“The Life of a Showgirl” is one of Taylor Swift’s most polarizing albums. “I don’t like the new Taylor Swift album —” “But I actually enjoyed yesterday’s album, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ —” And it’s also a really interesting cultural artifact for the Trump era. I’m the designated minivan driver for a family that includes three daughters, which means that I’m a longtime Taylor Swift listener and appreciator, at least by proxy. But I’m also a conservative dad, which means I’m not that appreciative of the new album’s coarseness, which requires explaining to a car full of kids why we aren’t going to be listening to the track called “Wood.” “I ain’t got to knock on wood.” Which is about the amazingness of her fiancé’s reproductive organ. “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see his love was the key to open my thighs” But “Life of a Showgirl” isn’t just coarse; it’s also a little bit conservative, and I can’t help seeing that combination — raunch with a touch of reaction — as holding up a really interesting mirror to right-wing culture in America right now. Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Taylor Swift, who undoubtedly cast her vote for Kamala Harris, has suddenly become a Republican. But I’m not the only one to notice the conservative turn. A number of Swift’s progressive fans are really, really angry about the album’s messaging. “It’s missing a feminist anthem.” “Taylor Swift is just coming out as MAGA with this new album —” “Is Taylor Swift using her music to red-pill you? In short, yes.” Consider “Wish List,” with its vision of suburban picket-fence domestic bliss. “Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like —” Or “Eldest Daughter,” with its celebration of marital commitment. But I’m never gonna break that vow. Having these kind of conservative aspirations sharing an album with vulgarity and raunch is a little bit like the way the Republican coalition today includes not just the traditional religious right, but also Barstool conservatives and Silicon Valley libertines. The Trump administration is staffed with evangelicals and Catholics, but the president himself is a much-married heathen with a porn star in his past. And the right right now seems both pro-marriage, pro-religion, very heteronormative and also rude, profane, scatological and a little bit sex-obsessed, trad and horny at the same time. And I’m really curious how long that combination can last. It might be that it’s just a marriage of convenience between a bunch of different groups reacting against wokeness and progressivism, and that at a certain point, the libertarians and the traditionalists will go their separate ways. But it could also last a bit longer than that because it is actually possible to have a society that’s a little more traditionalist than the America of the last 20 years, but not nearly as puritanical as the America of the 1950s. So maybe conservatism and coarseness could actually coexist for a long time. Like Taylor Swift singing about marriage and family and Travis Kelce’s endowment. But even though I’m up to about 30 or 40 listens to the clean version of “Life of a Showgirl” in our minivan, I’m still not going to play “Wood” for my kids.
