Taylor Swift has the record-breaking tour, the record-breaking wedding, and the fans who will cross oceans to see her. What she doesn’t have, according to a new Daily Wire op-ed, is a song that’s actually about being happy.
In a piece titled “Why Taylor Swift’s Prom Queen Crown Can’t Make Her Happy,” Daily Wire media specialist Paulina Enck argues that the four new songs on “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore” — the deluxe edition of Swift’s 2025 album — don’t deliver the romantic payoff the title suggests. Instead, Enck writes, the tracks keep circling back to the people Swift says she’s moved past.
A lead single about the doubters, not the groom
The centerpiece of Enck’s critique is “Cleveland!,” a track she describes as musically buoyant but lyrically consumed by Swift’s detractors. While the song is billed as a celebration of Swift’s marriage to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, Enck contends that most of its lines aren’t about her husband or their life together — they’re about what she calls “haters.”
Enck concedes the song has its moments of devotion, but she argues even those are framed defensively. The strongest praise Swift offers Kelce in the track, in Enck’s reading, is simply that he likes her despite what everyone else thinks — a dynamic she sees as putting a fair amount of Swift’s self-worth in the hands of the football star who chose her.
That structure, Enck writes, isn’t new ground. She compares “Cleveland!” to “Delicate,” the 2017 track from Reputation, which also opened from the premise that a tarnished reputation meant her partner had to like her for who she really was. The difference, per Enck: “Delicate” used its verses to explore a fragile, tentative new love, while “Cleveland!” stays on the surface-level refrain of not caring what anyone thinks — because he loves her.
An album where no track is purely romantic
The criticism extends beyond the single. Enck writes that the other “Showgirl” tracks marketed as love songs also lean on veiled references to past lovers and present-day critics, and that among the 12 songs on the record, not one is a pure love song. For a newlywed, she argues, that’s an odd register to be writing in.
The three additional “Encore” songs, according to Enck, follow the same pattern — old flames, yet again, from a songwriter who has spent two decades on the subject. She characterizes “Babylon” as a track about an uncommitted lover less invested than the singer, “Pink Clouding” as an apology to a man she made romantic promises to and couldn’t keep, and “Patient Zero” as a warning to the current partner of an ex.
Enck frames the whole collection through an adolescent metaphor: Swift as the prom queen married to the star quarterback, still stewing over the burnout, the drama-club type, and the kids gossiping in the hallways. The tone throughout the op-ed is that of someone puzzled rather than outraged — why keep singing about the people you’ve supposedly left behind?
The success is not in dispute
What isn’t contested in the piece is Swift’s commercial dominance. Enck notes that Swift’s most recent tour grossed more than $2 billion in ticket sales, a record that more than doubles any other tour’s gross, with over 10 million fans paying premium prices and some traveling across states, countries, and continents to attend. After years of writing about wanting to find lasting love, Swift married an NFL star in a heavily publicized romance.
Despite all of that — or perhaps because of it — Enck argues the new material reflects someone focused on the negative, and does so without the wit that could make the premise land. A whole song about being unbothered, she writes, paradoxically demonstrates how much you really do care. She contends the track aims for playful and comes off as thin-skinned, in part because laughing at yourself requires being okay with other people laughing too.
The op-ed does acknowledge a version of this album that would have worked: a portrait of a woman who reaches the pinnacle, gets everything she wanted — the man, the career, the adoration of millions — and discovers it doesn’t fill the emptiness. That, Enck writes, is fertile creative ground. But it requires a level of self-awareness and introspection she believes Swift either lacks or isn’t ready to explore.
Her conclusion is blunt. Swift has won. In Enck’s view, she should stop focusing on the negative and actually enjoy it.
The piece reflects a broader line of criticism that has trailed Swift’s recent releases — less about whether the songs will sell, which is not seriously in question, than about what the songwriter chooses to put at the center of them. For a pop star whose career has been built on narrating her own life in real time, the question of which chapter she’s still writing about has become a story in itself.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-taylor-swifts-prom-queen-crown-cant-make-her-happy