It's not too typical of domestic baseball if I note that The life of a dancer gets worse reviews than any other Taylor Swift album; If you've been online at all since Friday (October 3), you already know this.
Apart from at least one clearly pandering assessment (here I'm looking at you, Rolling Stone), most critics gave the record mixed to negative reviews – which is not at all like the experience Department of Martyred Poetswhen many major publications were overly generous and the pop star highlighted her testimonials on her Instagram story.. Again, this was only 18 months ago when my colleague was receiving various curses and death threats for giving TTPD 4 out of 10 points and now, two days after passing TAKAS however, I didn't get a tweet saying I was tasteless or a Facebook comment calling me a fat bitch.
The situation on Swift changed seemingly overnight, and even some die-hard fans began to lose faith, but I'm sure many would say this has been a long time coming. The way the floodgates opened definitely indicates that people have been waiting for this moment.
Just as Swifties have historically lambasted critics and bombarded them with hate speech for saying anything critical about the singer-songwriter's music, the backlash to this – non-Swifties trashing the album and Swift's behavior both recently and in decades past – has flooded social media platforms. Critics no longer fearful of Stan's backlash seem to have inspired everyone to get on the soapbox and voice their true feelings about Taylor Swift.
“Shake It Off” was released in 2014. I remember it well—as does Ben Kesslen, the writer who tweeted, “I learned what cultural appropriation is by reading a think piece on how to get rid of it,” just about the best 2014 sentence imaginable. I remember this well too: people were very angry about the music video because of said cultural appropriation, which I thought mostly had to do with Swift trying to twerk. People also said that casting black women in the video was exploitative.
Now, a new 2025 version of this discourse has returned, centered around the song “Opalite,” which references the gemstones opalite (usually white) and onyx (usually black) and also pokes fun at Travis Kelsey's ex-girlfriend Kayla Nicole—a black woman—in the second verse: “She was on her phone / And you were just a pose.”
Others take issue with “Eldest Daughter,” in which Swift borrows verbiage typically associated with black women and sings, “I'm not a bad bitch / And that ain't wild.” Even in a negative sense, Swift has to adopt a language that isn't exactly vernacular, and she sounds like she just learned fun new slang and wants to incorporate it into the lyrics to show that she understands what kids are doing.
I've also seen people say that the most talked about song on the album is embarrassing Charli XCX diss track “Actually Romantic” is racist because of the part where Swift compares the artist (whose mother is Gujarati Indian) to a chihuahua barking out of a tiny purse. In many other comment sections on TikTok and Instagram, Swift is called a white supremacist and MAGA – despite the fact that she supported Kamala Harris – and recalling her past “obsession” with Kennedy (she briefly dated RFK Jr.'s son Conor when she was 22 and he was 18).
At the same time, people have long liked to joke about how Swift is keeping legions of white women out of the alt-right's assembly lines, and I think it still rings true. On many levels, she's certainly not quote-unquote “woke”: Swift still openly supports Democratic candidates and encourages voter registration starting with the 2020 election. Miss Americana a documentary that highlighted her desire to be more politically active, as well as her very real fear for her safety.
If there is a world in which we can discuss Taylor Swift discourse without bringing up misogyny, it is unfortunately not this world. Misogyny has been a constant presence in her career since the beginning and continues to increase. Women shouldn't be exempt from making music that people are critical of, but paying close attention to everything Swift says or does is objectively incomparable to the attention of a (hypothetical, at this level of fame) male colleague, and we should keep that in mind when considering how she and her work are talked about.
Among all this talk, The life of a dancer still poised for the album's biggest first-week sales ever (29 vinyl variants are GirlBossing). Very close to the sun), being such a big part of this dog dump only makes Swifty dig in her heels even more. Even if you're trying to create “apolitical” art, as you can see from the extremism on both sides, pop music and pop culture are inherently a microcosm of politics.
It's the more casual fans, the non-extremists, who don't seem to be buying like they used to. Fairweather Swifties openly share their opinions on the album, not to mention Swift's notable moments. proposed use of AI in advertising videos — instead of continuing to pledge allegiance.
“What’s it like to listen to this album without a rat in your ear telling you it’s bad,” read the lyrics in one video I saw of a woman in a pink tracksuit dancing to the music. TAKASand I want to reiterate the point of everything here: please like what you like and like it because you really like it; not because you've been told whether it's good or bad, and certainly not out of any kind of self-imposed devotion (they don't do it like they used to!) to the artist.
“I have a lot of respect for people’s subjective opinions about art,” Swift told Zane Lowe. interview for Apple Music shared yesterday (October 7), saying she welcomed the “chaos” of people's mixed opinions about the record. “I’m not the art police. Everyone is allowed to feel the way they want.”
She continued, “And our goal as artists is to be a mirror. Often an album is a really wild way of looking at yourself, isn't it? What you go through in your life will influence how you relate to the music I put out at any given time.”
While the pop star astutely noted that she loves hearing from fans that an album they initially disagree with becomes their favorite after they have a few more life experiences, here she again starts to sound out of touch. None – or at least very few – of your fans will ever feel like you have the right hand of friends “wrapped in Gucci and scandal” (“CANCELLED!”) or willing to fly on an old private jet to Positano with your NFL player fiancé amid a grueling tour schedule.
Of course, she probably means this “intimacy” more in terms of her fans, who are as happy in love as she appears to be, blissfully ignoring the fact that love doesn't actually fix everything. At least this is the case with most of us; we realize pretty quickly that it doesn't solve our problems, even if we grew up with media that made us think otherwise.
It seems like Swift is still in that ivory tower, and now that Romeo has arrived (and she's achieved world domination), she has everything she wants. Thus, The life of a dancer is somewhat reminiscent of “Hot Issues,” a 2012 song by teen girl duo Double Take, who very much attended Rebecca Black's school Friday, a YouTube fame. Billionaires are just like you – they have problems too, only they are billionaires.
