With The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift has entered her slop era

It feels particularly cruel that, in the same month, we lost D’Angelo and gained what can only be described as Taylor Swift’s ​‘Slop’ Era. Like many artists whose fingers have made the most enduring impressions on human history – Prince, Sly Stone, and Kate Bush among them – D’Angelo was groundbreaking but reclusive. Pioneer of neo-soul, voice of an angel, and architect of a body so wham the video for ​‘Untitled (How Does It Feel)’ is credited as the inspiration for 50 Cent’s workout plan, D’Angelo straddled strength and sensitivity, the physical and the spiritual. ​“This is a very powerful medium that we are involved in,” he said of music in a 2014 interview with GQ. ​“I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher. It was a ministry in itself.”

Everything about D’Angelo’s life and creative process was antithetical to fame. His 1995 debut Brown Sugar introduced him as a transformative R&B figure at just 21-years-old, and his 2000 follow-up Voodoo handed him the keys to superstardom. He promptly turned them over, finding the game of celebrity at irreconcilable odds with his values as an artist, and disappeared for over a decade. (There’s a great Billboard podcast about this with music critic Craig Jenkins, for anyone interested). He kept his battle with pancreatic cancer private, and so his death on October 14, at just 51, came as a shock. ​“The shining star of our family has dimmed his light for us in this life,” read a statement from his family. ​“D’Angelo has been called home.” RIP a true legend. 

Now. Taylor Swift is, obviously, a very different artist. She’s a pop star – one of the biggest there ever was, a commercial enterprise with a balayage – and that has by all accounts been her sole focus since she was a pre-teen, when her family relocated from suburban Pennsylvania to Nashville to support her musical ambitions. To compare Swift with someone like D’Angelo is like asking ​“which is better, pizza or universal healthcare?” However, there is something to be said for the relationship between an artist’s approach to the spotlight and their actual art. It strikes me as telling that, at the peak of her financial and cultural prominence, Taylor Swift has released her most hollow project to date.

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In many ways, The Life of a Showgirl is the album that most represents 2025. The cover, featuring Swift submerged in water wearing a diamanté costume, surrounded by broken shards of her own image, is suggestive but anti-libidinal. On paper it’s a smash hit. It became the most pre-saved album of all time on Spotify, the most-streamed album in a single day on Amazon Music, and the fastest selling album on iTunes in 2025. It sold 2.7 million copies in the United States on the day of its release, making it the best-selling album of the year so far. But it has completely failed to capture the zeitgeist the way all of Swift’s previous albums have. Indeed, the biggest talking points about The Life of a Showgirl have revolved around how bad the lyrics are (“Her name was Kitty / Made her money being pretty and witty” go the opening bars of the title track) and whether its promotional material was AI generated. Some fans even wondered if the entire album might be. Speaking to Wired, Ben Colman, CEO and cofounder of AI detection company Reality Defender, said it was ​“highly likely” some of the promo clips were AI-generated. Even if they weren’t, the fact that they feel like they could be speaks to the project’s absence of soul – a grave enough problem on its own. 

Five star reviews rolled in everywhere from The Irish Times to Rolling Stone, but they landed at odds with public opinion. Reacting on X to Rolling Stone’s glowing review, film critic and editor Nick Newman wrote: ​“This magazine once published a review of a Dylan album, at the height of his fame and influence, so negative it is now the standard-bearer for asking what a musician was thinking.” 

In many ways, Taylor Swift has become symbolic of ​‘churn’ culture; a pop star for a world in which volume, consistency, and visibility steamrolls over quality, meaning, and nuance. (Not that those things are in opposition necessarily, but it’s an impossible balance to maintain long-term). Since 2019, Swift has released at least one album per year, including pandemic sister albums Folklore and Evermore, re-releases of her first six albums (an ongoing project undertaken after she bought back her masters), and 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department. Her output in the last six years has surpassed that of Michael Jackson’s entire career. Meanwhile, her relationship with Travis Kelce has been front page news since they started dating in summer 2023, with headlines from her 19-month-long The Eras Tour running concurrently. The latter was supported by a documentary (one of five she has released since 2020) made with permission from SAG-AFTRA amid the union’s 2023 strike. 

I could go on, but the point being, Taylor Swift generates material at the speed and volume of something produced by children’s fingers in Bangladesh. It’s become a popular joke, even among her fanbase, that she fishes around her back catalogue for something she can drop deliberately to prevent other female acts from topping the charts. At this point culture is so saturated with Taylor Swift she feels less like an artist and more like an extension of the naked, tech-driven commercialism that defines today’s ​‘slop’ landscape of AI art and mid-TV.

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Taylor Swift is a brilliant songwriter, and that has stayed the course of her reputation throughout the last half-dozen years of prolific output. With The Life of a Showgirl, that grip has slipped. Perhaps it’s because her story for the last decade has been one of overwhelming acclaim and unrelenting success. Perhaps it’s because the patron saint of middle American heartbreak is now happily married. Perhaps spending more time in a private jet than a reality recognisable to 99% of society is not conducive to accessing the full breath of human emotion – but the whole project feels toothless and churned out. It’s like the Billboard charts equivalent to that US Army general who recently admitted to asking ChatGPT to make key military decisions. Taylor Swift: Big Tech Pop Star, now noted more for her economic pull than her songwriting. Grok, is this music?

Meanwhile, Lily Allen has made a much bigger impact on the zeitgeist with West End Girl. Her first album since 2018’s No Shame, it was made in a two week whirlwind and announced four days before release. The surprise drop accounts for some of the attention it has drawn, but mainly it’s been lapped up like discontinued Charlotte Tilbury because it’s a concept album clearly based on her marriage to Stranger Things DILF David Harbour. A domestic thriller in which Allen tumbles down an ugly rabbit hole of alleged infidelities, sex addiction, and carrier bags full of butt plugs, West End Girl strikes the nerves of almost every popular complaint about relationships and ​“men” in the 2020s. Its balance of confessionalist emotion and salacious detail has launched a thousand Substack essays about polyamory, countless four-paragraph Instagram captions from 19-year-old girls and A‑list divorcees alike, and glowing reviews across-the-board from critics citing a blend of raw songwriting and jugular lyricism that has supposedly been absent from pop in recent memory. 

Whatever you think about it, the difference in reception compared to The Life of a Showgirl sends a clear message in terms of what mass audiences want from pop music. West End Girl might be flawed and messy, often deliberately so, but no one can say it doesn’t feel human.

Emma Garland is a culture writer and editor based in London. Follow her on Instagram.

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