The Life of a Showgirl

Taylor Swift and the Routinization of Everything

I was drinking coffee with Sara at a cafe in Brickell when she mentioned she'd bought tickets to the Eras Tour.

singers on the stage, degas

Sara's long brown hair was pulled back in the same style she wore in 2008, efficient rather than styled, though the effect was somehow elegant despite the functionality. Her eyes are the same penetrating grey, intelligent and severe in a way that made you want to prove you'd done the reading. She dressed like someone who'd assembled a wardrobe once, deliberately, and then never thought about clothes again because she was busy with other priorities. Everything she wore was sharp, functional, and beautiful. Like Sara.

We worked together at a nonprofit in 2008. I was sixteen. She was twenty-four, an economist who'd decided to mentor a libido-crazed teenager. She took me on as a side project after I'd confessed unrequited attraction to her. Looking back now, the lack of situational awareness must have seemed like a three-legged beagle wandering up to a wolf pack asking for work. Like always, Sara managed the contradictions with effortless grace honoring the initiative while correcting the ignorance.

On a relational level, she taught me how to repair relationships after crossing boundaries, how to access empathy when someone says no. She was patient, and sometimes stern, but always clear. Especially at the infamous Christmas party of 2008.

We bonded playing "Fearless" alone in the office kitchen while everyone else traded Sunset Rubdown vinyl at gastropubs an intern couldn't afford. Sara's frugal budget kept her in the kitchen with me, the broke intern. We talked about Romanticism, whether all cynics are wounded romantics, whether authenticity could survive institutional success.

Now she has two kids. Her husband is an accountant. She might leave nonprofits. Things are expensive.

The conversation drifted back to Taylor Swift.

"Travis Kelce was on the screen the whole time," she said. "They kept cutting to his box."

I asked how the show was.

"Fine. Professionally executed."

We didn't mention the NFL, though we'd both posted IG stories or written tweets about brain injuries and labor exploitation when that kind of signaling resonated and felt important. We didn't mention those kitchen conversations about how billionaires are probably culturally celebrated hoarders.

"She released an album," Sara said. "The Life of a Showgirl."

I asked if it was any good.

"I listened twice. It's exactly what you'd expect."

Exactly what you'd expect. That phrase sat there between us.

I listened later that evening, here’s what I think.

The album sold 4 million units its first week. Swift recorded it in Sweden between Eras Tour dates, flying back and forth while playing stadiums. Max Martin and Shellback produced it—the same architects who manufactured her 1989 and Reputation albums. The title track features Sabrina Carpenter and tells the story of Kitty, a Las Vegas showgirl who goes through show business challenges to become successful. In interviews, Swift described the album as "infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic," reflecting her "triumphant state of mind."

My experience doesn’t match her description. I heard something else: a machine running smoothly. The hooks arrive on schedule, the emotions land where they're supposed to, everything works, but nothing breaks through. Max Weber had a term for this: routinization. What happens when charisma has to start paying rent.

Charisma, in Weber's original sense, is the force that breaks through existing structures. The prophet walks out of the desert with a message the priests can't contain. It's disruptive, singular, impossible to replicate through procedure. It exists in the gap between what institutions produce and what actually moves people. Swift had this once.

Charisma's first rupture can feel like pure novelty, like access to something unprocessed. Swift's early appeal was that she seemed to offer a straight face in an era trained to smirk. For millennials coming up after the Nineties posture of irony, scarcity, and gatekept cool, a teenage girl writing plainly about her own life felt defiant and even transgressive. But once that rupture becomes a career, it needs calendars, staff, procedures, and a repeatable method. Once the break becomes an institution, it starts reproducing itself like pop art. The "rupture" becomes a series. The feeling gets standardized, made instantly legible at distance. The diary turns into a template, and the template turns into an apparatus that can produce the next version on schedule.

Max Weber theorized this process before World War I and kept working on it until his death in 1920, writing about routinization while watching industrial slaughter grind through a generation of broken families. Traditional routinization happens when the prophet dies. Moses leads the Israelites out, dies, his charisma transfers to institutional structures. Swift's routinization happens while she makes albums, tours stadiums, and yet remains alive. Late capitalism doesn't need the prophet's absence. Keeping them alive is more efficient anyway. Instead, it consumes revolutionary energy as it's generated, transforming spontaneity into content in real time.

Swift’s 2006 arrival came with a built-in story: a teenager writing songs like entries in a notebook, then walking them into an industry that had plenty of room for young women as images and very little patience for them as authors. The early songs carried the texture of ordinary feeling without much varnish, the kind you could sing in a car without feeling like you were auditioning for taste, cleaned up just enough to survive radio.

Then the album cycles began arriving with their own reading guides: colors, costumes, clues, the second layer that turns private voice into a participatory system. Fans learned to hunt for hidden messages and to treat decoding as part of love, a small recurring labor that keeps the intimacy feeling alive long after the bedroom has been replaced by an apparatus. The Life of a Showgirl doesn’t introduce that structure. It brings it to the front of the stage and calls it what it is. Or perhaps my intrinsic millennial optimism has finally soured enough to see the products of artists I love with clear eyes.

Either way, the production choices make this celebration of the routine explicit. Max Martin and Shellback return after the stretch where Swift worked hard to be read as auteur, and the record is tracked in Stockholm between tour dates, flown in and out of the schedule, in the same city where Martin built a career turning Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears into repeatable systems. The sound reaches back toward retro pop, but nothing about it is loose: the hooks arrive on cue, the vocals are stacked and scrubbed, the rough edges taken down until each emotional beat lands the same way, night after night, from the floor seats to the upper bowl. The routine isn’t something the album hides in the liner notes. It sits right in the mix, audible in how neatly every feeling arrives.

Did it have to be this way? Some careers, like Swift’s, survive by building an apparatus big enough to keep producing the feeling on schedule, and once it exists it starts making demands of its own: more dates, more product, more proof that the last thing happened and the next thing will happen too. Joy Division is the case where the apparatus never finishes forming, because the story stops in a kitchen before the first American tour, leaving the band to persist as myth in the exact space the work would have occupied if the calendar had been allowed to continue.

Ian Curtis hanged himself in this kitchen in 1980, the night before Joy Division was scheduled to leave for its first American tour. He was twenty-three. The band never had to discover what happens when a small, dangerous thing meets the touring economy that wants it bigger, steadier, easier to reproduce, with the same emotional cues landing in the same places night after night; there was no long middle period where repetition turns into method and method hardens into administration. Curtis’s death ends the negotiation before it begins, and what remains is the artifact: the body fixed in time, the image taking over.

Charisma that ends before it has to learn how to continue leaves a particular kind of afterlife: a short run of recordings, a few photographs, a sleeve design that turns into a flag, the canceled American tour sitting there like an unopened door, plus decades of reissues, shirts, and arguments about what would have happened next. Fisher called this hauntology: the way a future can linger after it's been cut off, audible in the work as an unfinished promise. Joy Division survives inside that unfinishedness because there is no long middle stretch where the band has to get bigger, smoother, more repeatable, with a set time onstage and a proven encore. The story stops at the moment when expansion is about to begin, and the culture keeps replaying that edge. When I imagine Joy Division and that American tour I feel like a wife whose husband died at war, like I’m photocopying a photograph from the lake again and again until the image degrades into pure grain, light on water reduced to abstract pattern, the moment compressed into less and less until only the shape of loss remains.

So, Curtis dies on the eve of the American tour and the band never has to learn the next set of lessons, the ones that arrive with airports and promoters and venues that hold ten thousand people, the ones that turn a dangerous little thing into a professionalized operation that has to hit its marks night after night, because the economics of scale do not care where the feeling came from. The myth stays intact because it never touched stadium economics. Post-punk's entire aesthetic depended on this: the future that failed to arrive, the revolutionary energy that couldn't be recuperated because the prophet was already dead.

An alternative timeline where Curtis lives and Joy Division plays stadium tours with Arctic Monkeys sounds absurd, maybe grotesque. But, what if?

What if Curtis lives and Joy Division becomes a functioning institution, with tour managers and promo schedules and the slow conversion of danger into a dependable ticketed night out. This is imaginable in the way all compromises are imaginable. In that timeline the kitchen is just a kitchen, the flight happens, the band has to learn the terms and conditions, and the myth dissolves. That isn’t our timeline and the force of the band’s myth has everything to do with what never got built, late-stage Kali Yuga conditions where the machine eats the future before it arrives and sells the leftovers back to us.

One unfortunate moment in this latest chapter of the Kali Yuga timeline occurred following the death of Marilyn Monroe. She died in her Brentwood home in 1962. Ahead of trends even in her death, she died clutching a phone. She was thirty-six. Two years later, Andy Warhol started printing her face in his Factory on East 47th Street, the same publicity photo silk-screened in orange and turquoise and hot pink, twenty-three paintings from one image, each selling for more than she earned in her lifetime. The face became more valuable as it became less human.

I'm exactly the kind of performatively male-coded critic who cites de Beauvoir in a Taylor Swift review (Solanas might be more appropriate), but the distinction she draws between transcendence and immanence maps too cleanly onto Curtis and Monroe to ignore. Transcendence means becoming subject, spirit, myth beyond the body. Immanence means staying object, matter, image to be reproduced. Curtis dies and becomes frozen potential: the artist who never had to compromise. Monroe dies and Warhol prints her face until it disappears into a sea of commodities.

When I imagine myself as a showgirl, I feel like a commodity. I audition for a spot in the Tropicana showgirl lineup and they measure my height against the other girls, my kick against theirs. My smile calibrates to match the choreography. The role existed before my consciousness arrived on set. I step into machinery already running. Ah, the life of a showgirl. There’s a strange comfort and security in bondage.

Despite what you think about my flight into imagination, I don’t think it can be argued that Swift made the opposite choice from Curtis. She chose survival, chose the stadium tour, chose the NFL boyfriend displayed on screens cutting to luxury boxes, chose to keep making albums while acknowledging what keeping making albums requires. The Life of a Showgirl is her detailed report on those requirements. Kitty becomes a successful showgirl by mastering institutional demands and mastering immanence. Transcendence is off the table. It’s 2025, baby. Transcendence hangs from a noose in the kitchen deep in the depths of the unconscious of our most talented femme pop stars. Numb is in.

The Eras Tour perfected the capitalization of immanence in ways earlier tours couldn't. It's a museum exhibition cataloguing completed archives. Each era gets its display case, period costume, carefully reconstructed historical moment. It’s the EPCOT country showcase of her career. A simulacrum of my nostalgic memories.

Now, in the 2020’s, Swift performs charisma as institutional memory instead of disruption. The setlist changes for European dates, incorporating "Life of a Showgirl" material, don't represent any kind of artistic evolution. Instead, they represent archival expansion: new artifacts to catalogue, latest exhibits in the permanent collection of a conquering girl boss. The tour grossed over $2 billion, proving that charisma's funeral generates a lot of revenue.

What she performs now is institutional charisma. Charisma that reproduces itself on schedule. The Eras Tour doesn't disrupt anything. It demonstrates mastery of apparatus: production design, logistics, fan management, content generation, the entire machinery of spectacle running at scale. Charisma that made peace with routinization, that discovered how to package disruption as a product. It’s the Vatican gift shop selling relics of the moment when salvation wasn’t for sale for 12 Euro.

This is what makes imagining alternatives seem impossible be they artistic, philosophical, or political. The revolutionary energy that generated Swift's initial charisma: teenage girl with guitar, writing songs, refusing Nashville's gendered conventions, blending commercial success with a bold assault on the Great American Soundbook–has been so thoroughly absorbed that thinking outside the system becomes structurally foreclosed. The Eras Tour doesn't present itself as one way to tour. It presents itself as the only way, the inevitable conclusion of pop stardom's logic. You either achieve Eras Tour scale or you fail. There is no outside.

In 2008, the structure seemed to allow alternatives (or perhaps I was still innocent enough to believe) Pitchfork or Coldplay, indie obfuscation or pop clarity–the choice meant something because neither had achieved total dominance. Now the structure seems closed. Swift's success demonstrates that charisma under late capitalism can only survive by giving up everything that made it charismatic. Life of a Show Girl is a funeral, but its vibe is triumphant. That’s why it feels off. The funeral generates billions. The bureaucratized parade of hearses moves through the streets of our culture like an ersatz simulation of a death procession in New Orleans.

I can't listen to "Fearless" the same way now. I hear the apparatus, the marketing strategy, the calculated vulnerability, the fan labor required to maintain connection myths. The song hasn't changed, but her charisma operates differently now. Recovering that 2008 feeling isn't possible. The Honda Civic got sold, Pitchfork got absorbed into GQ, the hipsters who policed those boundaries run streaming services now. That moment was already being absorbed into the apparatus even as it felt like resistance.

Sara texted me a few days after our coffee. "Did you listen yet?"

I had. "It's exactly what you'd expect," I wrote back.

"I know, I feel pretty sad about it," she said.

I didn't ask if she meant the album or what happened to our souls.

I try to imagine her life outside the nonprofit now. Two kids, the accountant husband, budget meetings about private school or whether to refinance. I want to believe the spark she carried in 2008 still burns, the one that lit a torch of dedication inside me, that lit something in a sixteen-year-old who didn't know hope could be grounded instead of angry. But intrusive thoughts creep in: spreadsheets replacing Romanticism, family dinners that feel routine instead of warm, small compromises stacking up until the thing you built doesn't look like what you meant to build, Nietzsche instead of Blake, cynicism. I made a note in my Google Calendar to pray.

Let’s touch grass.

Brian Nuckols writes primarily about memory and emotion. He’s interested in what can’t be said and the obstacles that prevent us from speaking. He likes to explore places where the psyche ruptures and infrastructure, material and social, fail.

His academic writing has appeared in the International Journal of Žižek Studies and Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. He's presented research in Freiburg and Taipei on topics like structural dream analysis and Jungian approaches to aggression in immigrant children.

As Managing Editor of Hesitation Media, Nuckols and his colleagues developed empathic journalism: a form of post new journalism that treats investigative reporting like psychotherapy and psychotherapy like investigative reporting. His journalism regularly appears in Jacobin, Public Source, The Seattle Times, and West Hills Gazette, pursuing whispers from Saturnian muses who come patiently, night after night.

Find more of Brian's work here