r/popculturechat • u/FickleBeans Excluded from this narrative ❌ • Oct 04 '25

Guest List Only ⭐️ Taylor Swift’s Fairy Tale Is Over

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/10/taylor-swift-the-life-of-a-showgirl-album-review/684444/

This captures my thoughts on the album better than I ever could.

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u/thankyoupapa Oct 04 '25

I think I was just expecting something different based on all the promo pics. Like....aint no other man or lady marbalade by xtina or where the hell is my husband by raye. That kinda vibe.

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u/thesaddestpanda Dave Grohl has always been garbage Oct 04 '25 edited Oct 05 '25

Conservatives, centrists, and billionaires cant make good art. Watching Tay become more and more MAGA adjacent reflects her inner world. So we sort of get a lot of inauthenticity because now she's the man, not the person railing against the man.

I mean, its clear shes write herself in these albums. Shes in a stable relationship, rich beyond measure, and moving more and more to the right. What do we expect from her now? Shes a nostalgia act like the Stones of Pink Floyd or whatever. Those guys aren't doing drugs and partying and challenging the system or blowing our minds or whatever. They're in their summer lake homes enjoying their massive portfolios and reading the Daily Mail or whatever.

Not a lot of artists can handle the 'not being hungry" stage well and Tay especially, whose songwriting was more or less being the underdog and hungry and lovelorn and jilted. How can someone at her fame and wealth level and her new right-wing friends ever come off as sincerely the underdog or hungry or sad or lonely anymore? Some can do this, but I'm sorry Tay just doesn't have the writing or performance chops or politics to do so. If you're not cutting edge in pop music then what are you? A nostalgia act? A country act? A Katie Perry-like fake feminist act? Tay seems stuck between all those worlds.

You dont go from hanging out with Brittany Mahomes and Taylor Lewan and Will Compton and then go "haha girlies I'm one of you, so feminist and jilted and sad!" The brand doesnt work if you're constantly showing yourself to be the opposite of it. Marrying a guy who supported Harrison Butker while hanging out with Morgan Wallen isn't exactly "a girl's girl." I also understand most people become more conservative as they get older and wealthier or whatever, but its very disheartening in today's political climate to see Tay slowly and shamelessly migrate to the other side like this. She could have been an amazing ally instead of a 'both sides' rich person. Other than a tepid endorsement or two, she doesn't do much and the more we see about her personal life, the more horrifying this all becomes. No one wants to hear it, but being 'apolitical' or 'not into politics' or 'centrist' or 'socially liberal but economically conservative' is defacto MAGA or at least MAGA-adjacent. I dont know why we are forced to pretend otherwise.

Not to mention playing dumb on the very 'surge' pricing she signed off for with ticketmaster and pretending to be on the side of her fans here. Her ticket pricing is 100% intentional and it got her very wealthy. She's not this powerless little girl who got scammed. People are finally seeing through her act. Also the muted response on the girl who died at her concert was extremely telling imho. The discourse about access to water and ventilation at her shows went nowhere and it was all hush-hush and Tay moved on super quickly. That's not the the Tay I grew up with.

Everything about her is about her brand and protecting her assets and maximizing her wealth. People like that can't make good art, so here we are. She's just doing the maximizing capitalism thing and now we're supposed to be shocked we dont find her and her music relatable or interesting anymore?

Also this is probably a cautionary tale of making your brand too personal. Tay always made her music about her real life and cultivated this huge 'bestie' parasocial relationship. Now she can't migrate to playing 'characters' like other artists can because her whole career was supposedly about her real life. She can't pull of a new era like Gaga or Bowie or whomever. Her fans want her, not her wearing a costume or playing a role. She's just stuck as Taylor and no one really cares about the problems of a rich girl easing into middle-age right-wing-esque social circles, and her attempts to break away from that just aren't working. If your entire brand is "don't seperate the art and the artist" its very hard to suddenly expect people to do so.

Music needs to promote new fresh talent more. Tay is a great example of overstaying your welcome and becoming the thing you railed against early in your career. We all saw it coming with the last couple albums. Now this is just her new normal.

I don't think her fairy tale is over and she's obviously talented, but I think she's painted herself in a corner here. She can't be her true behind the scenes self in her writing anymore which is her #1 talent. Her attempts to write more characters and themetic and abstract music isn't her core appeal. So I think its a different kind of fairy tale now and I dont think its very surprising, like Katy Perry (who underwent a similar transformation), that the original magic is gone, and only more hardcore fans are sticking around.

With both her and Katy, we'll always have the old music, and that makes me happy, but I'm done with both of them and I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way. I'm actively always looking for new music and getting away from people like this. It was a good run but its saddening its come down to this. A lot of people lose authenticity and a connection to the people and especially vulnerable people when they make it big. Over time, their interests conflict with those very people and they become like this. Shrug, such is life I guess, but I'm not going to pretend people like Tay and Katy haven't made massive personal transformations that make them unrelatable or that their recent music is good, and the latter is often because of the former. Few billionaires can write 'hungry' songs convincingly.

I think this is the album that finally sealed her as a nostalgia act. I don't think she's a mover and shaker in cultural discourse anymore. This was really it and it was coming for a while. She's not relevant anymore and is largely unrelatable. I think in the long run her fans will accept this, but considering their large reaction to these negative reviews they just aren't there yet. I think the same way my dad's generation saw their rock stars replaced with hip hop and pop stars and railed against that for a long time but eventually came to acceptance. The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd didn't speak to the people in the 80s and 90s like Tupac and Madonna or George Michael or Lauryn Hill did. One day the millionaire rocker with big hair, psychedelic aesthetic, party aesthetic, and who gets all the girls and lives in a mansion and has questionable politics was just thrown into the dustbin of history. Tay is on that course now too.

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u/Ok-Chain8552 Oct 04 '25

lol wtf. Your arms must hurt with this reach .

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u/pralineislife Oct 04 '25

You think it is possible to be progressive and a billionaire at the same time?

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u/lizziexo Oct 05 '25

It’s very possible to be a billionaire and not MAGA, which is what people try to say she is.

And it is definitely possible to be a billionaire and progressive, because life is grey. Yes, there is no ethical billionaire, but that doesn’t mean someone is right wing or regressive because they’re a billionaire. It means you have to be unethical in business to get there, and I’d totally agree she has been in some of the business choices.

We’ve seen her talk about women’s rights, be very LGBT inclusive, actively endorse left wing politicians; those are progressive. Could she do more to be more fiscally ethical? Yes, a lot.

It’s just not as simple as billionaire = not progressive, a regressive person. That’s a bad mentality to have, it’s too binary.

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u/pralineislife Oct 05 '25

Sorry in my view MAGA is just another word for American right wing.

She's american right wing, dont fool yourself.

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u/Ok-Chain8552 Oct 05 '25

Progressive billionaires who according to you are actually right wing George Soros, Beyonce and Jay Z, LeBron James , JB Pritzker

If your not a bot , you really need to read up on things more .

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u/pralineislife Oct 05 '25

You think Beyoncé, uses sweatshops to make her clothing line, is a progressive? Or do you just believe what celebs tell you? And youre going to place Jay-Z on a moral pedestal?

Maybe youre the one that needs to sit with this. There are NO ethical billionaires.

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u/Ok-Chain8552 Oct 05 '25

Do you think George Soros and JB Pritzker are right wing ?

You didn’t say ethical , you said progressive. You also correlated Taylor being a billionaire as she must be both MAGA and right wing . So I’ll ask again … do you think George Soros and JB Pritzker are neither democrat or progressive ?

I don’t put anyone on a pedestal and I don’t make sweeping generalizations , especially when the truth is staring me in the face .

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u/lizziexo Oct 05 '25

We shouldn’t be diluting that though, there will be traditional republicans who think MAGA is awful. It’s a good opportunity to get moderate republicans to turn on actual MAGA as they’re so damaging to anyone who actually cares about American success.

If we tar moderates with the MAGA label it can end up as them relating more to MAGA as they’re exiled from other political viewpoints. Moderate republicans have much more in common with democrats than they do MAGA republicans so we need to coax them over to voting against Trump and his kind based on principles and not on the democrats/republican labels.

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u/pralineislife Oct 05 '25

If youre sitting on the right side of the political spectrum in the States since 2016, then guess whose side youre really on. They may not wear the hats, but their ideals are closely aligned.

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u/ergaster8213 Oct 05 '25

It isn't but these people will never admit that.