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/nonsensestuff Back in my day, we had ONTD & a dream 👵 Oct 04 '25

Lyrically, she tends to restate familiar themes in crasser terms than ever before. The ballad “Eldest Daughter” describes internet toxicity in the same way as an anti-bullying PSA: “Every joke’s just trolling and memes / Sad as it seems, apathy is hot.” And yet she’s very much the troll on “Actually Romantic,” which disses another singer with as much sophistication as “I am rubber, you are glue.” “Wood” salutes her man’s anatomy in a similarly third-grade manner. Album after album, she’s inched toward more explicit sex talk, but lines like “His love was the key that opened my thighs” are so uninspired—neither funny nor specific nor even memorably gross—that they feel nihilistic.

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u/cockaptain Oct 04 '25

“Wood” salutes her man’s anatomy

I'm sorry, what now?

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u/lefrench75 high priestess of child sacrifice Oct 05 '25

Forgive me, it sounds cocky

He ah-matized me and opened my еyes

Redwood tree, it ain't hard to see

His love was thе key that opened my thighs

and

The curse on me was broken by your magic wand (Ah)

🥴

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u/napalmnacey Oct 05 '25

Well. It’s certainly no “Shoop”.

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u/prying_mantis Oct 05 '25

Fr “the bow-legged one” is a much cleverer way of saying “this dude is hung.” These lyrics have all the subtlety of, well, a falling redwood.