Her listeners have matured. Can Taylor Swift grow up with them?

In her latest album, "The Life of a Showgirl," Taylor Swift vows to step into her most mature era yet. But as her teenage listeners have all grown up, can her music still resonate?

Photo by Karissa Song/The Barnard Bulletin

By Blanka Gyorfi-Toth

November 18, 2025

Throughout her prolific career, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift has explored various facets of the human experience in her music. In her teenage years, she sang about the innocence of first love. As she stepped into the role of pop icon, her music explored toxic relationships and the intense media scrutiny that comes with celebrity status. She has also prominently spoke out against misogyny in the music industry on albums such as “Reputation,” cementing her status as a role model for many young girls.

Many Barnard students remember this defiant version of Swift. “The first album that I really got into was ‘Reputation’ in 2016. That was a really big part of my middle school experience,” said Moksha Akil (BC ’26). 

With each album representing a different “era” of her life, Swift presents a clear artistic vision to fans. However, Swift’s previous record, “The Tortured Poets Department,” with over one hour of runtime, sounded more like an excerpt from a messy notes app entry than a fully polished body of work with a thought-out message. 

“Her audience grew up, and her message stayed the same. I don’t think she evolved,” said Akil, voicing the feelings of fans and casual listeners who grew up with Swift.

On her 12th studio album, released October 3, 2025, “The Life of a Showgirl,” the singer had the opportunity to return with a more mature narrative. Dressed in colorful beaded dresses and intricate feathered hairpieces on the record’s cover, Swift looks ready to shake up her usual sound and promises to deliver some hard truths about show business.

Despite the visual fanfare of “Showgirl,” the tracks on it are surprisingly lighthearted and mellow, with critics describing its sound as retro-pop and soft-rock. But more importantly, while the tracklist is peppered with syrupy love songs such as “Opalite” or “Wish List” directed at Swift’s NFL player fiancé, Travis Kelce, the album’s larger message is muddled at best and disappointing at worst. 

To start, Swift seems to embrace her edgy and vengeful side. However, this time, instead of assembling a team of powerful women to take on a common enemy, like in her 2015 “Bad Blood” music video, the singer is adamant to pit women against each other. In her song “Actually Romantic,” she calls out an unnamed woman who goes to great lengths trying to paint Swift in a negative light. Swift builds up the antagonism between them, calling this person a “toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse.” 

The dig is speculated to be aimed at fellow popstar Charli XCX, whose song “Sympathy is a knife” likely referenced Swift. On that track, Charli explores how the media’s constant comparisons of female artists fuel her own insecurities and make her doubt her artistry. “Actually Romantic” appears to misinterpret this message completely. Swift seems more eager to punch down on Charli rather than consider that making women compete with each other is the main mechanism that a patriarchal system like the music industry employs to keep women in inferior positions. It is certainly a far cry from her 2013 statement in Vanity Fair, where she said that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

We can also find this surface-level feminism in another song from the album, “The Fate of Ophelia.” As the name suggests, Swift references Ophelia, a noblewoman from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who is mistreated by the men around her, eventually driven mad, and ultimately drowns herself. In the song, Swift sings “And if you’d never come for me / I might’ve lingered in purgatory,” rewriting the tragedy into a version of the story where Swift’s love comes to save her from Ophelia’s fate. At first glance, this may seem sweet if Swift did not ignore the devastating impacts of patriarchy illustrated by Ophelia’s character. In the play, Ophelia does not simply die because she was not paid attention to; instead, she does so because she completely lacks agency over her own life. Dominated by the men close to her, she exerts what autonomy she has left through her “escape in death.” What Ophelia needed was not a knight in shining armor to save her but to be liberated from a system that oppresses women.

For critical listeners like Akil, Swift’s feminism is a symptom of her inability to evolve: “She used to be so, like, ‘Oh my God, women, feminism,’ but the definition of feminism has changed a lot throughout her career, and she has not changed.” 

Another questionable message appeared in the song “CANCELLED!” where Swift speaks on the vicious boycott culture of social media, embracing the controversy surrounding her and her friends. On her Amazon Track by Track explanation of this song, Swift spoke about how she does not “cast people aside just because other people decide they don’t like them.” While punishing someone to the point they cannot redeem themselves certainly poses its own issues, Swift doesn’t actually address the underlying behavior that got her cancelled in the past. 

Swift has been criticized in recent years for her association with Republican public figures. Since associating with her now-fiancé, Travis Kelce, she grew closer to fellow NFL wife Brittany Mahomes, a Trump supporter who even got a shoutout from the President. Most recently, Swift sent Mahomes a personal thank-you note along with a copy of “The Life of a Showgirl.” While there is nothing wrong with having friends from across the political aisle, Swift’s political ambiguity elicited rightful backlash from followers who previously knew her as a staunch defender of, LGBTQ+, POC and women’s rights, with Swift voting for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

Swift has also come under scrutiny for her carbon footprint. By extensively using private jets while travelling for her Eras Tour, she emitted roughly 8,300 metric tonnes of CO₂, which is 1000 times more than the average person's total annual emissions. 

“With this private jet thing, if you just face the facts, she has the power to do a lot with her platform. Is it her responsibility? I mean, maybe not 100 percent, but I think she has some responsibility,” said Cassidy Kao (BC ’27), echoing the sentiment that in the age of climate change, which produces both environmental and human disasters, holding celebrities accountable for their share in the climate catastrophe should be a legitimate criticism. 

At the end of the day, there is also nothing wrong with sticking to love songs and not having a resounding political or societal message. However, even in her romantic lyricism, Swift sounds cringey and uninspired, the writing falling short of the penmanship in Swift’s earliest works. The song “Wood” especially sounds as if a middle schooler wrote it, with lines like “his love was thе key that opened my thighs” —  a sexual innuendo that reads like a less clever rendition of a Sabrina Carpenter hit.

Release after release, Swift’s music seems to have lost its relevance to many casual listeners, with many citing that they have not listened to “Showgirl” at all.

“Back then, her whole image was more of a relatable sort of like, down-to-earth, like, ‘She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts.’ And now, she’s this gigantic pop star. She’s this white lady who’s dating this other white guy. It doesn’t feel very interesting,” said Kao.

It really is a shame. Swift could have seized the opportunity to deliver a reflective and profound album about the harsh realities of fame. Instead, she rushed into putting out a piece of work that many categorize as a disappointment. Maybe if she had put down the pen for a second, Swift could have avoided coming across as immature as she did on her new record, unable to change with the times, with the essence of what she is trying to convey eluding the listener. 

Some do not believe in a Taylor Swift redemption story at all. Listeners like Akil do not think that she has the power to recapture her past audience, even if she were to use her platform to raise awareness of social issues, citing her ultra-wealthy status as a barrier to authenticity.

 “I’m sure people would see through it,” said Akil. “I think she’s just rich and she doesn’t really care anymore. She has the inability to have a good image.”