Before December of 2020, Jordan Holmes (comedian, author, podcaster) had never, intentionally, listened to a Taylor Swift song. Then began The Swiftening, where Jordan decided to review every Swift album in order. Want to see the rest of his reviews? Just click on “The Swiftening” tab above the title of this and it will take you to Jordan’s reviews of Ms. Swift’s last eleven works.
Does Taylor Swift’s new album suck as much as the last ones? I’m here to let you know. As always, I’ll be ranking by my patented system Listenable or Unlistenable. But first, I’m going to preamble in order to get you in the right state of mind for what will undoubtedly be scorched earth by the end.
How about a story?
A cop broke into my house, committing, by my count, at least three illegal crimes. He laughed when he told me it was a misunderstanding. To me, that means he did zero illegal crimes.
In my thinking, “illegal” means “there will be consequences for your actions”. If there aren’t any consequences, then it’s not illegal. “Illegal” is about what happens after you do the “illegal” thing. “Illegal” is for poor people, everything else is a negotiation.
Someone lost their job because they said that Charlie Kirk being dead is a bonus for humanity. That means, to me, that saying “Charlie Kirk can go fuck himself and I hope he dies again and again in the fires of hell” is illegal.
It is legal for the cops to break into your home. It is illegal to talk ill of the former Charlie Kirk. Somehow, despite what I have just explained, you will disagree with me! You will say, but we have the constitution! You will say, but the cops are bound by laws!
I say, if you don’t follow through, you’re just talking shit. Your Constitution is just shit-talking. Your laws are just shit-talking. They are nothing!
I was naked, in my shower, washing myself, when a cop entered my back door, forcing me to bounce out of the running shower and peak my head through the crack of my door, drenched still. This fuck shined a flashlight into my eyes, pointed his taser at me and blinded me as my dogs walked out. I yelled at this dumb motherfucker “close the door, my dogs are getting out!” and he continued being a dumb motherfucker. Finally, I burst through the bathroom door, ran right past him and picked up my beloved Fannie before this dog-murdering cop motherfucker could get himself killed. If he in any way put my dogs into real danger, I would’ve killed him. I would’ve killed him and when they told me it was “illegal” I’d tell them I’d do it again.
Illegal my balls.
Fuck you for trying to tell me what he did was illegal but saying “Charlie Kirk’s corpse should be skull fucked and then shot out of a cannon into Donald Trump’s fucking face like a circus act” is legal. You’re just shit-talking. Because the former gets laughed at and the latter gets you fired.
Illegal is about what is done in response. If there is no legal system in America that can hold these people accountable, then justice is whatever the fuck you say it is. It’s whatever the fuck I say it is. Because the law is an illusion, but justice is real.
Reach for justice, ignore the law, ignore the Right. When they speak, say go fuck yourself, no matter what. Try it now. Say “Go Fuck Yourself.” Say, “I don’t care what you have to say, go fuck yourself.” Say, “Everything you are is meaningless and empty, Go Fuck Yourself.” Do not say anything else.
How do we make things just? We first have to remove the people invested in injustice. Until they can no longer put their vast wealth on the broken scales, we will never be able to create something fair. We cannot make any steps forward until the obstruction is torn down. Wealth is our Berlin Wall. You will never be free, you cannot be free while the wall stands.
Who strides atop the Berlin Wall like Horus portending doom? The very wealthy, very powerful, Taylor Fucking Swift.
Let’s scorch that Earth.
Track 1 is titled “The Fate of Ophelia.” An uninteresting way to start any creative endeavor is by beginning at the end and then doing a “7 days earlier” title card. Similarly, opening your album, titled “The Life of a Showgirl” with the “Fate” of someone long dead is both boring and annoying.
Ophelia, of course, is the lady hanging with Hamlet, the original my-name-is-Inigo-Montoya-you-killed-my-father-prepare-to-die, who dies herself. She dies because Shakespeare needed a good death at that point in the play, and also supposedly because she was not great “at love”.
Our song, and presumably the album, is about someone saving Taylor Swift from being not great “at love”.
I concur. She is not great at love. She fucked John Mayer.
I must admit here that I am forced to know something. I haven’t in any way attempted to discover anything about Taylor Swift’s lifestyle, ever. And yet. I know. So. Fucking Much. So I know that she is fucking Travis Kelce. This song is about fucking Travis Kelce.
Presumably, the entire album is about fucking Travis Kelce.
One of the elements of truly great writing is when the end is in the beginning and the beginning is in the end. Think of stories as waves; the crest of a wave is the same water as its trough, the difference is when you are looking. If you start a story at the top, it must fall, then rise. If you start at the trough, it must rise, then fall. The water itself, though, doesn’t go anywhere.
It is the rising and the falling that animates the story. It is birth and death that give meaning. To begin your story denying the fall, denying the fate of Ophelia, is to end your story denying the rise, denying the birth of Ophelia. In other words, to deny Life itself.
My point is, if you want to make an album about fucking Travis Kelce, be gentle. Ease into it. Lube up before you tell me Travis Kelce has been honing his… power.
The song is blaaaaand. It is a blaaaand song. It’s so bland, it wouldn’t make it on the Garden State soundtrack despite its faux-motional depth. It’s stopped playing in my ears, but when I try to summon the memory, there’s an emptiness. It’s as if there’s a hole where the song should be. It’s unmemorable to an extreme I’ve never encountered before.
Jesus Christ, I thought I needed lube for metaphorically and literally Travis Kelce’s dick, but that stuff is nowhere near as coarse as the beginning of track 2, “Elizabeth Taylor”. I know the name of the song because within the first ten seconds she is SCREAMING AT ME. The song is titled “ELIZABETH TAYLOR!!!”.
This song is about fucking Travis Kelce.
As far as the music is concerned, which from the reviews I’ve read is tangential to the quality of the album, it’s very Britney Spears in ‘07. It’s a Britney Spears-y song.
I don’t know, call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think the largest music-adjacent thing in the world should be making twenty year old Britney Spears songs.
Track 3 is one of Taylor Swift’s musical theater kid songs and I fucking hate it. The first two tracks have been focused entirely on draping post-bubblegum pop onto a stripped down 80s disco skeleton.
“Opalite” is that song in a musical, you know the one, where the main character (who’s fucking Travis Kelce) has her own spotlight, she’s singing about the difficulties she faced in the first couple of acts when she finds a new strength from within. To illustrate this newfound strength kinetically, all of the other characters in the musical, even ones supposedly in a different fucking zip code, appear and really quote rock out unquote.
The central metaphor of the song being that at night the sky is dark, but during the day, the sky is light.
Genius has helped me understand something about Taylor Swift that I hadn’t before, I’m excited to share it with you:
Swift’s aware of how the roads work — speed bumps are usually set in roads in order for traffic control and safety, similarly to how humans sometimes have to slow down and rest in order to face adversities and hard times
Swift’s aware of how the roads work.
Ah ha! I am looking at the lyrics for track 4, “Father Figure”, and I see that Taylor Swift intended to write “my dick’s bigger” but for the radio version, it has been altered to “my check’s bigger”.
The obvious reason they changed dick to check is because adults are afraid people will hear the word dick, a word they hear roughly several millions times a day, and watch them do their job nearly as often.
I think that might go overlooked. There are grown adults… who are afraid… that people… will hear the word “dick”. Friends, give it fifteen years and they’ll be sucking one, get over yourselves.
I don’t understand that, I also don’t understand why Taylor Swift gets away with so much sing-talking. What is it with all of you? She’s just talking. She sucks at music and this song is bad music. Why has this gone on for so long? Answer me!
SAY THE WORD DICK!
First things first, I must applaud Taylor Swift. Four straight tracks without pointing out how fucking hard it is to be Taylor Swift because people are mean on the internet. Unfortunately, the streak was broken by Track 5, “Eldest Daughter”, a song I think is literally about me.
The reason she’s named this track “Eldest Daughter” is because she would have you think the reason I hate her has something to do with her being a woman. Not a bad strategy! It’s pretty undeniable that the world hates women, so it would be fair to assume I do, too. Alas, I’m afraid you won’t catch me there. I don’t hate Taylor Swift because she’s a woman. I hate her because she’s rich and because she sucks at music.
This song is also about fucking Travis Kelce being better than reading mean comments about herself on the internet, which I cannot help but assume is true.
It’s also the first track on the album so horrible sounding I didn’t finish it. It is a bad sounding song and I didn’t want to listen to those bad sounds, so I stopped. This is my strategy for most things that I don’t like. I’m very straightforward.
Track 6 “Ruin the Friendship” is a reprieve. I have a hard and fast rule, if you reference a better song in your song, I’m going to listen to that song. You’re the one who told me to listen to that song in your song. In a way, you’re telling me that your song sucks. Why are you telling me your song sucks? Probably because it sucks.
Guess what? That 50 Cent song is better than “Ruin The Friendship”. Taylor Swift was right, you shouldn’t listen to this song. Go listen to 50 cent.
I had just put up my “1 song since last song about how hard it is to be Taylor Swift because people are mean to her on the internet” and then I had to toss it again. “Actually Romantic” is about how hard it is to be Taylor Swift because people are mean to her on the internet.
Taylor Swift has pulled a move here. As a little bit of a Vizzini, I have no choice but to guess where she has put the iocaine powder. The song itself is about how the people who are mean to her are not hurting her feelings, which she hates, but in fact, by giving her so much attention, which she likes, they are not being mean, which she hates, they are being romantic, which she likes!
This is where it gets interesting. Because if you follow her thinking, then someone who spends a lot of time thinking about someone else is giving them attention, which she likes, even if that attention is negative, which she hates, but she wrote a song about the people who give her attention, which she likes, meaning she is giving them attention, which she hates, and since she’s giving them attention, which she hates, rather than view it as her being mean to them, which she likes, in fact, she is being romantic towards them, which she hates.
By writing a song about how stupid her haters are for possibly spending so much time thinking about her, she reveals that she has actually spent a lot of time thinking about them, making her the stupid one.
Which she hates.
Holy shit what the fuck is “Wish List” (I refuse to sic)? Track 8 is fucking wild, man. I don’t know how this got through quality control or, like, people with ears. It begins very mild-mannered. I thought for sure we were getting a little sing-talky bullshit song for the first 30 seconds.
And then shit goes CRAZY! That chorus is nuts. Then the second verse. It’s a non-stop assault on composition. My god. The way she screeches “Have a couple kids got the whole block looking like you” is so distracting you don’t even think about what the fuck the words mean. And once you get past the screech, you say, wait, the whole block? What the fuck, lady?
Then there’s this trashy key change when she sing-talks “they want a contract with Real Madrid” and it sounds terrible. Why put that in there? We were doing poorly, sure, but why shoot for the bottom?
Then the use of “wow”. I declare a moratorium on the use of the word “wow”. Period. The word is dumb now because of the way Taylor Swift used it on Wish List (I refuse to sic). She sucks the fun out of fucking everything.
And finally, the stuttering “boss up settle down” makes me want to burn everything to the ground. The world must take responsibility for this. It’s because all of you enabled her that we got here, with Taylor Swift stuttering “boss up settle down” as the largest music-adjacent thing in the world. I hope you’re all proud of yourselves.
Track 9, “Wood”, is about fucking Travis Kelce.
It sounds like when a commercial can’t afford to license a popular song so they commission a song that sounds sooooooo close but still legal. In fact, this whole album sounds like she’s a high schooler that got away with plagiarizing by rearranging sentences slightly.
We made it two tracks this time. The obstinately named “CANCELLED”, track 10, is about, say it with me, how hard it is to be Taylor Swift because people are mean to her on the internet.
“CANCELLED” possesses some of the most offensive forms of Taylor Swift’s horrifying career-long assault on meter.
She opens over an early Nirvana guitar lick and then proceeds to say utterly insane shit with utterly insane syncopation. This song makes her sound utterly insane. The voices are coming from all directions, the “friends” Taylor Swift is singing about do not exist because they are all Taylor Swift, the melody changes nigh constantly.
She’s got the musical focus of a man playing a guitar, harmonica, knee cymbals, kick drum, and lead vocals at the same time.
The song is horrible. It’s just horrible. But because it’s titled “CANCELLED”, I have to look up just what the fuck she’s talking about. Because I don’t personally believe the largest music-adjacent thing on the planet has been cancelled, let alone “CANCELLED”, on account of how it remains the largest music-adjacent thing in the world.
Perhaps it is I who does not understand words and their meanings, perhaps not.
The song is about how Blake Lively was “CANCELLED” for something to do with It Ends With Us, a thing I don’t know anything about and refuse to look up. I don’t know who Blake Lively is. I don’t care. I absolutely do not give a shit about what rich people do or think.
Rich and famous people who are constantly showered with love are also constantly cancelled. I don’t care anymore, all of you deserve each other.
Track 11 is titled “Honey”, so you don’t need me to tell you it’s a MIDI sounding R&B tinged pop song about fucking Travis Kelce.
As an end to this album, “The Life of a Showgirl”, track 12, is perfect. This is a terrible song to close out a terrible album, but it’s terrible in a way that combines the ways that all of the other songs have been terrible. She put it all apart in the end, so to speak.
This is musical theater with a capital Broadway. I hate this song. It sucks. They do a thing in the middle where they musical theater all over my tits. I’m disgusted.
More and most egregiously, however, will no one – no one? – hold these people accountable for what they’ve done to rhyming? What is this? What is “legitly”? What the fuck, man. What the ever living fuck? Menace and Lenox? Neck and Expect?
What the fuck!?
Wow.
This is the worst Taylor Swift album of them all. I think this is the least listenable collection of music-adjacent sounds ever made. This is an astonishing work. What else is there to say but, Taylor Swift, please, please, dear god, oh god please no, I’ll give you anything, I’ll kill my firstborn child, please don’t make more music.
Go fuck Travis Kelce and leave the rest of us alone.
Jordan Holmes is a Chicago comedian, author, podcaster, and one of the twenty best humans of all time. We love him very much. Every Monday & Friday, you can hear him on a new episode of Knowledge Fight, a podcast devoted to exposing the lies of Alex Jones. You can read (or listen) to his debut novel, The Quiet Part Loud, by going here.
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