Dr. Stephen Ross teaches a 200-level English course surveying Swift’s discography
Photo via RollingStone.com.
Rhinestones, glitter, burlesque, and fanfare were the imagery and tonal expectations set for Taylor Swift’s newest album, The Life of a Showgirl, but what was presented was mediocre at its best.
Dr. Stephen Ross, a professor of English at UVic, began teaching a new course in January 2025 — English 240: Introduction to a Major Author: Taylor Swift.
Ross has worked closely with Swift’s discography over the past 10-plus months, giving him extensive knowledge about her artistry. Given the heated online discourse about the album, the Martlet wanted to get to the heart of it, and get Dr. Stephen Ross’s expert opinion on the album, which included praise, criticism, and even disappointment.
“Musically, I think it’s mid-tier like Lover (another of Swift’s albums) for me,” said Ross in an interview with the Martlet. “Lyrically, I think it has some really interesting stuff going on, and some really not interesting stuff going on.”
Ross’s analysis included some theorizing. “If I am right, in my sense that this is actually a whole narrative told from the perspective of a character (Kitty),” Ross said, “then [that] actually takes it up in my estimation, but you have to do quite a bit of work to make that happen.”
The inspiration behind Swift’s 12th album is supposedly her own life on and off stage during the Eras Tour, which took place over the course of 2023 and 2024. You can read or listen to the lyrics autobiographically, but at the end of the day, Ross said, that’s a shallow interpretation.
It’s possible “there is more going on, and we have to get beyond thinking of the speaker as her [Swift], if we want to actually make sense of it, or make it make sense,” Ross said. “I think it doesn’t make sense otherwise, and you just end up listening to it and thinking she’s nuts. That she’s completely lost the plot…. Making Swift the speaker, I think, it’s limiting for the art.”
Beyond the question of the narrator, Ross had many thoughts about Swift’s lyricism on this album, too. He has a particularly soft spot for the album’s first track, “The Fate of Ophelia.”
“I really like ‘Fate of Ophelia’ almost despite myself. I kind of don’t want to, because it’s the most obvious bait for an English prof, but I really think it’s the most complicated one,” said Ross. “There is a lot more going on in that song. ‘Tis locked inside my memory’ is a line from Hamlet. It adds a whole other thing going on.”
Two lines later in the song also drew Ross’s interest. “ Don’t care where the hell you’ve been,” Swift sings in the post-chorus, and in the next pre-chorus, “I might’ve lingered in purgatory, you wrap around me like a chain…pulling me into the fire.”
“The progression there is from purgatory to hell,not purgatory to heaven. There is a powerful undercurrent going in the opposite direction in that song that I am not sure people are picking up on,” Ross said.
“I think Wood is broadly misinterpreted as well because people are so fixated on the chorus [“I ain’t got to knock on wood”], that they lose track of the fact that most of the song is not about dicks. It’s just because of the chorus that people think it is,” said Ross.
“I am actually very interested in the way that the song uses various phallic symbols as fetishes,” said Ross.
The song is essentially saying “I don’t need luck, because now I have a phallus,” said Ross. “I think there is really something you could really do with that. In terms of the fetishization of no penises, but [instead], redwoods and magic wands. They are all substitute signifiers for something that actually doesn’t get named in the song, and that something Travis [Kelce, Swift’s fiancé] gets reduced to.”
“[In the song] he’s just a dick,” said Ross.
Both online and in the classroom, the album has caused controversy regarding the potential political and racist implications of some of Swift’s lyrics. With the new cast of characters in her life, there is bound to be some bleeding between her personal life, politics, and music. Whatever that may now look like for Swift, a song in particular that has listeners disappointed and angry is Swift’s seventh track, “Wi$h Li$t.”
“I think that stuff [American nationalism and ‘white suburbia’ propaganda] is indisputably there,”
said Ross. “It’s got a MAGA vibe to it… We talked about this in a class the other day. We had a fight over racial politics and the white racial homogenization in “Wi$h Li$t.”
One line, referencing Kelce, reads “Got the whole block looking like you.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know what she thought she was doing,” Ross said. “Language does what language does, and it drags with it its context(s). Intended to or not, and whether it’s an unconscious expression of bias or simply a bias that is embedded in the discourse that you mobilize, it’s there.”
You can watch Dr. Stephen Ross’s lecture on the album on YouTube.
