This Is A Cry For Help

At midnight, Taylor Swift released a four-song update to her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, which came out last October and had the cultural impact of a Sketchers sneaker drop. Despite juicing its commercial success with several variants on the physical copies for sale, responses to the album from critics and fans alike have been lukewarm at best. Certainly nobody that I know liked hearing Travis Kelce’s dick compared to a redwood tree.

One might think that after reaching the economic pinnacle that was the Eras Tour, the accompanying concert film and Disney+ docuseries, three albums in four years, and a single for the billion-grossing Toy Story 5, Swift would maybe consider chilling for a second. But for better and for worse, this woman is a compulsive writer who must metabolize her life into song. The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore is proof that some ideas should just stay in the diary, the voice memos, or the group chat.

All four of the new songs on this extended edition land with a thud, with the most egregious of the lot being one called “Cleveland!” It’s an attempted rejoinder at Swift’s ever-present “haters” who criticize her looks, her values, and her dancing ability. But she doesn’t worry, because “you only need to find one person in this entire world who doesn’t find you completely insufferable,” and Swift has found hers in Kelce, whom she married at an intimate ceremony in Madison Square Garden in July. Kelce, she writes, has blown her socks off with a trip to Cleveland exclamation point. Gone is the sardonic self awareness of singles like “Anti-Hero” and “Blank Space,” as is the storytelling and mathematical rhythm work from folklore and evermore. For someone who just a few short years ago wrote songs like “ivy” and “peace” about people who were apparently not her soulmates, the shallowness of these songs that point to Kelce is shocking. “He already took me to Cleveland / And showed me The Heights, so hate all you like / This is the love of my life, hey, hey, hey,” she sings on the chorus. It’s very much giving “I have never EVER been happier!!!”