‘Eldest Daughter’ Is Actually The Best On Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’

There’s been much discussion about the lyrics painted throughout Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl. Since its release on Oct. 3, fans and critics alike have been swift (pun intended) to point out the “millennial cringe” and catchphrase-ridden sentences that the singer penned.

It seems as though no song on the album has garnered as much criticism as “Eldest Daughter,” the album’s fifth track, which delves into the concept of being, well, the oldest daughter in the family and the inferred responsibility to portray a “tough-guy” facade that comes with the role. And while many point fingers at the song being one of the worst on the record, I’m confident that it’s my favorite — and dare I say — Swift’s best this go around.

“I am the eldest daughter in my family, and when you talk to other eldest daughters, you kind of realize you all usually have a very similar experience with the world, with fear, and with feeling like you have to sort of do it all,” Swift said of the song during a scene from “Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl”.

“It’s about unmasking the facades we put in front of ourselves and just saying, like, ‘Yeah, I’m not all those things we aspire to be culturally.’ Sometimes you do want connection, softness, and sincerity, and that’s okay.”

I agree with Swift here as an eldest daughter myself. The role comes with this innate sense of somewhat toxic, self-inflicted perfectionism and independence, while also still being expected to live up to all of the niceties that being a “perfect daughter” entails. You need to be tough and self-sufficient, but never too coarse or brash; be successful, but don’t ask for too much help; you need to be a caretaker and a leader, without being too brazen.

The song itself has a simple melody, just Swift and the piano — her versus herself, so to speak. The first verse of the song, which is a nod to internet culture (“Every joke’s just trolling and memes/ Sad as it seems, apathy is hot”) feels almost infantile in its word choice and simple cadence.

“This entire first verse was me trying to assimilate to the way culture tells us to be,” Swift said in an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music. “Sometimes I’ll use specific vernacular to be satirical.”

That’s the secret of the entire song — the lyrics are cringe with immature undertones because they’re supposed to be. The whole tune is satire, making Swift’s main point that it’s cringe on purpose. It is cringeworthy to act like you know what you’re doing and that you have it all together when the reality is that no one does, and the more you try to portray to the world that you really are this martyr who can do it all, the more one-dimensional and confused you appear.

“Every eldest daughter / Was the first lamb to the slaughter / So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire,” Swift sings in a later bridge in the song. She bravely explains that as the eldest daughter, she’s had to disguise herself as the predator and not the unassuming prey, and thought she looked so cool and effortless while doing so.

She uses the “looked fire” phrase to add another element of cringe and to remind the listener that this is all an act, a character she feels forced to play, making fun of herself and the disingenuousness she feels forced to hide.

The chorus brings it all to a head. The ever-discussed lyrics: “But I’m not a bad b—- / And this isn’t savage,” are meant to poke fun at internet culture but also poke fun at the ways we try to make others perceive us on and offline, through made-up, inauthentic personalities.

Culturally, we’ve gone from “girl boss” to “bad b—-”, from “wild child” to “savage” — the archetypes have never changed, the names we’ve given them have. In a way, it’s Swift throwing her hands in the air and saying, “I don’t want to be whatever this is!”

But then she goes into the next part of the chorus, which to me, is the pinnacle of the entire song. “But I’m never gonna let you down / I’m never gonna leave you out”, she croons. This encapsulates everything that being an eldest daughter is about.

No matter how much of your outward-facing persona is a mask to hide the fear, loneliness and deep feeling of never being good enough, there is always the inescapable need eldest daughters feel to protect the people they love. Sure, you might be flawed, but the best thing about pretending to be fearless is that you’re a reliable rock to everyone else.

“How do I keep up with how we’re supposed to talk in order to describe how much we don’t care when really, we all care about something,” Swift told Lowe about the song in her Apple Music interview. “There’s this aversion to actually seeming like you could need anything.”

Though Swift may be talking to her loved ones, I argue that she’s talking to herself. If everyone else leaves, she’ll never abandon herself, because that’s what eldest daughters do. It’s a feeling that’s difficult to explain until you’ve lived through it, realizing that the quest for people-pleasing and emotional nurturing follows you well into adulthood.

It’s a strange mindset to put into words, but as an eldest daughter, I’m glad Swift did.