At the end of Taylor Swift’s newly released 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, the narrator makes a somewhat shocking confession.
In the album’s final song, the title track, the narrator describes the sordid life of a showgirl: the betrayals, the faithless men, the industry indifference. She urges the song’s second narrator — a wide-eyed dreamer “as sweet as a peach,” also voiced by Swift — not to strive after the spotlight.
The peach-sweet dreamer decides she’s going to aim for fame nonetheless. She takes the first showgirl’s warning to heart, finding that by the peak of her career, all the up and comers are “bitches” who wish she would “hurry up and die.” Regardless, the dreamer-turned-icon has no plans to do so: “I’m immortal, baby dolls,” she croons. “I couldn’t if I tried.” For that reason, she’s “married to the hustle,” and despite the “pain hidden by lipstick and lace,” she “wouldn’t have it any other way.”
As the song fades out, we hear what appears to be audio from the end of a performance of Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour, as she thanks the audience and the band and Sabrina Carpenter for opening for her. (Carpenter sings a verse on “Showgirl.”) The association is complete: Swift is both the peach-sweet striver and the cynical industry vet, and regardless of what pain her experience may have caused her, she is glad she made it to the top.
It’s the “wouldn’t have it any other way” line that startled me.
Pop stars tend to sing a lot about the tragedy and pain of fame, and Swift is no exception. Her last album, 2024’s The Tortured Poet’s Department, included a callout of her own Swifties as “wine moms” and “judgmental creeps” for criticizing her relationship with Matty Healy. So it’s not unusual for Swift to sing about the dark side of fame. But it is unusual, both for pop stars in general and Swift in particular, to finish up such a song by announcing that nonetheless, she wants to be famous and she is happy that she is.
Taylor Swift used to try to hide her ambition. It didn’t always go well.
The idea that Swift has pursued fame with a single-minded fixation since the beginning of her career cannot be news to anyone who has ever given one of her songs a more than cursory listen. From her self-titled release in 2006 forward, Swift’s public persona has seemed to vibrate from a desire to win: Grammys, billboard battles, feuds, prestige, money, history, everything.
That pure intensity of ambition has always been one of the most compelling aspects of Swift’s star image, all the more so because it is so in tension with her sweet everygirl relatability. In a culture that discourages feminine agency, nice girls are not supposed to be ambitious, and Taylor Swift is nothing if not a nice girl. Yet all the same, Swift wants with such an unfeminine lack of restraint (complimentary).
At times, Swift’s ambition has read as a liability. At the parts of her career when she’s leaned hardest into her niceness, circa 2014 or so, she seemed to be uncomfortable showing her ambition directly. When it appeared anyway, it made her audience uncomfortable, too: it meant they felt that she was lying to them.
Every time she won another award — and she was winning a lot — she made a surprised face that people said looked fake. When she got photographed by the paparazzi — and she was papped a lot — people said the pictures looked posed. When Kim Kardashian leaked snippets of a conversation between Swift and Kanye West that made it appear Swift was lying to the public in a cynical ploy for sympathy, people said she was a conniving snake. (Swift would later be vindicated when the full tape leaked.)
After all, which one was Swift: the cold-eyed striver or the peach-sweet dreamer? She couldn’t be both, could she? No woman could, surely. The harder she insisted on being a dreamer, the more it felt like a lie, because anyone could see how hard she was working and how much she wanted to be huge.
How disorienting if she was both, after all. Yet how thrilling, too.
Since her 2017 Reputation era, Swift has learned how to integrate aspects of her obsessive perfectionism into her good girl image without diluting either. We live in a moment that rewards celebrities who show their work over celebrities who make it look easy (see Beyoncé), and Swift didn’t shy away from showing the sheer physical strain of performing her three-hour Eras tour set night after night after night.
She’s also played with making her ambition less threatening by putting it in a romantic context. In “Mastermind” from 2022’s Midnights, she sings about a woman who ruthlessly strategizes her romantic conquests, only to be rewarded with a boyfriend who knows she’s plotting her way to him and likes that about her. “I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ’cause I care,” she sighs, a little joking, a little mournful.
Swift has released songs about how afraid she is that her fame will crest and fall away from her. “I’m not trying to exaggerate, but I think I might die if it happened, die if it happened to me,” she sings in character as a young striver in “Clara Bow” from 2024’s Tortured Poet Department. The song ends with Swift herself rendered as obsolete as original It Girl Clara Bow, left only as a reference for some new up-and-comer who looks “like Taylor Swift” but has “edge she never did.”
What do we do with an ambitious showgirl in a time of anti-feminist backlash?
Yet in “Life of a Showgirl,” Swift is in no danger of losing her spotlight. Sure, fame is rough and people say mean things about her sometimes, but still — “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
It’s a remarkably self-assured statement from someone who has spent so much of her career furiously working to portray a non-threatening girl next door. It suggests a Taylor Swift who is done apologizing for being ambitious, who sees no profit in trying to cover it up any longer. She is, like the narrator of “Mastermind,” telling us that none of this was accidental, that nothing was gonna stop her, and that furthermore she isn’t tortured by her fame; she’s happy about it.
At the same time, she isn’t dropping the insistence on her approachable niceness. She is “not a bad bitch,” as she sings on “Eldest Daughter.” She’s a responsible oldest child, clearly announcing her intentions to marry her boyfriend and have a bunch of kids. She just also loves being famous and has no intention of giving it up.
All of us, like the boyfriend in “Mastermind,” knew the entire time that this was the case, if we are being honest. No one gets to Swift’s level without working hard and without liking it at least a little bit. What’s new here is seeing her acknowledge it without any apology, and being forced to confront our own knowledge of Swift’s ambition at the same time.
We’re living in a moment of deep anti-feminist backlash, one where it’s becoming an increasingly common talking point from conservatives to say that a woman’s highest purpose is to have children. The policies of Trump’s administration have been both effectively and ineffectively targeted at pushing women out of the workforce. Charlie Kirk spent the week before he died telling a newly engaged Swift that she should submit to her husband, take his last name, and have a passel of babies.
“Maybe one of the reasons why Taylor Swift has been so annoyingly liberal over the last couple of years is that she’s not yet married and she doesn’t have children,” Kirk mused. “That’s not a great role model for young women, to wait all the way until you’re 35 and just put your career first.” Nice girls, after all, are not ambitious: They put family before work.
Yet here is Swift, just weeks after announcing her engagement, singing about being happy that she knows the life of a showgirl. Right now, despite everything else, the biggest star in the world is a woman who is willing to crow over her own professional and artistic ambition.