Taylor Swift’s <i>The Life of a Showgirl</i> : The Legacy of a Cult Classic

Abstract At midnight on October 3, Swift released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl —a record that, in just 11 hours, achieved more streams than any other album of 2025—and by 7 AM the next morning, the internet was ablaze with some of its most scathing indictments of Swift’s songwriting. The Life of a Showgirl is the first album Swift has released after her record-breaking tour, The Eras Tour, and follows Swift’s 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , an album that is deeply introspective, poetic, and saturated with literary references of the most “tortured” kind. In comparison, the internet is right to notice the tone shift in The Life of a Showgirl. Swift’s writing on The Life of a Showgirl gets into character as adroitly as she does on Folklore, Evermore, and The Tortured Poets Department . The difference is, where the culture has been settling into Swift’s nineteenth-century preoccupations and allusions for the last five years, she has now stepped into a mid-twentieth century story-world with the likes of Jacqueline Susann and her 1966 cult classic, Valley of the Dolls .