‘The Life of a Showgirl’ Shatters Swift’s Parasocial Relationship With Fans

Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” has accomplished a rare feat — no, not breaking the modern era record for the most albums streamed in a week or occupying all 12 slots on Spotify’s Top 100 list. These are indeed impressive achievements, but for Swift, they are almost expected at this point in her stardom. Far more remarkable for her is the fact that, for the first time in recent memory, Swift has produced an album that has failed to be universally beloved not only by the critics, but also by her notoriously diehard fanbase.

The New Yorker, for instance, criticized the album’s “cringy, sexual innuendo,” (see: “Wood,” an ode to the “redwood tree” of Swift’s fiance Travis Kelce), “millennial perfectionism,” and “obsession with her haters.” Pitchfork dismissed the album as like “much of the pop music you have heard over the past 10 years and throughout your lifetime.” The Guardian mocked it as a “dull razzle-dazzle from a star who seems frazzled.”

But far more surprising than the negative critical consensus was the reaction of her fanbase — normally so loyal to her that they crashed Ticketmaster trying to purchase tickets for “The Eras Tour,” prompting a congressional investigation, made the exes that are the targets of her songs objects of online vitriol, and vociferously defend their heroine’s honor against any charge of wrongdoing.

TikToker Grant Gibbs summed up these same fan reactions to “The Life of a Showgirl” beautifully: “Y’all know I’m a die-hard Swiftie, but this album just feels so lazy. I’m really trying to like it. I’m trying to give it more time, but, like, girl, I’m actually at a loss.”

Such words would previously have been sacrilegious for a Swiftie: Swifties love the artist and all she touches unconditionally. But “The Life of a Showgirl” has shattered that mandate — because, I argue, Swift has failed to uphold her end of the bargain, the one she has observed in all of her previous albums: To make music that is, at least partially, relatable to her fans. Even as her star power grew to stratospheric heights, Swift had managed to deliver on her part, even with her slightly pretentious last album “The Tortured Poets Department.” But now, fame — and her new album’s singular obsession with it — has made her remote from the fans whom she has to thank for it.

A crucial part of Swift’s success, since the beginning of her career, has been her “girl next door” persona. Just like you, she falls in love with boys who don’t like her back (“Teardrops on My Guitar”), loves her family (“The Best Day”), and enjoys partying with her friends (“22”). Accordingly, her fans have developed such a deep connection to her because of her capacity for autobiographical narrative and pointed lyricism; this excessive sharing allows for her music to become not only relatable, but delude fans into thinking they know her personally. They idolize her, but they also have a parasocial relationship with her. Out of this is born a scarily intense loyalty.

But perhaps the illusion that Swift is relatable to her fans was always destined to shatter. The more her stardom grew, the more remote she became from the fans who had catalyzed it.

Swift has tried a few tactics in the past to obscure this paradox. In “reputation,” an album written in the wake of a feud with Kanye West that led to her being cancelled by the internet, Swift compared herself to a victim of online bullying. In “Lover,” she is still comparing herself — at this point a multimillionaire global phenomenon — to a high school prom queen in “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince.” In “Midnights,” another album heavily focused on how Swift is perceived, she still wins sympathy with “Anti-Hero,” where she provides a window into the anxieties of being the subject of gossip.

But in “The Life of a Showgirl,” Swift is no longer likening the online backlash she gets to that which an average victim of online bullying would experience, or her fame to the attention a prom queen receives, or attempting to make her fame relatable with the anxiety it causes. In “The Life of a Showgirl,” just as the name implies, she is entirely focused on representing herself as someone to whom her fans simply cannot relate: a global pop star. That is indeed what she is, but to the fans that have always seen her, to some extent, as the girl “on the bleachers,” that is an unforgivable character-break.

That the album and its lyrics, as the album’s critics have pointed out, are her lowest quality yet is almost beside the point. “You’ll be sleeping with the fishes before you know you’re drowning” is truly a nonsensical insult with no teeth, to name one example of the sloppy lyricism. To name another, “Every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter, so we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire” is equally off-putting.

Maybe these lyrics don’t move her fans or the critics simply because we are not global superstars like Swift is. Maybe if we were better able to relate to her, we would find them moving and deeply profound. Maybe.

But since many of us will never be able to adopt the perspective of the world’s biggest superstar, “The Life of a Showgirl” has left Swift’s fans perplexed and alienated from the woman whose music they had previously turned to because she so viscerally communicated how she felt, and most of the time, it resonated with the way they felt.

Swift herself says it perfectly: “You don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe.”

She’s right — we don’t.

Her fans’ parasocial relationship with her may have led them to believe they did understand Swift’s life intimately, but to her, after all, they are little more than “toy chihuauas barking from a tiny purse.”

—Staff writer Alexandra M. Kluzak can be reached at alexandra.kluzak@thecrimson.com.