As every New Statesman-reading Sociology postgrad is all too aware and ready to remind you in a lengthy lecture, popular music has long since ceased to soundtrack the lives of nations. Social media, growing societal diversity, and on-going processes of mass politicisation have profoundly fragmentated once relatively homogenous popular cultures into separate and in some cases hostile demographics (and markets). And yet, the all-conquering, all-consuming, bubonic plague-like phenomenon that is Taylor Swift indicates that reports of the demise of the so-called monoculture are greatly exaggerated.
All of the metrics point in the same direction. Taylor is unmistakeably the biggest popstar of all time; her songs have been streamed 26.6 billion times on Spotify, while a recently wrapped world tour reputedly prevented the otherwise rickety global economy from sinking into recession. For one week in 2022, Tay-Tay became the first artist to occupy every single spot on the billboard top ten, and she is also the first performer to become a billionaire solely through her music (without needing to buttress her income by, for example, snapping up the Beatles back catalogue [Wacko Jacko], committing tax evasion [U2], or selling whizz out of the back of a Ford Escort [Shaun Ryder]).
Why, then, given the fact that Taylor is quite literally bigger than Jesus, is she so breathtakingly, eye-wateringly, self-harm-inducingly dull? I could perfectly understand if this level of celebrity had attached itself to the forbiddingly Dionysian and obviously unhinged Lana del Rey, or the oddball shoe-sniffing mad scientist the Weeknd, or even faux-Geordie working class hero Sam Fender, with his wanky Bruce Springsteen covers and voice-of-the-people cosplay.
Yes, I would be perfectly happy for these undeniably talented comic book clowns to hog the covers of dying legacy media publications across the West. But Swift? She’s an ungainly shrinking violet of a country bumpkin who somehow finds herself catapulted into a position of unimaginable exposure largely by virtue of her unapologetically agreeable blandness. Her obscene popularity is in effect yet another reminder, as if one were needed, that the dribbling, dull-eyed, barely sentient masses consistently get the heroes they deserve, as the inhabitants of the Weimar Republic discovered to their cost in 1933.
It’s unfair, of course, to compare Taylor Swift with Adolf Hitler – the Führer, after all, never subjected 26.6 billion impressionable teenagers to an entire album’s worth of songs about the lead singer of dogshit New Wave revivalist poptarts the 1975. But as if further evidence of the ongoing infantilisation of the West were needed, then it is here at last, in the form of Taylor’s newest – and by my reckoning, her 97th – album, The Life of a Showgirl. Because with god as my witness, there isn’t a single tune on this insipid whoopie cushion of a record.
I say this as someone who has only ever sat through one Swift album from start to finish, 2012’s by-numbers pop-country pigsty Red, during a particularly hellish drive to Frankfurt Airport, largely so that I could distract myself from the possibility of imminent death on the German Autobahn with a titillating game of “guess which famous person this next (boring) song is about.” And, as it happens, I actually didn’t mind it – some of it is catchy enough, though the mere notion that it’s in the same league as Sophie B Hawkins, let alone Madonna or Fleetwood Mac, is risible in the extreme.
But this? This Life of a Showgirl? This is eye-gougingly banal. Whether she’s trying to channel cinematic Born to Die-style electro-pop, fifteen years after that particular pastiche passed its sell-by-date, or reverting to her natural half-witted straw-chewing Dolly Parton-style balladry, Taylor remains almost extraterrestrial in her sheer gaucheness, a mere magpie to the ideas and innovations of other, more gifted individuals. She’s got a way with words and some of her lyrics are clever – it would be peevish to deny it – but overall, it’s tempting to conclude that Taylor’s popularity is actually predicated on the fact that she’s an inherently naff individual endeavouring ceaselessly, and with every breath she takes, to be cool – an irresolvable complex that she comes close to airing on the Dawson’s Creek-esque “Eldest Daughter.”
This is all well and good if you’re a socially anxious fourteen year old girl. And obviously, without a preponderance of halfwits who would choose corporately appropriated urban electropop over Lana del Rey’s perverted fever dreams, essential public services would simply grind to a halt. And yet, in the 1980s, Madonna enjoyed a similar cultural reach while exhibiting considerably more character than the Taylorbot evinces at any point on this utterly forgettable assemblage of personality cult-sustained claptrap. But then, as the Salem witches surely also realised as they were being led to the stake, every culture gets the showgirls it deserves.
Rating: * *
Standout track: “CANCELLED!”