In “Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” the preeminent pop star of our time introduces the 12 tracks on her 12th album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” Seated before a painted forest backdrop (very Shakespeare), she takes a few minute to sketch in the background of each song, describing each one of them like the kind of artist who regards everything she writes with total and equal love, as if the songs were her children — though in this case, she has a clear favorite. That would be “The Fate of Ophelia,” which opens the album and is its obvious standout track. As soon as I heard it I thought: This one’s going to kick in and last. It opens with what sounds like Coldplay piano chords, which then expand into a dance groove of infectious maximalism that isn’t too far from the wheelhouse of Lady Gaga. It all builds to a hook that won’t quit — the exultant way that Swift lets loose on “Oh-feel-ia…”
You can tell Swift knows what a terrific song it is, because in “Official Release Party…” she shows the complete video for it (which she wrote and directed) not once but twice, she includes an extended backstage clip of herself at the computer coming up with visual ideas for it, and she sprinkles scenes from a “Making of ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ video” throughout, so that we keep returning to the song.
The song’s video, which envisions Tay as “showgirls” from different historical eras (a cabaret burlesque performer, a Busy Berkeley bathing beauty, an artist’s model posing for a pre-Raphaelite painting, a Vegas showgirl), is an elaborate multi-set fusion of analog and digital, with intricate sets that feed into each other, as Swift hops through identities and eras. Near the end of “Official Release Party…,” she then comes on and talks about what the lyrics mean to her. Ophelia, driven mad by the unstable actions of Hamlet, could almost be a character out of a Taylor Swift song — a romantic martyr dealing with a suitor who has more troubles than she does. But as Swift explains it (and maybe this is what accounts for why it’s such an ecstatic song), Ophelia, in “The Life of a Showgirl,” is the anti-Taylor — the lost soul who Swift sees she could have been had she not chosen a healthier and happier way, which as she describes it something that The Eras Tour helped her do. Hence the happiness of the whole record.
But “Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” like the album this 90-minute, in-theaters-for-only-two-days Taylor Swift special has been designed to market, can’t come close to sustaining the high of “The Fate of Ophelia.” You leave the theater with that song buzzing in your head. The rest of the numbers have an airy dance-pop shimmer and a winning clarity of message, but most of them don’t quite make it up the stairway to hook heaven.
The video for “Ophelia,” too, is unlike the others. The rest of the videos feature Taylor, and Taylor alone, against digitally enhanced art backdrops that are skewed and fractured through what looks like a rectangular-lensed kaleidoscope. It’s a kind of cut-rate psychedelic effect, and not a bad one, but it’s a bit puzzling to see it used for every one of the videos. Between that and the fact that Swift, in costume, is the only figure in them (though she’s often multiplied), there’s a samey-sameness to the presentation that starts to make the effect into that of a single extended video.
I couldn’t help but notice that the showgirl idea, which makes “The Life of a Showgirl” sound like a concept album à la Madonna’s “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” is there in Swift’s costumes and music-video demeanor, but with the exception of the song “Elizabeth Taylor” (“If you ever left me high and dry, I’d cry my eyes violet”), it isn’t actually reflected in many of the album’s lyrics.
I raise the issue because “Official Release Party…,” which is launching “The Life of a Showgirl” as a kind of fan-friendly theatrical weekend bash (let there be no doubt that Taylor Swift has the power to bring people into movie theaters), is less a cornucopia of imagery than you might expect. The “Fate of Ophelia” video is irresistible, and it’s fun to see Tay, in one sequence of the “Making of” video, decked out in a frosty platinum-blonde wig as a Marilyn/Jean Harlow Hollywood chorus girl, dancing on chairs backstage with her comrades. But as the other videos glide along, the effect of that kaleidoscope (there’s actually an opening title warning viewers about the stroboscopic quality of it) becomes more like animated wallpaper. Maybe that’s because the idea is that we’re meant to focus not on the visuals but on the lyrics, which are printed prominently onscreen.
The stories those lyrics tell can be compelling, and a couple of the choruses approach hook status, like “Opalite” (in which Swift uses man-made opals as a metaphor for the idea that you have to create your own happiness), or her scathing reconfiguration of George Michael’s “Father Figure,” or “Wood,” a double entendre (about knocking on wood for good luck, but also…the other kind of wood) that had the audience I saw it with laughing out loud. As the latest in the series of confessional/accusatory pop cantos that are Taylor Swift’s albums, “The Life of a Showgirl” has what it takes to connect with her galaxy of fans, but “Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” while it may become a prototype for how Swift releases albums in the future ($35 million worth of tickets sold in two days can’t be wrong), is at once a punchy celebration of Swift’s artistry and a piece of promotion that just exposes aspects of the album that may not wear so well over time.
