As 11:00 p.m. approached on the night of Oct. 2, my best friend and I sat diligently with Spotify open on our TV and a closeted excitement for the drop of the new Taylor Swift album, “The Life of a Showgirl”. We had both been fans of Swift since we were young, with genre-bending album releases like “Red” and “1989” dominating the cultural sphere of our childhood. I myself had a unique sense of hope and excitement for this new era — a showgirl theme, with jazz synths and that signature almost-poetic writing? Sign me up.
That was, unfortunately, not quite what we received.
Instead, we cringed as we listened to an album of songs that seemed to pivot sharply away from the feminist aesthetic curated so readily by the same artist known for songs like “The Man” and “mad woman.” Swift’s previously recorded work featured well-loved lyrics that criticized the patriarchy, tore down expectations of women as purely motherly figures, and led dialogues on the intersection of feminism and fame, but this album was a stark contrast that instead seemed to embrace the opposite of those ideas.
One of the worst offenses of this takes place in the song “Wi$h Li$t,” in which the chorus states, “They want that complex female character / They want that critical smash Palme d’Or… I just want you, uh / Have a couple kids, got the whole block lookin’ like you.” For an artist whose discography highlights the complex female existence, this is a very obvious change in rhetoric. The rest of the album keeps this theme: women are no longer these artistic, fluid beings with their own complicated thoughts and feelings, but instead, mothers and wives with a dependence on the perfect man to save them from the issues of their intelligence.
This is, however, not an isolated incident. It is only a cog in a machine of a rise in conservative values in pop culture, and specifically inside of the music industry. It is not even a new trend — history has shown that when an economy is unstable and a population is equally as worried, the shift to traditional beliefs rises.
One example of this is the hemline index, which is a theory that states that when the economy flourishes, the hemlines of skirts get shorter. However, when it plummets, fashion quickly turns to the more modest side. Our culture has shifted from something that largely embraced childfree women and feminist values, to one that has begun to shame them for those choices.
Tradwives and homesteaders go viral on TikTok. Grifters discuss the supposed ‘dangers’ of birth control. Girls who embrace their sexuality are no longer “cool” or “interesting. Swift’s rebranding to that of a married, happy housewife who is uncomfortable with the idea of public fame and freedom is not an unintentional slip, nor can it be considered a true indicator of her honest beliefs.
There is one truth here: aligning yourself with shifting values in the face of public scrutiny makes money. To take the shot at alienating a chunk of your fanbase that was built through a now less-popular set of ideals, in order to embrace those who float with the changing views of society is somewhat ingenious.But it begs the question — why do we let celebrities dictate and reshape our ideals in the first place, when they’re often just mirroring the most profitable ideals back at us?
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