ve still retained some self-worth—but I’ll mention a few lowlights.
“Eldest Daughter,” perhaps the worst song she has ever made, is notable only because of how disgusting its lyrics are (“We all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire”); “Wood” is a Jackson 5 ripoff that pays homage to Travis Kelce’s large red penis (?!?!); “CANCELLED!,” a song about how Taylor Swift is a bad person who hangs out with bad people, could have been made by Minecraft YouTuber Tobuscus in 2013 if he were worse at singing and music production.
Despite the failure of its composition, Showgirl was an unprecedented success. It had the highest first-week American sales for any album in history, surpassing a decade-old record held by Adele’s 25. Lead single “The Fate of Ophelia” is Swift’s longest-running Billboard Hot 100 number-one hit—its run at the top lasted ten weeks.
I went to Guatemala last spring, hoping in part to escape Swift’s stranglehold on culture, and the currency exchange shop in the Guatemala City airport welcomed me by playing “The Fate of Ophelia,” much to my chagrin.
What happened to the musician I loved? I pinpoint her plummet to Midnights. High off the acclaim of her twin masterpieces folklore and evermore, she released Midnights at the end of 2022. The muted, maudlin album has a couple gems on it (the simmering “Maroon” and flawless B-side “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” are standouts), but the rest of the album is middling. Most of the songs are meandering and boring; they sound unfinished and unoriginal. The concept for the album was that the songs were written in the middle of the night, while Swift was delirious and exhausted and hazy. She was going for moody and sombre, but instead she turned in an album that sounds like it was made by someone too tired to do a good job, which, to be fair, was the conceit of the album.
The album is tepid, but its reception was not. It won a Grammy for Album of the Year—Swift’s fourth—and anchored the Eras Tour, which was so popular it permanently tarnished Ticketmaster’s business due to a fiasco so notable it has its own Wikipedia page. Any hopes I had that Swift would dig deeper into the intricate songwork that made her quarantine output so special were dashed. Prior to Midnights, I’d always assumed the quality of Swift’s music was the key to her success and fortune. I’d thought her love of money and attention was equalled by her love of making good music, but the scale was starting to tip. I believe Midnights taught Swift that she can print money off whatever sludge she slaps together.
And it’s been sludge ever since. Her Midnights follow-up, 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, was not only mindlessly boring but insultingly long, 31 tracks ranging in quality from okay to horrible, most of them occupying the latter end of the spectrum. Before this album came out, most of the people in my life accepted that Swift was the great songwriter of our time; even if they didn’t like her music or her persona, it felt undeniable that she was one of the most important artists of our generation. After TTPD, I noticed a shift. I saw Swift’s music become classified as a product, as a hollow consumable to be exchanged for capital. Some of my friends were apathetic toward her, and others openly despised her. My friend Tyson dubbed the album “The Tor-turd Poo-ets Defartment,” a nickname so apt I never refer to it as anything else, if I have to refer to it all.
But for those of my friends most passionate about Swift, I noticed a different phenomenon begin to unfold. TTPD seemed to break something in them. These were people who basically listened to nothing but Taylor Swift, who knew all her songs by heart, who had organized their lives around her music; people so profoundly touched by Swiftian turns of phrase and by the catharsis they offered that they were almost religiously devoted to her. But Swift’s decisive pivot toward capitalism, toward mediocrity, was also a pivot away from those who loved her most. I can describe the way they felt—the way I felt—as betrayal.
Then came The Life of a Showgirl (Tyson’s version: The Shart of a Poopgirl). When the album came out, I FaceTimed a close friend who is—was—one of Swift’s fiercest devotees. I thought it would be funny to talk about the album, but she turned from the camera and looked down. “I honestly can’t talk about it,” she said, choking up. And suddenly it wasn’t so funny anymore, watching someone I love feel punished for putting years into an artist who, as it turns out, only saw them as a piggybank to be smashed.
The other day, on the heels of The Encore’s release, I reposted a video on Instagram making fun of the idiotic bridge on “Cleveland!” Hope replied to my story. “I have to go into hiding,” she said. “She’s having a mid-off with herself.”
I thought of those two teenagers from years ago, slurping Kraft Dinner in a basement, giddy over Reputation, over Red, over Taylor Swift. Those memories seem like they’re from another universe, where there was more joy to be squeezed out of life, where things hadn’t gone so sideways. And I thought of everything I wouldn’t have if I’d come of age later, after the woman who could have been the artist of our generation surrendered her title for cash.
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