Taylor Swift Can Only Punch Down

When you’re the biggest musician of your generation, and close to one of the biggest of the past century, what is there left for you to conquer? Do you relish the freedom your financial and cultural safety net has given you or do you just keep chasing the next high? It’s not a question that many artists will ever ask themselves. This is a business where the lion’s share of professional creatives live below the breadline. For the tiny handful who accomplish it, however, all eyes are on them to see what they choose. For Taylor Swift, her choice is clear: keep going up at any cost, even if it means punching down.

Taylor Swift is a billionaire. That was confirmed once more this week, following the release of her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl. According to Bloomberg, Swift has an estimated net worth of $2.1 billion. Her profits are sure to rise with Showgirl breaking sales records and taking over the record set by Adele for album-equivalent units sold. Still, she’s unsatisfied. Swift is releasing ever more vinyl variants to ensure her dedicated fanbase boost those numbers. But throughout this, Swift is contending with something she hasn’t dealt with in quite some time: critical scepticism and a weary cultural landscape.

I don’t think it’s a signal of Swift backlash that reviews for The Life of a Showgirl have been decidedly mixed, even more so than they were for The Tortured Poets Department. Swift is an artist whose stratospheric power can withstand a few critical maulings. And yet there is a sense of tedium in the air that feels new. For casual observers of Taylorworld, the spectacle doesn’t seem as satisfying. Even many die-hards are at odds with their idol with this album, which has received many reviews describing it as disappointing or even a creative step backward. The lyrics don’t feel as fresh or piercing, the production seems samey, the showgirl aesthetic doesn’t pay off. And then there’s ‘Actually Romantic’, a song that literally everyone clocked as a diss track of Charli XCX, who had possibly written ‘Sympathy is a Knife’ as an emotional exploration of her own insecurities in regard to Swift.

It’s not that we’re against a fun or bitchy music tiff. The pop genre could use a few more colourful rivalries, and maybe Charli was Gossip Girl-ing in every recording studio on the Eastern seaboard. But there’s been such a visceral reaction against Swift’s song because it feels so lyrically misguided. Responding to a number about self-doubt that contains a fantasy about buying a gun and committing suicide, with taunts over drug use and her issues making you ‘wet’ is mean. More than that, it’s dumb, entirely misconstruing what is a layered and pretty devastating song by Charli. ‘Actually Romantic’ is a bad song that feels like the musical equivalent of the Dril ‘don’t tell the newspapers I got mad’ meme. Nobody is ever madder or more bothered than Swift, and there comes a point where that starts to feel burdensome to artist and fan alike. And yes, it did feel like punching down.

No, Charli is not some meek nobody being targeted by a billionaire. She’s a cultural icon whose record speaks for itself. It’s just that literally everyone feels like a nobody or also-ran next to the billionaire who spent decades building an image of herself as a perennial underdog. Aside from perhaps Beyoncé, no musician of this generation can go toe-to-toe with Swift on even ground. This is not to say that she should only start dissing Ms. Knowles. I wouldn’t want the Beyhive to implode in that manner. It’s more a question of what Swift even wants to be now that she’s gotten everything she’s wanted.

Thinking of that Charli diss, my mind wandered to Swift’s chart domination with The Tortured Poets Department. Many felt that she was gaming the system with the album and single variants, offering fans more and more things to buy that would conveniently keep her competition from taking the top spot. When Brat, the most critically adored album of 2024, looked ready to become her first-ever number one album in the UK, Swift suddenly announced the release of six deluxe reissues of her album with voice memos and new live editions. It was available only in the UK and only until 11:59pm on the Thursday night when the tracking for the week’s sales would end. It was an old tactic for Swift and one many acts now repeat because making money in this business is tough, but Swift is who has come to represent the shoddy ways this is used to battle other musicians. She was accused of doing it last year to keep Billie Eilish off the number one spot in the US.

How do you even maintain this image when your bank balance and private jet flight plans immediately refute it? When publications decide to anonymize their negative reviews of your work to prevent mass harassment from your own fans, an activity so predictable that it’s commonplace across the industry, how can you be an underdog? Swift finds herself in this contradiction of images that only exacerbates her punching-down status: you cannot be both the soft teenage girl who the world is oh-so-mean to and the girlboss billionaire with immeasurable influence. Yet much of Swift’s music still plays around with images of high school romance, domestic bliss, and mean girls who will get their comeuppance.

If you’re mean to Swift, she’ll write a song about you. That’s one of the reasons she is so popular. She has spent years encouraging fans to decode her barely veiled lyrics for her latest culprit, be it a bad boyfriend or the other woman or Kim Kardashian. One could argue that a key factor in her endurance as a popstar is in the way she’s made her work into a diary of sorts and invited listeners to enjoy the dopamine hit of being BFF-adjacent to their idol. You feel her heartache, her spite, her triumph. As fandoms splinter into ever-more hostile divisions and make attacking the perceived enemy a full-time job, Swift was always adding fuel to the fire. What is ‘Bad Blood’ if not a giant F-you to Katy Perry, and signal for her fans to make the same kind of drama?

When I wrote my piece about my distaste for fandom becoming an endless numbers game, I wasn’t specifically thinking about Swift. This is a problem that has taken over every area of the entertainment industry. Still, Swift is probably the most thorough and ruthless example of this perpetual hunt for victory, both with herself and her fans. You don’t do dozens of album variants, often with region-specific bonuses, unless you’re trying to game the charts. Your fans don’t exhaustively argue about your corporate glories unless that’s something you’re pushing onto them via your business practices.

In a very controversial piece for Defector, Kelsey McKinney wrote that Swift’s insatiable capitalistic drive has turned her art into a transparent vehicle for endless profit. ‘Swift clearly cared more about producing something—anything—that could be sold for profit than about making an album worth buying. It’s not an album. It’s a product for sale, and it sounds like one.’ As McKinney argued, no good art comes from greed, quoting Oli Mould who asserted, ‘Being creative today means seeing the world around you as a resource to fuel your inner entrepreneur.’ This is the part that stuck with me in regards to Swift. When the endless hustle for bigger numbers, for more sales and more fans spending thousands of dollars on the same thing over and over again becomes your focus, how could the work not suffer? Moreover, how could you not look like anything other than the big bad wolf?

Swift could get away with a lot more on this album had it been an introspective affair, but as many critics noted, it’s as deep as a feather duster. Her songs about how fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be feel repetitive, and her odes to fiancé Travis Kelce can’t make the cringe charming (‘Wood’? Really?!) I’m not a Swift fan, but I am inclined to agree with those negative reviews that describe this as a cycle of content more than an outpouring of art. This is a ceaseless battle for dominance from someone so comfortably at the top that it’s a miracle she can even see the ground. One wonders if her obscenely monied life and intense brand maintenance mean that she’s lost touch with the mundanities and dreams that made her music so appealing. No wonder she clings to them if the only alternative is rich people nonsense. There aren’t a lot of songs to be mined from being in the private box at Chiefs games.

On Brat, Charli sang ‘girl, so confusing,’ about her insecurities regarding another popstar to whom she was often compared. Everyone figured out it was about Lorde. When Charli sent the lyrics to Lorde, she got a reply in the form of a very personal verse about Lorde’s own troubles and how much it sucks to be in a business where women are expected to be forever at odds. It led to a remix and one of the most interesting and joyous songs of 2024. Here were two beloved artists laying their hearts on the table and finding resolution through collaboration, and it was amazing. You can’t help but wonder what it would be like had Taylor asked Charli to work it out on the remix. Holding out a hand requires a bit more work than punching down.