The name on everyone’s lips is Taylor Swift, as it often is. Her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, is splitting opinions, with TS12 being labelled “cringe,” receiving one-star reviews, and people wondering if it is the same artist who released The Tortured Poets Department.

While she may have put down her lyricism pen to focus on bops, there are tracks on this album that are akin to some of Swift’s cringier eras—although not much is as painful as ‘ME!’ being the lead single for Lover.

But critics of the album are digging deep into its symbolism and saying that The Life of a Showgirl is pushing a conservative agenda. TikTok user Little Debbie (@beysus.christ) explained her take in a near-six-minute-long video, saying that “Taylor Swift is handing the conservative agenda on a silver platter to the masses.” 

@beysus.christ

These are my heavily condensed thoughts

♬ original sound - Liittle Debbie

The Life of a Showgirl is all-American; it has been from the start. She literally announced on her NFL boyfriend Travis Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, with Little Debbie saying this move was the aligning of their brands. Swift has been in the business for a while and worked hard for her career, so “why are you sharing what you are saying is the best piece of work you’ve ever put out…with a man?” 

Little Debbie says Swift is aware of the optics of everything she does, and the announcement was the first creeping step down the conservative pipeline. The engagement between Kelce and Swift happened just after they recorded the podcast episode announcing the new album, with the ring being posted to Instagram a few days later, making The Life of a Showgirl and the engagement a “package deal,” according to the critique. Just another step in the conservative pipeline.

The video goes on to explore the track ‘Wi$h Li$t,’ with lines that include: “They want that freedom, living off the grid,” and they want “a fat ass with a baby face.” And a chorus that goes: “I just want you / Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you.” Little Debbie says this is Swift using an insult that was once directed at her, of being a childless cat lady, and turning it on everyone else. “You know what’s coming next,” the video asks, “a Taylor Swift line of baby products. You too could pop out some kids and live in a racially homogenous neighbourhood.” 

Getting married and having kids is conservative, and it’s something Swift hasn’t seemed fussed about before. But as Flo Read explains on UnHerd, pre-Travis, Swift was adamant not to be reduced to arm candy, singing that “he wanted a bride, I was making my own name” on the 2022 song “Midnight Rain.” “And yet,” adds Read, “Swift doesn’t mind when Kelce gives her pet names, as she explains in [track] ‘Honey,’ because ‘you give it a different meaning.’” Sometimes it’s nurture over nature, though. She wasn’t in a relationship that was leading to marriage. But it seems with Kelce, she’s living her truth. 

In an interview on BBC Radio 2, presenter Scott Mills mentioned that fans were worried this would be her last album because she is seemingly ‘settling down,’ to which she replied that it was a “shockingly offensive thing to say.” Swift adds that people don’t get married just so they can quit their job. 

As Swift sings in ‘Eldest Daughter,’ “every single hot take is cold as ice.” She has loyal fans and even more loyal haters. So, it may be that The Life of a Showgirl is pushing a conservative agenda, and everyone needs to have kids and get a basketball hoop in their back garden, just like Swift plans to do. Or maybe it is a satirical album, as some are sensing, and she’s playing up to the archetype of that all-American girl living the American Dream that people so love to paint her as. 

I think it’s an album that shows she finally doesn’t care, and Swift is having fun with that. Swift has always cared so much; she feels everything, and she’s made a career out of it. But when Swift has said in interviews and in promo for this album that it’s the record she’s been waiting to make, I think that’s the truth. It’s an ovulation album. The girl is in a loving, secure partnership for once instead of a situationship with Matty Healy. You don’t write lyrics about your fiancé’s redwood-tree-sized hard wood if you’re going to be worried about what the reviews might say. 

People have opinions for opinion’s sake—but they probably can’t touch Swift from behind her security-clad white picket fence anyway.