Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott
ICYMI, TS12 is upon us. Taylor Swift has officially announced her 12th studio album, complete with a symbolically-revealing track list and cover art. However, perhaps the most intriguing (and telling) message is the album name itself: The Life Of A Showgirl.
We know Taylor loves a thinly-veiled reference and a good play on words. But what does The Life Of A Showgirl tell us about Swift? Specifically, could she be telling us something about her relationship with fame and her career? Allow us to dive into the meaning of pop culture’s tragic heroine, the showgirl.
The Life Of A Showgirl Meaning
In pop culture, ‘the showgirl’ serves as a potent and tragic metaphor for what it means to ‘perform’ (read: exist) as a woman. While in Swift’s case, the performance is quite literal, for many, it’s the daily demand to perform one’s femininity to an acceptable social standard.
Picking apart the concept of the ‘showgirl’ is on brand for Swift. Through her music, she has increasingly referenced both the traps of gender identity (Take, ‘The Man’) and her position as a woman in the public eye (Think: ‘But Daddy, I Love Him’, in which she takes people to task for their projections on her persona).
In pop culture, ‘the showgirl’ serves as a potent and tragic metaphor for what it means to ‘perform’ (read: exist) as a woman.
Showgirls tend to symbolise the consumption of the feminine, particularly the female body, as a commodity.
The role of a showgirl is clear: They perform, you consume. It also suggests the existence of something deeper behind the facade. As Swift has now confirmed, The Life Of A Showgirl tracks her life behind-the-scenes of her record-breaking Eras Tour. The major theme? The dichotomy of Swift’s public and private lives.
Swift is one of the most idolised and scrutinised women of her generation. Whether or not she wants it, she’s stalked by paparazzi, and every outing is turned into a headline. As Swift becomes increasingly private, these headlines have often attempted to ‘fill in the gaps’ of what exactly is going on in Taylor’s life. This has resulted in everything from false-start album rumours, to made-up pregnancies.
Ever since her public fallout pre-Reputation, Swift has made a point of saying to the public, ‘you don’t really know me’. This came to a head with her 2020 documentary Miss Americana, which lifted a veil on previously untouched aspects of Swift’s personal life, from her political affiliations to her struggles with disordered eating.
Just like Britney Spears — another artist who has drawn on (nay, embodied) the ‘showgirl’ persona — Taylor Swift is suggesting a struggle between ‘Taylor Swift: the image’, and ‘Taylor Swift: the real person with a real life’.
This brings us to another possible meaning of The Life Of A Showgirl.
For me, the first thing that came to my mind when I heard the title, Life Of A Showgirl, was the 2024 indie film hit, The Last Showgirl. Given Taylor would have been making this album at the time of its release, there’s a good chance she was influenced by the film in some regard.
Taylor loves referencing well-known pop culture in her songs. While she’s most-famous for writing about her personal relationships, Taylor often draws on film, literary and mythological references to get her feelings across. Think: ‘James Dean daydream look in your eye’ (‘Style’); ‘He can be my jailer/Burton to this Taylor’ (referencing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in ‘Ready For It’) or a whole track called ‘Clara Bow’. The Life Of A Showgirl makes several film and literary references, including Elizabeth Taylor (again), George Michael’s Father Figure, and, most significantly, Hamlet’s tragic heroine Ophelia.
Most will recall The Last Showgirl as the vehicle that returned Pamela Anderson to the spotlight. The movie follows an ageing performer facing an existential crisis after her three-decade-long act is scheduled to close. With Swift fresh off the Eras Tour—a performance that broke just about every record it could—it wouldn’t be surprising if Swift is pondering her next moves, her role as an entertainer, or, indeed, the meaning of a career that has spanned nearly twenty years to now.
Is The Life Of A Showgirl about Travis Kelce?
The main theme of The Life Of A Showgirl is definitely the duality of public and private life for a celebrity. For Swift, this includes her burgeoning romance behind-the-scenes of her headline-making Eras Tour.
Speaking on Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast, Taylor confirmed that the album was about her life “behind the curtain” at that time. And a glance at the track list suggests there are a few songs with a definite Travis Kelce slant.
For starters, tracks like ‘Actually Romantic’ suggest, at the very least, a song pertaining to Swift’s real life romance. Then, there’s Opalite, which appears to be a reference to the birthstone (Opal) for Librans, which is Travis Kelce. This is in addition to the track ‘Honey’ which is very Kelce-coded, as viewers of Kelce’s fim debut, Happy Gilmore 2 can attest.
Given many of the details of Swift’s latest love story played out away from the public’s prying eyes, there’s a good chance a new album will tell us way more about the relationship than we currently know.
Is The Life Of A Showgirl a pop album?
As the name and — and orange colour scheme — suggest, ˆThe Life Of A Showgirl will lean less on folksy, ethereal tracks, and more on dance-ready pop. Prior to the album reveal, Swift dropped a curated playlist of tracks produced by her 1989 collaborator Max Martin, leading fans to conclude the album will have a pure pop sound.
Taylor has now confirmed this on her New Heights appearance, where she said the record reflected the “joyful” and “dramatic” themes of her life during its making.
“It just comes from the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life,” she said. “That effervescence has come through on this record.”
Not for nothing, the final, titular track of The Life Of A Showgirl features Swift’s protege and present-reigning pop princess, Sabrina Carpenter. So, there’s a good chance it will blend the sounds of the two artists.
For now, we know one thing: It’s going to be a major pop moment for Swift. In fact, Travis Kelce revealed he’d heard all 12 tracks on the album, and confirmed—as we all suspected—it’s a “banger”!
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