Taylor Swift Edition
October 2025 (Week 2)
What a week, what a week! I hope everyone’s hangin’ in there and gets a sweet little treat because you all deserve it.
Thanks for being here! Welcome to the Taylor Swift edition because her new album has sucked the air out of everything else that isn’t our nation collapsing.
Let’s get into it…
The Haters… (Gonna Hate, Hate, Hate)
This week Taylor Swift released her newest album ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ and the internet reacted in its predictable, hater way. Nothing on God’s green Earth garners more clicks and views than dunking on whatever pretty blonde happens to be most popular at the time. If you’re like me and grew up in the Britney era, you find these collective attacks familiar as a national pastime.
Her haters aren’t even wrong, but the breadth of the pile-on is always universal and usually a bit jarring, if I’m being honest. Maybe she deserves it! I’m just here to report on the internet’s reaction and, man, has ‘Life of a Showgirl’ dominated the online discourse since it dropped last Friday, October 3rd.
Whether the album is actually good or total dog shit, millions of people sure do love to hate this woman!
You never get used to watching the entire internet go into collective psychosis—treating a new pop album as proxy for every frustration in their lives. Do we really have to make girly-pop songs into discourse on modern imperialism? Taylor wrote a love song about her boyfriend’s dick, stop expecting her to talk about Palestine!
But perhaps hating on Taylor is how we broadly bond as a society—because when you think about it, nothing really connects us like collectively hating on the same girl.
Online takes have generally fallen into the realms of, “this is the best album ever made and, if you disagree, you should DIE” or “this album is total ear diarrhea and we should kill her.” The reality is closer to: she made a decent album with a bunch of cringey lyrics and some fun bops.
But there’s no room for nuance here, so it’s either 1-star, 5-stars or we kill her. Choose your weapon.
That being said, ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ for being the most interesting album Taylor’s ever released, had an absolute fucking mess of a roll-out.
With an internet mob primed to unleash their worst upon your creation, there were way too many mistakes made by Team Swift.
The Mess…
The first move that royally pissed off the internet was the algorithmic boosting, with the album promo unleashing a massive budget and flooding onto everyone’s feeds.
Next, was the positive-review spam and traditional media outlets giving the album immaculate ratings, causing the internet to suspect these were also paid endeavors.
Rumors also circulated of negative reviews being quietly deleted.
Bad review-bombing is a real problem, but shutting down the ability to rate an album on both Metacritic and Album of the Year isn’t a good look. It looks like manipulation.
On RYM, where leaving reviews remained unrestricted, ‘Life of a Showgirl’ garnered a 1.69 rating out of 5 based on 5,842 reviews.
The Greed…
Yes, yes we’ve all heard about the variants. There are way too many, but whose fault is it if people are buying them? At least we can give Taylor credit for bringing back massive vinyl sales. If someone buys 25 different versions of a single album they are a stupid, stupid person. There’s nothing else to say.
At the time this newsletter went out there are now 30 variants.
She followed up all this nonsense with the dumbest thing she could’ve possibly done to tarnish her reputation as a Shakespearean-level songstress—she used Ai.
The original concept doesn’t sound terrible: During her final show of the Eras Tour, Taylor walked through an orange door. So, to promote the new album, 12 orange doors were placed in different cities around the world with QR codes. These codes linked fans to these stupid Ai generated pieces of slop-shit that were supposed to contain hidden words. The words would lead to a lyric video for the first song on the album. Okay, fine! But, girl, you’re a billionaire! You can afford to not be lame!
Ai content looks like total ass but, because it’s also so inconsistent, Swiftie’s struggled to tell whether the missing letters and fucked up visuals were mistakes or purposefully placed easter eggs.
Someone pointed out one of the buttons on the treadmill is the Grindr logo.
Someone must’ve fucked up because Team Swift jumped into damage control and deleted all the videos.
You would think someone who just won a years-long battle to reclaim their intellectual and artistic property would be against Ai, but I suppose billionaires gonna billionaire.
Anyway, I keep thinking back to that Family Guy clip where Taylor introduces a new song about her boyfriend and the crowd starts booing and throwing bottles at her. “This stinks!” “We like you when you’re miserable!”
That’s it for this week!
I love you all and pour one out for Jane Goodall, RIP.
