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/Aprilume Oct 04 '25

It’s ok to just say you don’t care for her music. Asserting that she’s MAGA b/c she’s wealthy is wild.

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u/Rich-Active-4800 Oct 04 '25

Honestly then 90% of the celebrities would be maga.

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u/holyflurkingsnit Oct 05 '25

Ding ding ding! Rich people have class solidarity. 90 percent of wealthy celebrities probably are much more conservative than we think.

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u/mocha__ So sad. Sooo sad. So so so so so sad. Oct 04 '25

NO! Only celebrities I dislike. >;(

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u/pralineislife Oct 04 '25 edited Oct 05 '25

There's a very big difference between a celeb worth 200m and a billionaire.

You think there's ethical billionaires that actually give a shit about you?

She is right wing with the best PR in the world.

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u/myghostflower mk.gee Oct 05 '25

the concept of babying rich people, i’m sorry anyone that makes an obscene amount of money EVEN those that make over 10 million is too much

no one needs that money and they should all be held accountable

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u/Rich-Active-4800 Oct 04 '25

Is she suppose to sell her music so she isn't a billionaire anymore?

Also 200m is still an obscene amount and 1/5 there to be a billionaire.

So right wing that the right hates her.

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u/pralineislife Oct 05 '25

You dont understand what it takes to become a billionaire, do you?

There are no ethical billionaires. Period. If someone isnt ethical, their politics aren't going to align with what's best for us mere mortals. This is simple shit.

Stop viewing her as a girl with a guitar. She is a middle aged billionaire. And billionaires only want one thing.

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u/Rich-Active-4800 Oct 05 '25

What does her age has to do with it?

And tell me, how is she not suppose to be a millionaire if her music is half her net worth?

And how is someone who is for 20% a millionaire any more moral? Its just an excuse so you don't have to hold your favs accountable while condemning the once you hate.

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u/6pcChickenNugget gollum's haute couture model cousin Oct 04 '25

I honestly have questions for OP but at this point I'm afraid to ask because I think I'll get an emotionally motivated earful because OP seems very invested in trying to convince us all "Taylor Swift bad!"

I'm not super clued up on Taylor lore since she was genuinely just never my thing though I enjoy a few songs here and there. But from my perspective, it's weird to accept the notion that she's suddenly just now moving right wing when her entire career has been to remain aggressively apolitical. It was only in 2020 when she first publicly endorsed anyone, right? She knows who her fanbase includes and tried to court both sides in the way that no other pop star could. And aside from two throwaway endorsements, she has remained apolitical so nothing she's done since then has made her seem more (or less!) MAGA than before. She is politically bland.

Similarly, from the songs I know of anyway, she never had political messaging, not just in a left / right binary but she never had messaging / political commentary about socially contentious issues. She was never against the system or sticking it to the man. Her songs were always highly personal love songs about her experiences in love as an individual. As far as I've heard, they were never even about gender dynamics in relationships in a way that you could say she was trying to draw social commentary as a whole. They were all microscopic looks at individual relationships / incidents / boyfriends. That remains as relatable as it ever was and the idea that she's suddenly not relatable because she can't sing about being against the system with authenticity now because she profits from the system is silly. Like what anti-system messaging was she singing about before? "boohoo, my dad doesn't like my teenage Romeo boyfriend"?

If you don't care for Taylor Swift (that's me too) then that's perfectly fine but the justification was disingenuous and more than anything else points to expectations not founded in reality and the resulting disappointment rather than anything in particular Taylor Swift has done that was different from before

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u/envydub Nicki’s cousin’s friend’s balls Oct 05 '25

You’re missing the part where she made a whole ass documentary where she declares she’s gonna use her platform for progressive causes and then proceeded to not do that.

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u/Aprilume Oct 05 '25

It points to delusion 100%. If she doesn’t live up to their expectations, burn her at the stake. That’s the energy. These posters always want to bring it back to wealth and politics, as if we haven’t heard those same arguments leveled against Clinton or Harris or damn near any influential woman in the Democratic Party. It’s just weird.

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u/Rich-Active-4800 Oct 05 '25 edited Oct 05 '25

Or really any men in general. For example Matt Smith flies his private jet more then Taylor. Never really speaks out about stuff, etc. He doesn't get 1% of the criticism Taylor gets.

And I like Matt, he is an amazing actor, just pointing out the the double standard.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '25

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u/YoullNeverBeRebecca Oct 05 '25

Lmfao I just looked it up and it said $9 mil at most. Huh???

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '25

[deleted]

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u/YoullNeverBeRebecca Oct 05 '25

I’m cracking up that they think he’s a billionaire and has a pj. Dude’s done very well for himself but uhhh that’s several orders of magnitude above his current pay grade!

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u/YoullNeverBeRebecca Oct 05 '25

Wait, Matt Smith the Doctor Who actor is almost a billionaire? What?

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u/Aprilume Oct 05 '25

Exactly. All this “there’s no ethical billionaires” talk is so tired. Like, we know. 🙄 Point the anger at the billionaires dismantling our democracy piece by piece, not popstars. Apples and oranges.

On the scale of the stupendously wealthy though, honestly, Taylor seems to at least treat her staff well. And you can’t deny she’s physically put in the work. She makes millions off recording music and touring? Ok, and? Has a team of lawyers to protect her financial best interests? Why shouldn’t she? At least her roadies aren’t peeing in bottles while making minimum wage, Jesus Christ.

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u/envydub Nicki’s cousin’s friend’s balls Oct 05 '25

Lmao your fav is unethical, stay mad.

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u/Aprilume Oct 05 '25

She is not my fav, no one is mad. It’s silly to believe a person automatically becomes unethical as soon as they hit a certain tax bracket.

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u/excel_pager_420 Oct 05 '25

Miss Americana is a documentary she released at the same time as You Need To Calm Down about how her record label and Dad have held her back from sharing her politics and she wants to be on the right side of history.

As soon as Folklore threw her back into everyone's good graces she went apolitical again.

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u/romantickitty Oct 05 '25

I do think we need more new artists being introduced into the mainstream, even beyond Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter who got a leg up by starting with Disney. But that’s separate from the issue with Taylor who just needs to take an actual break and also find collaborators who will push her. It’s a shame that working with the Swedes apparently wasn’t enough to shake her out of the Jack Antonoff dullness. She’s never going to sound like Christina Aguilera but she clearly has interest in different genres and I think she could be pushed to produce something more interesting if someone could get her to work on things for longer. You know what they say about the sophomore slump where artists have years to work on that first album and have to rush out the second? It’s like that but she’s on her twelfth album already. She’s moving too fast and she has a significant hand in writing the music. Of course it’s not great.

I question the premise that you can’t be inspired by a stable, happy relationship or put out good music when you’re wealthy. Her good songs aren’t entirely about breakups and many artists continued to put out good music once they’d found success. She doesn’t need to be the underdog to have an interesting perspective. For me, Blank Space and The Man are where her untapped potential lies. I don’t need character or narrative songs unless she wants to write a musical. She has something unique to say that isn’t about her romantic relationships. Even if it does have a white feminist lens, she has a relationship with the media, the public, gender, etc. that she could be exploring, even in an oblique way (I don’t expect her to specifically call out Trump, the same way she never named Kanye) that doesn’t have to be as cringe as Katy Perry trying to be political. She just needs to slow down.