Taylor Swift\u2019s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, has been an unmitigated charts and sales success. On Friday October 3, the day her 12th studio album was released, it racked up 2.7 million sales in a day \u2014 a new US record. Now it\u2019s sold 3.5 million copies, beating Adele\u2019s 2015 record of 3.378 million copies sold in the first week of her hit album, 25. And that\u2019s all been without releasing a single single in the run-up.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been the biggest opening week of her entire career<\/a>, catapulting strait to the top of the charts. Bloomberg estimates her personal wealth has soared to $2.1 billion, doubling her net worth since she first cracked the billionaire club two years ago.<\/p>\n Such is Swift\u2019s power that no fellow artist in their right mind would dare release an album in close proximity to her. At his London gig last night, Robbie Williams joked that he\u2019d had to push the release of his Britpop album<\/a> to February 2026 in order to have a shot at topping the charts. \u201cHere\u2019s the truth,\u201d Williams said. \u201cI want 16 Number One albums but then Taylor decided to put hers out the same week as me so we thought, for f***s sake, let\u2019s do it in February when no one\u2019s got an album out.\u201d<\/p>\n Swift\u2019s version of being, as she sings, a girlboss \u2014 an outdated term for women in business, which reigned several hundred meme cycles ago \u2014 means crushing the opposition to dust. The only competition she faces in the music charts this week has been from Huntr\/x, the fictional girl band from K-Pop Demon Hunters.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a power Swift does not use wisely, as her behaviour towards other artists has shown. Before writing a cringey, lesbophobic diss track about Charli xcx (Actually Romantic, in case you were wondering), Swift blocked the British singer from reaching number one with Brat by releasing a variant of her last album, The Tortured Poets Department, at the same time.<\/p>\n That same year, she also chart-blocked Billie Eilish in a perceived retaliation for Eilish criticising album variants as wasteful.<\/p>\n She is powerful; that\u2019s undisputed, as is her position at the top of the pop tree. But as a cultural artefact, The Life of a Showgirl has been somewhat less well received.<\/p>\n Charli xcx shared a pointed post days after Taylor Swift\u2019s \u2018diss track\u2019 (PA\/Instagram)<\/p>\n Critics (myself included, I confess I gave it a miserly one star<\/a>) were underwhelmed by the jettisoning of lyrical and emotional depth in favour of racking up enough Travis Kelce-themed love songs to soundtrack their wedding. Many hardcore fans, the Swifties, were left feeling short-changed by what they felt was a shallow rush-job cash-grab of an album drop. Swift won people\u2019s adoration by her unique talent for creating relatable bangers \u2014 but who can relate to one of the richest people on Earth?<\/p>\n Black fans felt particularly alienated by her choice of lyrics on Opalite, where Swift describes her and Travis\u2019s love as a sparkling white respite after the \u201conyx night\u201d. Kelce, notably, has only dated black women prior to Swift. A later track, Eldest Daughter, also contains the line \u201cI\u2019m not a bad bitch and this isn\u2019t savage\u201d, which has been criticised as a racist dogwhistle.<\/p>\n That\u2019s before we get started on Actually Romantic. While Swift later removed the homophobic line about calling an ex gay her 2006 song Picture to Burn, she\u2019s back at it again here by suggesting her rival (who many people suspect is Charli xcx<\/a>) is, like, so obsessed with her on Actually Romantic. Queer fans were baffled: where was artist who said she \u201cneed[ed] be on the right side of history\u201d during her Miss Americana era?<\/p>\nThe cultural backlash<\/h2>\n
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