Once upon a time, in a timeline far, far away, there was a verbose country upstart from Pennsylvania who dreamed of becoming so big that no one could touch her. When Taylor Swift released “Mean” in 2010, she could still plausibly position herself as the David to the media’s Goliath, a hearty little engine that could—and would—make it all the way to the top. Yet now, bigger than ever, Swift has never sounded more bogged down in criticism and less assured in her strengths.
Nowhere is this as apparent as on “Cleveland!,” the nadir of The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore: the latest new variant of the best-selling first-week debut in modern music history. Buried within production situated somewhere between Dear Evan Hansen and a Kohl’s holiday playlist is an idea aligned with Swift’s greatest work: Love turns the average into the extraordinary. A trip to her hubby’s “home” (helpfully contextualized in “Babylon” as “where you’re from”) in the canonically normal Ohio city might as well be a private tour of Versailles.
But Swift is too mighty now to get swept off her feet. “Cleveland!” remains firmly committed to the defensive snarl of Showgirl songs “Actually Romantic” and “CANCELLED!,” transforming what might have been a sweet love song into an exercise in self-flagellating spite. While Travis is ostensibly trying to show her where he grew up, her song’s narrator is furiously name-searching on Twitter, collecting a laundry list of digs against herself: can’t dance, “dressed like trash,” “only a four,” fake, annoying. She stops short of calling herself “a whore,” but not a “bitch.” None of that’s supposed to matter, of course, because she’s found the love of her life, which Swift defines in a shell of a spoken-word bridge as the “one person in this entire world who doesn’t find you completely insufferable.” She wants us to know she wants for nothing. But it’s tough to see the bar this low.
