Taylor Swift got her fairytale ending, but for many fans, the love affair is over.
Last Sunday, the 36-year-old, newlywedded pop icon made history at the MTV VMAs as the most-awarded artist in the show’s history, but Swifties could only muster so much enthusiasm for the milestone.
Two days prior, Swift released “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore,”a four-track addition to her 12th studio album which came out last October. But the new songs — “Patient Zero,” “Cleveland!,” “Pink Clouding,” and “Babylon” — were mostly with met derision, not delight.
“Verses evoke ‘Baby Shark’ with blocky melodies that overly emphasize each rhyming syllable,” wrote Spencer Kornhaber in the Atlantic. “Her lyrics, usually laden with double and triple meanings, invite little extended analysis.”
“Taylor Swift needs an intervention,” commentator Link Lauren declared on TikTok. “These songs were so bad they would not make the cut for a playlist at Forever 21. The mall would not play these songs.”
“Cleveland!” — an ode to Swift’s new husband Travis Kelce with lyrics like “The taste of me is acquired, but it’s his favorite dish” — was declared especially cringeworthy. This, on top of last year’s unsubtle ode to Kelce’s manhood, “Wood.”
“She cares more about how the world sees them together than how she sees him,” wrote Poppie Platt in the Telegraph. “This is miles away from the sensitive songwriter who, while dating English actor Joe Alwyn between 2016 and 2023, wrote some of 21st century pop’s most intensely romantic love songs.”
The new tracks, coupled with the fact that Swift has yet to release wedding photos from her July 3 wedding, have longtime fans questioning their loyalty — and if her best music is behind her. What does happily ever after mean for a musician who built an empire chronicling bad breakups, girlish crushes and revenge fantasies?
“All the music sounds like AI. There’s no heart or soul in it,” said a 30-year-old public relations executive in New York City, who asked to remain anonymous and has listened to the singer religiously since she was 12. “I feel like she’s gotten lazy with her music, because all the songs sound very familiar.”
Still, on paper Swift has never been bigger. When it came out last fall, “The Life of a Showgirl” sold more than 4 million copies in its first week. In addition to her record 33 VMAs, she’s got 14 Grammys to her name.
Yet, while there are some fans who will like anything Swift does, the p.r. exec says they deserve better.
“[We] have to hold people accountable to good music. Like, she has the best producer in the world and she has an incredible team around her, so why is she missing the mark? Has she gotten lazy, or is it a commercial thing, like she just wants to pump it out?”
Kristiane Westray, a 38-year-old writer who lives in Brighton, England, says that Swift’s business savvy has gone too far and detracted from her artistry.
“There were like 30 different variants of ‘Midnights,’ and the same for ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ and it’s obviously being done to drive sales,” she said. In its release week, “Showgirl” came in 27 physical editions — 16 CDs, eight vinyl records, two deluxe CDs bundled with clothing and a cassette — plus 11 digital versions.
Westray was born in 1988, about a year before Swift, so in her 20s she related deeply to Swift’s songs about heartbreak, dreams and friendship. Everything changed when she went to the Eras tour at Wembley Stadium in London. The tour ran from 2023 to 2024 and became the first in history to gross more than $2 billion.
Westray said she looked around the stadium and felt there was something too mass-market about what she was seeing. “I was like, ‘This just doesn’t feel authentic.’ I mean, she’s literally a billionaire now. Our lives are so different, so what have I got to relate to?”
She also questioned if Swift has made good use of her sizeable platform, compared to slightly edgier rivals like Olivia Rodrigo and Charli XCX. Rodrigo recently launched Daisy Chain Fields, an all-women, nonprofit music festival in Irvine, Calif., that donated proceeds to worthy causes. Charli XCX is famed for bringing lesser known female artists onstage at her shows.
“What has Taylor done?” Westray asked. “I know that she donates to charities, but the amount she donates is so small compared to her income, it’s like me donating 50 cents. I want her to really do something good for the world.”
Instead, Swift shut down New York City streets on a holiday weekend for her July 3 wedding to Kelce, a sports arena spectacle that included a laundry list of celebrity guests — Tom Cruise, Ed Sheeran, Hugh Grant, Dakota Johnson, Zoë Kravitz and many more — along with a castle theme and raffled off luxury items. With so much fanfare, people expected pictures, and they’ve gotten nothing.
“Taylor Swift is subjecting fans to a humiliation ritual,” said one TikTok video. “She wanted people to make fools of themselves, humiliating themselves, desperate for any crumbs of what they could get out of her wedding … and yet she would give them nothing of substance, and then she would invite all these celebrities who she doesn’t even know, they are not friends of hers, in order to be like, see, I am above you … You are the working class, and the only function that you serve in my life is to buy more variants of my albums.”
Critics say that celebs who have less splashy, more off-the-radar nuptials — say Tom Holland and Zendaya — are fine to keep things under wraps. But, if you get married in the middle of a city, use public resources and fill the room with some of the most famous faces of the day, the public expects something.
“I am someone who defends Taylor Swift. I always have. I don’t like it when people dunk on her for any reason,” said another user on TikTok. “If you’re going to have a wedding at Madison Square Garden, you’re going to have the big wedding and invite all these people in a really public place, and you know your fans just really want to see that fairy tale moment where you marry Travis. To keep that from them I think is cruel.”
There have also been questions about how Swift behaves in the stands at Kelce’s games, which some find increasingly contrived. Last month, when the Kansas City Chiefs played the Indianapolis Colts at Arrowhead Stadium and Kelce caught a 13-yard touchdown, she eagerly pointed at her wedding ring and declared, “That’s my husband.”
“I have found myself feeling nostalgic and saddened at times as I remember the way she ‘used to be,’ with her fans,” Britton Rae, 27, a Nashville-based content creator and author, told The Post. “She is more guarded, polished, and protected from the outside world which, unfortunately, includes us fans right alongside her haters.”
Westray put it more succinctly.
“I am so disappointed in her,” she said. “She has broken my heart.”
The post Now that her love story is complete, are we over Taylor Swift? appeared first on Page Six.
