If only Ophelia had ditched the flowers and gotten herself a redwood tree, maybe she could have turned things around.
Such are the latest musings of pop’s most famous AP English student. Beware, all ye who listen here.
We have, in real time, watched Taylor Swift age but not grow. Her discography charts the elevation of emotional immaturity into an art form.
We weren’t surprised when a teenage girl struggled to control her emotions and thought that a boyfriend could save her. But to witness the “all grown up” version of that girl still in that same mental state is to feel a certain existential dread.
What we have in Taylor Swift’s “Life of a Showgirl” — her 12th studio release in a career spanning two decades — is a cautionary tale about a middle-aged woman in a perpetual state of arrested development. (Cue Ron Howard: “Hey, that’s the name of the show!”)
This new album earns an “explicit” label for bad words and sexual content. But the deeper problem is not the vulgarity of the body — it’s the vacuity of the mind. “Showgirl” is less a collection of songs and more a case study in what happens when emotional adolescence becomes a permanent condition. Swift is not merely immodest; she’s foolishly immature. Let’s look at a few songs to get the point across.
Get thee to a nunnery
Every Taylor Swift song addresses the same inexhaustible mystery: How does Taylor feel? At times the feelings are so big that Swift has no choice but to enlist the help of the kind of literary heavyweights they write CliffsNotes about.
In “The Fate of Ophelia,” it’s William Shakespeare’s turn. Swift casts herself as Hamlet’s doomed girlfriend — with a crucial revision: Instead of being undone by spiritual despair, Swift’s Ophelia is saved by romantic ecstasy. Why drown yourself in the river when you can dive into the sheets? It takes a certain talent to depict sexual yearning poetically without making the reader cringe in embarrassment. Shakespeare had it in spades; Swift emphatically does not.
Never mind: This is Swift’s vision, and her emotions are in the driver’s seat. But her peculiar vision of salvation through (finally) finding Mr. Right suggests serious spiritual depression rather than empowerment. Add to that her pride in thinking that referring to one of literature’s most well-known characters imparts intellectual depth, and you have no reason to think she will ever mature.
It’s not so much a feminist reimagining as it is the fan fiction of a sophomore lit major. In this story, Ophelia has some prurient advice for her would-be Hamlet, but more on that soon enough.
Feminists will hate that she wants to be saved by a man. Christian parents should warn their children that no man or woman can save you and that entering a relationship with that expectation will surely doom it to failure. They needn’t take Mom and Dad’s word for it; this is a lesson you can see play out again and again in Swift’s own songs.
Naughty ‘List’
While Swift’s “sex-positive” Ophelia has left her religious hang-ups behind, that’s not to say that “Showgirl” discards the numinous altogether. In “Wi$h Li$t” Swift prays to God for “a best friend who is hot.”
The chorus petitions for a husband, kids, and a basketball hoop in the driveway. Lest this vision appear too wholesomely straight and suburban, Swift punctuates it with the F-word. She’s also quick to acknowledge the listener’s weary skepticism: Haven’t we heard this all before? “I thought I had it right once, twice, but I did not,” she confesses. Yes, Taylor — we noticed.
This moment of honesty is meant to sound self-aware; instead it reads like the notes of a 20-year group therapy session that never progressed past week one. It’s a chronicle of romantic exhaustion mistaken for wisdom.
In some sense she sees her need for salvation, and she recognizes it must be personal/relational, but she looks for it in sex and not from Christ. A teenager missing this is sad but understandable. A middle-aged woman still missing it is culpable ignorance.
But wait. What if this really is the relationship that’s going to save her? Swift makes her case in the next song.
RELATED: Taylor Swift isn’t a role model — and it’s time for moms to stop pretending she is
Todd Owyoung/NBC | Getty Images
Stiff competition
It is called “Wood.” And if that title prompts some involuntary Beavis-and-Butthead-style snickering, you are on Swift’s wavelength.
The listener, having already endured the desecration of “Hamlet,” must now endure the anatomical metaphor of the redwood tree. “He ah-matized me and opened my eyes,” she sings, before clarifying: “His love was the key that opened my thighs.”
Just ponder this. Swift has been wrong more than once before. But this time she’s right, because this time she has proof: his “redwood.” Is it too cynical to conclude that the only thing this guarantees is future musical torture — yet another song tearing down another false savior? It’s too bad the title “Timber” has already been taken.
These are the kinds of lyrics that make one nostalgic for the intellectual rigor of bubblegum pop. Somewhere, Shakespeare’s ghost is filing a restraining order. Hamlet’s father bids us adieu.
But Swift needs more than an editor to fix her songwriting. Her problem isn’t just bad taste — it’s a disordered worldview. In one sense, the title “Showgirl” is sadly apt: On this album Swift puts her spiritual emptiness on full display. She craves deep and lasting love, but years of seeking it in fleeting infatuations have left her soul in a deplorable condition.
Taylor’s (re)version
We have, in real time, watched Taylor Swift age but not grow. From the dear-diary teenage angst of her self-titled debut to these latest middle-age manifestos of sensual self-affirmation, her discography charts the elevation of emotional immaturity into an art form. Taylor and her emotions are always in the center. There is no self-mastery, no self-discipline, no lessons learned. Just doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.
Even the most dazzling career is a cautionary tale in the making. Just ask Madonna, still gyrating unhappily at 67. Parents may one day scare their daughters with the warning, “You better shape up or you’ll end up like Taylor Swift.”
Some will say I’m a grumpy old man. So be it. But Swift could stand to be a little more pessimistic herself. While she revels in her freedom to use bad words and talk about sex, she can’t see that it changes nothing; she’s still fleeing the same profound emptiness. We all are, and the more frantically we try to escape it on our own, the closer we get to the same grim destination: spiritual death.
It’s only Christ’s love that can save us. That Swift has persisted for so long on the same fruitless path is a testament to the allure of the world and the stubbornness of the soul. Perhaps instead of Ophelia, Swift should have drawn inspiration from another of Shakespeare’s indelible creations: the Fool in “King Lear.”“Thou shouldst not have been [middle aged] till thou hadst been wise.”
In the world of this album, however, wisdom is passé and self-absorption is a virtue. Swift gives us a spectacle with endless costume changes and a plot that goes nowhere. But even as we turn away in boredom, we should hold out hope that Swift will someday find a better ending. God’s love has confounded expectations many times before. Even the most jaded showgirl sometimes gets a second act.
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