Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
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For as long as we’ve known Taylor Swift, she’s played many roles, the songwriter and the storyteller, the narrator and the main character. In the last two years, she’s become both the tortured poet and the billionaire showgirl. Her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department captured her deepest heartbreak, which unfolded alongside her greatest victories: the record-breaking Eras Tour, her long fight to reclaim her master recordings, and a whirlwind romance with her now-fiancé, Travis Kelce. Never one to take it easy, she began her next project by saying, “I want to be as proud of an album as I am of the Eras Tour, and for the same reasons.”
Swift’s twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, is anything but reserved. She opens with “The Fate of Ophelia,” a love story that lifts her away from heartbreak, not into a fairytale, but out of tragedy. On The Tortured Poets Department, she spent thirty-one songs writing her way through sorrow. Here, she seems to undo it all in just one.
The melancholy that colored her last four records is mostly gone, yet The Life of a Showgirl still feels surprisingly understated. Swift reunites with pop powerhouses Max Martin and Shellback for the first time in eight years, crafting arrangements built around crisp ’70s soft-rock drums and minimalist hip-hop beats reminiscent of Pure Heroine. The songs focus heavily on her voice and lyrics, but they don’t quite capture the lush emotional nuance she found in her collaborations with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.
Outside of “Ophelia,” the other clear radio contender is “Opalite,” a breezy pop-rock track that recalls Red-era songs like “Message in a Bottle.” The difference is that 2012 Taylor never would have started a love song with lines as biting as, “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past / My brother used to call it ‘eating out of the trash.’”
For the starry-eyed young Taylor, romance used to be the lens through which she saw everything. Now in her mid-thirties, she still portrays love as pure, but her stories come with more complications. The acoustic ballad “Eldest Daughter” begins with her guarded and detached, then gradually opening up as the song unfolds. The narrative works, but it also shows the album’s smaller emotional scope: she gives the same weight to romantic vulnerability as she does to frustrations about the internet.
That’s about as serious as Showgirl gets, in fact, it might be her funniest record yet, depending on how much you’re laughing with her. On “Father Figure,” she playfully references George Michael while poking fun at her feud with Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun, singing, “I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger!” Then there’s “Wood,” her first attempt at disco, which channels The Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” and Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out.” It’s a cheeky, joyful track that nods to her fiancé’s prowess both in life and in love. “Wi$h Li$t” is equally over-the-top, think “Royals” rewritten by someone who’s as close to American royalty as you can get, yet its domestic fantasy somehow feels sweet and genuine.
When Swift stops trying to prove anything and simply exists within her music, the magic comes back. “Ruin the Friendship,” like “Betty,” captures the innocence of a teenage crush that lingers into adulthood. “Wilted corsage dangles from my wrist / Over his shoulder I catch a glimpse,” she sings, as memories of missed chances fade into a funeral decades later. Then, in the present, she mourns what could’ve been: “It was not convenient, no / But I whispered at the grave / ‘Should’ve kissed you anyway.’” Swift’s greatest gift, the one at the heart of the Eras Tour, has always been her ability to make a song feel like a lived memory, no matter how many times you hear it.
But by the next track, “Actually Romantic,” she’s back in character, reviving her “Blank Space” persona to seemingly take aim at Charli XCX. Over a grungy Pixies/Weezer-inspired beat, she taunts, “It sounded nasty but it feels like you’re flirting with me / I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it / It’s kind of making me… wet!” The jab feels random, especially given the references to Charli’s “Sympathy Is a Knife,” the “CANCELLED!” lyrics on this album, and their supposed reconciliation on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix. Maybe she wrote it just to amuse herself.
The closing title track nearly ties everything together. Featuring Sabrina Carpenter, Swift tells the story of an aging showgirl named Kitty who warns her about the ruthless world of fame. By the song’s end, Taylor flips the narrative, claiming her own power: “I’m immortal now, baby dolls!” She’s still marked by the battles she’s fought, but she didn’t have to lose herself to win, and she hasn’t shut the door on those who come after her. Like Elizabeth Taylor, the world might gossip about her personal life, but history will remember her career, exactly as she intended.
When Michael Jackson passed away, TIME Magazine wrote, “In the theater of celebrity tragedy, each play has three acts.” Having escaped Ophelia’s fate, Taylor Swift now finds herself in her fifth. She’s still a fascinating main character, though her focus has shifted to life under the microscope of social media. Meanwhile, outside her kingdom, the world continues to face crises, from climate change to political unrest and humanitarian disasters.
There’s nothing wrong with seeking escape, but the best pop music makes personal emotion feel like everything is at stake. Speak Now, Reputation, Folklore, her most powerful albums transformed her pain into something universal. For the first time, The Life of a Showgirl finds Taylor Swift not growing through love, but resting comfortably within it.
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Less than two months after the surprise release of his seventh album , Swag, Canadian pop star Justin Bieber has returned once again, announcing the follow-up , Swag II , with less than a day’s warning. Though the record was promised for a midnight release, it arrived three hours late, with Bieber admitting to fans that he, too, was “clicking refresh” and waiting for it to appear on streaming platforms.
While Swag was filled with questionable lyrical moments (the low point being Go Baby and its clumsy shoutout to Hailey Bieber’s phone-mounted lip gloss holders), its successor is more straightforward, which works to its advantage. Swag II also tones down the overt sensuality of the first installment, which had Bieber making promises to “make your sheets hot” with all the allure of an appliance manual.
This time around, the mood is lighter and often more tender. On Mother In You, an acoustic-driven reflection on fatherhood, Bieber recalls meeting his son for the first time. “It’s half past seven, I had somewhere to be,” he sings. “I guess I’m late, but I got a reason; you’re a beautiful world that’s countin’ on me.” The infamous paparazzi sample, first heard on "Standing On Business ," returns on "Speed Demon," but here it is used more playfully. “Is it clocking to you?” he asks, over breezy guitar lines and a hip-hop-inspired beat.
Love Song, the album’s standout and Mk.Gee’s only contribution leaves space for jazzy piano flourishes to shine. Tems delivers a strong feature on I Think You’re Special, while Bad Honey is another highlight, with Bieber leaning into funk-tinged vocals and layering in falsetto for added flair.
Still, not everything works. The nearly eight-minute closer Story Of God, in which Bieber retells the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve, comes across as unnecessarily indulgent. Lyrically, the album also repeats itself, circling the same two themes: devotion to God and love for his wife.
One improvement is the absence of Druski’s wandering interludes, which weighed down the first record. Yet overall, Swag II does little to set itself apart from its predecessor. Much of the sound remains the same, with returning collaborators Dijon and Mk.Gee, Carter Lang, and Eddie Benjamin are helping Bieber shape a similar R&B-infused palette. There are no obvious singles, and the project reportedly underwent last-minute changes right up until its release.
Like Taylor Swift’s unexpected addition to The Tortured Poet’s Department, SZA’s extended SOS deluxe, or Drake’s lengthy Scary Hours update to For All The Dogs, Swag II feels like a streaming-era project stretched too far. Across both parts, there are strong ideas, but together they run for more than two hours, making the experience bloated and repetitive. There is plenty of good music scattered throughout, but as a double album, it feels excessive. The real question lingers: Did it genuinely need to be released this way?
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