The New Yorker:

The weak lyricism in the Travis Kelce-inspired songs on “The Life of a Showgirl” has led to some of the most virulent and sexist anti-Swift discourse in years.

By Tyler Foggatt

If I were writing a song about Travis Kelce, a man I’ve never met, I would mention that he plays football, and that he has a podcast. I’d point out that he’s about to marry Taylor Swift, and that the two of them appear to be very happy together. I might also include a line about how Kelce seems fun; he has good vibes. If I were really reaching—and I almost certainly would be, because, again, I don’t know him—I’d resort to basic physical descriptions. He’s tall, and has noticeably large hands (great for catching balls). Also, he’s pretty hot.

These aspects, and seemingly these alone, are the ones that Swift dwells on in “The Life of a Showgirl,” her twelfth studio album, which came out on Friday. “Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes,” she sings in “The Fate of Ophelia,” which also includes a passing reference to Kelce using his “megaphone”—a.k.a. his podcast, “New Heights”—to publicly express his interest in her, after he had attended one of her Eras Tour shows in 2023. In “Wi$h Li$t,” Swift says she “made wishes on all of the stars” for someone like Kelce: “Please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot.” The next song, “Wood”—Sabrina Carpenter-esque in content and Jackson 5-like in sound—is essentially one long dick joke. (Well, not that long: at two minutes and thirty seconds, “Wood” is technically the shortest track on the album.) “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was the key that opened my thighs,” she sings. At one point, she suggests that Kelce has reached “New Heights of manhood.” (“Singing about travis kelce’s penis over a Jackson 5 sample should get you taken out back like a rabid dog,” one person wrote on X.)
When Swift first announced that she had made a new album—in a guest appearance on Kelce’s podcast, which he co-hosts with his brother, back in August—she said that the music came from the “most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic” period of her life. Career-wise, she was at a peak: she’d begun writing the record while she was still on the Eras Tour. But she was also alluding to her relationship with Kelce. Swift described his public attempts to court her, adding “This is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teen-ager.” After they finished recording the podcast, Kelce proposed to Swift in his back yard.

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