From boom to backlash: has Taylor Swift lost her touch?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, has Taylor Swift lost her touch?

0:21She is, by any measure, the biggest pop star in the world. And she doesn't miss a trick. I'd previously met her at meet and greet when I had long hair, and then when I went and met her prior to doing this interview, I had a bob and the first thing she said to me was, oh my God, you've had your hair cut. And there's no way she remembers that, but that photo exists on file somewhere. As Laura Snapes, The Guardian's deputy music editor, can tell you, Taylor Swift's thing is all about being your relatable BFF while building an empire like no artist before her. I would describe her as presidential and goofy.

0:55Like she's very easy to talk to. You know, you can talk to her about Sally Rooney novels while she's knocking back a large glass of white wine. She is an absolute machine. A one-woman industry who has repeatedly broken album sales and streaming records on every new release and whose era's live tour boosted the UK economy by£1 billion. And so when she released The Life of a Showgirl a week ago, the hype was intense. This is my brand new album, The Life of a Showgirl. The Life of a Showgirl! The Life of a Showgirl! Oh my gosh, wait, the website crashed, the website crashed. New album! When's it coming out?

1:32Wait, did you see the caption? Did you see the caption? And then it landed. Why does Taylor Swift's new album sound like it was written by Chachi Bete? The whole thing is like so cringe and like she's giving me the ick in so many songs. Life of a Showgirl is Taylor Swift's worst album. I don't feel like she has any interest in anything she's put into this record. And I know I definitely don't as a fan. the backlash has been well swift and vicious to her fans this isn't just about one dud album it's become a question about her entire brand what she's saying and what she's selling the death of a showgirl the life of a capitalist that's what i think this album honestly should be called that taylor swift is a capitalist queen and i don't mean that in a good way

2:25And suddenly, the conversation has shifted. From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, what the Taylor Swift backlash reveals about modern pop.

2:42Alexis Petridis and Laura Snapes, welcome back. You're both friends of Today in Focus, I'd like to say. I mean, one as the Guardian's chief pop and rock critic, and the other as our deputy music editor. Now, it's not usual for us to cover a single pop star over the course of an episode, let alone two, and we did do Swiftonomics around her era's tour. But I guess Taylor Swift isn't your average musician. It's probably more akin to a one-woman cultural conglomerate. Now, this week, she manufactured an incredibly loud buzz around her new album, Life of a Showgirl, which wouldn't be unusual for her, except how did it go down Laura?

3:23It's had really really mixed reviews the Standard gave it a very outraged one star we gave it two stars Rolling Stone gave it five but then they also turned their website green in the colours of the album for a whole day the lyrics which are quite cringe and let's not talk about the one about her fiance's penis but other people are enjoying it as a sort of like back to basic bops Taylor sort of record. So my awareness of the general discourse about the album is linked to its sales figures it's sold this is not including streaming 2.7 million copies in america i think in a day that's uh an absolutely extraordinary figure wow if chart rules permitted it every song in the singles top 10 this week would be a track from the life of a showgirl so i mean it's doing quite well and laura could you also maybe give us a flavor of some of the the backlash?

4:15I mean, obviously, this is in context of these insane sales anyway. So I think there's been backlash about the perceived quality of the work by some people, that some of the lyrics seem quite thin, and that she's taking, once again, potshots at people who absolutely aren't her foes. We're hearing the same sort of beefs reheated that she's come back to a lot of times. And I think there's also more industry-style backlash as well, in that she has persisted in putting out endless vinyl variants of the same record. And when she announced it, she said, there's just these 12 songs, there will not be any more.

4:42And previously, what she's done is stuck different songs on different vinyl releases, so you have to buy them all to get them. So it seemed like, oh, okay, maybe she's not doing that. Wow, so it's a real endeavour, isn't it, to be a Swifty? Oh, yeah, because a vinyl record is like 30 to 40 quid anyway, let alone if you have to buy loads of them. But then last Friday, she announced that she was putting out four CDs, each of which contained a different acoustic medley of two songs on the album, which is something she did on the Ears tour. There was an acoustic moment where she mashed up two songs from her catalogue.

5:10And so technically, she's true to her word. there aren't any new songs. There are just cut and shut versions of some songs that you've already got. But each one of these four CDs contains one different medley. So if you want them all, you have to buy them all. And so I think people are really annoyed about that. Laura, you've kept a close eye on Taylor Swift's marketing machine over the years. How did she go about launching this album? And what was the new Swift twist this time around? I think the biggest Swift twist this time around is that she announced the album on her then boyfriend, now fiance's podcast.

5:39She's never done a podcast before. And it was genuinely any revelatory to see her in that context. So I wanted to show you something. Okay. What do we got? We got a briefcase. Yep. Mint green with TS on it. Yep. What's in it? This is my brand new album. It's with her fiance, Travis Kelsey and his brother, Jason. Travis is a footballer. Jason is a retired footballer. I hate that I know anything about American football because of all of this. This is my brand new album. It's called the life of a show girl. Love it. It was something that I was working on while I was in Europe. But you got to see her being as loose and natural in public as I think you'll ever get to see her, which was really like she's funny and she's sly and she's witty and quick.

6:23And so like that, that was quite a nice way to see her with this record where usually you would get a video online at 5 a.m. when the record comes out. She decided to host what she called the official Life of a Showgirl release party, which was in cinemas across the world from Friday, Saturday, Sunday. and it was effectively the new video, some behind the scenes on the making of the video, lyric videos for all of the other songs and filmed introductions of her talking about them. It lasted 89 minutes and so the only way you could see her new video over the weekend if you wanted to was to go to the cinema to see it and I would say it was a sorry excuse for content.

6:56To me it sort of adds up to this picture of her gouging fans for everything they're worth because it was not high value visual entertainment. And Alexis what about the music itself because you gave the life of a showgirl two stars which is pretty brutal why well yeah i don't think i don't think it was that brutal a review i think it was sort of disappointed more than brutal you know one of the reasons she's got bigger than anybody else is that on her day she's better at what she does than anybody else she's a more intelligent lyricist i generally speaking have really liked everything she's done recently it was sort of trailed as her big return it's kind of like a sort of updated version of west coast soft rock of the 70s sort of very acoustic guitar driven melodically it didn't seem to me to be particularly great there's been a lot of discussion about the lyrics and them not being up to her usual high standard which i think is true if it had had a load of absolutely killer tunes on it.

8:02I don't think anybody would be talking about the lyrics. One of the frustrating things about it musically is that, unlike what she does usually, it's so heavily obviously indebted to other people. Wood sounds like a Bruno Mars song. The Life of Ophelia sounds like Lana Del Rey's Summertime Sadness and a Jonah Brothers song. Opelite sounds like her eating Sabrina Carpenter's lunch, trying to do that cheery Abba style thing. It all feels a bit reheated. Laura, I should mention for listeners that you've written a fantastically detailed piece analysing the lyrics on this album. Can you tell us what the life of a showgirl tells us about where Swift is personally and creatively?

8:38Primarily, it's about falling in love with Travis Kelsey, wanting to have a white picket fence and a basketball court and a bunch of kids.

8:50And a really odd lyric that says, I want the whole block looking like you, which you can read one way or another. It's very romantic. It's once again, it's about him saving her, blah blah blah we've heard her sing these sort of things before but then the flip side of it is songs about Taylor Swift's other favorite subject uh which Alexis knows very well the haters so the haters the haters might be her former record label head who sold out her master recordings from under her which she has now got back like she owns those masters but she's still going after this subject matter then there's actually romantic which is a diss song about Charlie XCX.

9:22And then a really, really tone deaf song called Cancelled.

9:33The premise of this song is I provide a home and sanctuary for people who have been through this as well, because I know what it's like and I'm not quick to judge. And on the one hand, you might think, well, that's, you know, that's compassionate, that's reasonable. But also you could imagine any number of like MAGA freaks, people who have faced the consequences of their very bad actions and had to live with it, taking on that song as an anthem and being like, yeah, this is a song for me.

9:56So I do think that one feels especially reckless.

10:02From what you're saying on this album, she's punching down other female artists. Well, I think she's punching down by default. If you're the biggest pop star in the world, or maybe even the biggest pop star of all time, if you attack one of your rivals by default you are punching down because you are more successful than them so true but it also sounds like on this album she's dropped the boy chasing girl boss melodrama and sort of settled into love but also very much back into her beefs and i wonder how does that compare to the arc of her career from country sweetheart to pop mastermind to billionaire CEO.

10:41What's changed? I think that this has been kind of a constant since Speak Now, which is an album that she put out in 2010. There's a song called Mean, which is about a not very relevant critic who said that she couldn't sing. And she wrote the entire thing herself with no co-writers to disprove critics who said that she wasn't the architects of her own songs. What you don't know, what you don't know Someday I'll be living in a big old city From that point onwards, she starts interfacing with the publicly confected character of Taylor Swift within her songs and also using them to settle scores.

11:16But it just feels like diminishing returns of that archetype. Right. I mean, it looks like the social media backlash to this isn't just about this album. It's as if it's suddenly everything that Taylor Swift represents, you know, the millennial mean girl shtick, the corporate overexposure, her silence on politics. But how potent is the discourse, really? And is it making a difference to her bottom dollar? Obviously not. It sort of isn't. I don't know. It's difficult to see. That thing that you said about her silence on politics. Well, I mean, in fairness, during the election, she did come out in favour of Kamala Harris.

11:58Also, in 2019, around Lover and in the documentary that came out the year afterwards, she started talking very specifically about politics in America. And she says in this documentary, like, I have to be on the right side of history. She starts being very supportive of LGBTQ rights and so on. And then that all disappears.

12:19Laura, one of the reasons we are talking about Swift today is because she's not just a pop star. She is an economy. Can you outline the kind of power she wields? The industry sort of like bends towards her. It's easy to forget now that she's such a streaming giant. There was a time where she wouldn't put her music on Spotify because she said they didn't pay enough. And then obviously, you know, something changed. Also, similarly, when Apple Music launched and they weren't going to pay musicians for the first few months, she made a point about that. And then it wasn't just her that changed this.

12:49There was a conglomeration of indie labels behind it. But she was seen as one of the figures that got them to sort of shift this. When she signed her new record deal with Republic, I think one element of the deal was she said that if they sold any of their shares in Spotify, any revenue they got should be divided between artists on the label. I don't know if they have sold any of those shares, but she made a real point about that. and the whole thing with the Taylor's versions as well which were re-recorded in order to get the rights of her master recordings back that educated not just like a generation of music fans about like the inner workings of the music business also a generation of younger songwriters especially female singer songwriters realizing actually you do have more bargaining power than you think there's also if you look at the thing we were talking about earlier which is this releasing of multiple versions of her album 27 there are 27 different versions of this album available of this one yeah um yeah with no extra songs on i think four of the four of the vinyl versions each have a verse of a poem that you can put together taylor swift it should be noted is by no means the worst offender there were 42 different vinyl versions of the last rolling stones album 42 but what i would say about this if you look at what um lucerne grange who's the CEO of Universal is probably the most single most powerful man in the music industry he sees uh the future of the music industry in lying in something he calls engagement with super fans redefining the merch experience streaming 2.0 you know focusing on the value of an authentic relationship between fan and artist now I don't want to sound like a terrible old cynic but that all strikes me as being a polite way of saying we're going to get an artist's biggest fans and turn them upside down and shake them till the last bits of change come out of their pockets everybody is trying to game the system to a certain degree but it is quite you know notable that taylor swift does it to this extreme it's just audacious yeah it is and also you know i think where does where does that leave the artistry really i mean this just seems like a huge capitalist commercial endeavour.

14:58Yeah, and I mean, I would say there is probably a sort of difference between the Rolling Stones releasing 42 versions of their album. Also, their fans are rich old men. Boomers, yeah, exactly. If, as a parent, you sort of know that kind of pester power, that seems to be quite a rough old deal, really, for fans. I really do want to underline it is not just Taylor Swift doing it. the absolute kings of the shaking down fans that it is, the K-pop industry. So hyper-engagement, super-stands, that's sort of the future for artists. And I kind of wonder, you know, with Taylor as the archetype of this model for today anyway, what's the cost of that?

15:44Not just for fans, but for other artists and the rest of the music industry at large. It's very hard to get vinyl pressed when she's got a record coming out because all the plants are full, pressing 90 million different versions of her album well that's true that's true of any big artist in fairness you know yeah i think hers are coming out you know if you've got to service demand for how many copies was it the first day like three million in a day i do feel like she should invest in her own pressing plan at this point i mean i think taylor swift is the sort of ultimate symbol this sort of weird divide in pop music where there is the top you know the one percent of artists who do unbelievably well and then there's everybody else you know and the gulf between the the that one percent of artists and everybody else and by everybody else I don't mean some you know left field alt rock band that's scuffling around the pubs and clubs I mean other pop stars who are not as mainstream pop stars who are successful but not as successful as your Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter's, whoever.

16:52That gulf is absolutely immense. That gulf is sort of unprecedented. You know, the landscape has changed more dramatically in the last 15 years than at any other point, like certainly in my life. To come back to the Charlie X, the X thing, last June, Charlie put out her album Brat, which contained a song called Sympathy is a Knife.

17:22there's so much law that you have to explain around all of these things and it makes me ashamed that I know all of this without like having to do any research if you don't do it who's going to do it for us come on Laura um but at the time uh or just before that Taylor had been going out with Matt Healy from the 1975 Charlie was going out with and is now married to George Daniel who's the drummer from the 1975 so there was a short period of time where Charlie had to be in the same place as Taylor. And it made her feel really insecure because she knows that like, she could never be that sort of pop star.

17:47And I guess we all know what it's like to be around somebody who just like makes you feel insecure, whether it's like, you think they dress better than you, or maybe they got off with your boyfriend once in the past or like anything that just makes you go, oh my God. And it's not a diss song about Taylor Swift, but this song, Tortured Poets Department was already out at this point. And Charlie was on course to get UK number one for Brat. And then on the Thursday afternoon, Taylor Nation, which is the official Taylor fan body that represents her it is run by her management team they announced that that thursday a number maybe it was six different digital variants each each containing like a different rehearsal demo or a voice note or something was on sale specifically for about six hours only in the uk up until the thursday night cutoff for the charts and so the inference is she was doing it to block charlie from getting a number one and she was successful she also did some she also did something similar with uh billy eilish right yes after charlie and billy appeared on a song together so chart blocking yeah chart blocking and so she knows how to not only wield these variants but also tap into like social media sentiment and have taylor nation be like guys you've got six hours to get these things and you'll never be able to get them again and it seems like a generous outpouring to fans but actually it's about crushing the competition and so she is the perfect pop star for our times in that she knows how to harness all of those ecosystems and make them work for her But then to come back to the Charlie thing, something I should have said earlier is the diss song on Taylor's album about Charlie XCX is personal and it's vicious.

19:13She calls her a cokehead and she likens her to a toy chihuahua barking from a purse. We're very much meant to assume that it's about her. Whereas the Charlie song isn't really about her. It's about a feeling. Yeah, it's about fear. It's a very irrational song. Do either of you think there's an element of schadenfreude here? And I hold my hands up because I'm not a Taylor Swift fan. I never have been. I've read both of you writing brilliant, incisive, funny reviews and analysis of her work. Just leaves me cold. But is there a sense that, you know, would she face the same level of criticism and scrutiny if she were a man?

19:54I think, you know, if we just focus on the song Wood for a moment, which is, I reiterate, a song about her boyfriend's penis, her fiancé's penis. W-O-O-D, by the way, if anyone's watching, yeah. Yeah. W-O-O-D, like wooden. Yes, wood. Here we go. This is wood. Alexis, can I tell Nasheen about when we were talking about the album on the phone last week and you were like, no, it's a song about superstition. And I had to read, Alexis, the lyrics.

20:30my eyes. Redwood tree, it ain't hard to see. His love was the key to open my thighs. I'd be like, it's not a song about superstition. One of the most gawling moments of my professional life. It was no picnic for me, that conversation in fairness. You know, it started out like, I don't know what happened, man. It went off the rails. I got in there, we started vibing, and I don't know, I don't know how we got here, but I love this song so much. What I was going to say was that I think if any male pop star wrote a song about his fiancée's vagina, it would attract criticism. The specific criticism she's getting for this record, yes, I do.

21:15Actually, I do think a male pop star would get exactly the same kind of criticism. I don't think it's necessarily rooted in misogyny. A lot of the criticism of Taylor Swift in the past has been rooted in misogyny. Undoubtedly so. I totally agree with Alexis. as much as Taylor likes to sing awful songs like The Man and Father Figure, where it's like, oh, people wouldn't come for me if I was a man. That's false, because when she makes a very strong business decision or she does something that people think is good, she gets applause for it. Well, tell me more about that, because what impact has Taylor Swift's business savvy had on the music industry?

21:47One thing I've noticed about gigs is that tickets are now so expensive to go to big shows. once you've bought your ticket transport food and drink maybe bought a t-shirt you're looking at dropping between 200 and 300 pounds on a night out if that's the case a gig automatically becomes something that you save up for it becomes a treat if i look at the gigs that i went to when i was a teenager where i guess i was going to see you know my bloody valentine or nirvana or whatever tickets for those gigs were five pounds and even with the rate of inflation or whatever that's that's a dramatic difference if you inculcate that idea that a gig is this sort of special event that is ultimately damaging to the live industry i mean it just it just is that's part of the issue and the other part of the issue i guess is that the vast majority of artists outside of that 1 % of huge artists or outside of the realm of the heritage artists or are appealing to an audience with more disposable income.

23:00If you're a band, artist, whatever, you don't make any money selling records anymore. You don't, you know, it's increasingly difficult for people to make money on tour. As a system, it is completely broken. I think a couple more that I would mention as well is that I think perhaps because of streaming and because of the availability of all the music that's ever existed on the internet, music tastes have become more Catholic. And so in the past where you wouldn't have a major pop superstar headline in Glastonbury or like Primavera, now that happens all the time. And so pop stars are in spaces that are once more kind of alternative.

23:31And so the biggest musicians become celebrities and they're written about all the time. And so they become even more dominant. And it sort of sucks the air out of the space for anything else to sort of get a look in. The pattern that we're seeing here is big female stars. And so I wonder how you both assess the impact and influence that Taylor Swift has had on music over the last two decades. It's interesting. I think the most influential thing has been the specificity in her songwriting. People always point to how in All Too Well, one of the killer details is about, because it's about her fling with Jake Gyllenhaal.

24:05It's about leaving her scarf in a drawer at his sister's house. And it comes back to this narrative device.

24:21And I think that sort of like hyper-personal, hyper-detailed songwriting had maybe sort of disappeared from pop a little bit. And I think that's what a generation of younger female artists has really learned from. You look at your Gracie Abrams, I mean, Olivia Rodrigo, like that diaristic, detailed thing is now the sound of pop. So I'd say it's more in the writing than in the sound. She also absolutely introduced or reintroduced that idea of, as you say, writing songs about other people, about other famous people. She brought back the beef. She brought back the beef. But I mean, it partly comes from hip hop.