I will admit, it’s a bit awkward to hear one of the country’s greatest living lyricists sing about being dickmatized. The woman who gave us the line: “Time, mystical time, cutting me open then healing me fine,” relying on such internet-y language feels ill-fitting—like hearing a toddler swear or seeing Leonardo DiCaprio appear on a podcast. But as much as Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl marks her return to Max Martin’s decidedly capital-F fun production style, it’s also one of her most jargon-filled projects to date. Here’s a rundown of some of the main internet references that caught my attention:

  1. The aforementioned reference to the term “dickmatized,” on “Wood:” “He ah-matized me and openеd my eyes” (I must note here that this song brings me immense joy.)
  2. The chorus of “Eldest Daughter,” which calls out the endless memeified subject of eldest daughter suffering: “Every eldest daughter / Was the first lamb to the slaughter”
  3. Everybody’s so punk on the internet / Everyone’s unbothered till they’re not / Every joke’s just trolling and memes” —“Eldest Daughter”
  4. The line “Did you girl-boss too close to the sun?” on “Cancelled”
  5. Going back to “Wood,” my personal favorite line is “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His lovе was the key that opened my thighs,” which some online conspiracists think is a reference to this 2021 tweet from an Ariana Grande fan:

Taylor’s use of this fad-ish terminology divided the reception to TLOSG. Plenty of fans voiced frustration that these lines lean too much on viral talking points and feel like a regression from her folklore-era prose. Plus, they say that the wording is out of character, coming from someone who made a point of saying on her fiancé’s podcast that she stays off the internet. But! I’d like to offer Taylor some grace in my own interpretation of the album’s slang-heavy moments.

She (and her listeners) should be allowed to have some fun. Taylor even recently admitted that she feared her songwriting talent was tied to suffering, “I used to, kind of, have this dark fear that if I ever were truly, like, happy, and free being myself, and nurtured by a relationship, what happens if the writing just dries up?” she said on BBC1 while promoting the release today. “What if writing is directly tied to my torment and pain? And it turns out that’s not the case at all, and we just were catching lightning in a bottle with [The Life of a Showgirl].” That sentiment does leave me dismayed about the harsh reactions to Showgirl’s irreverence. It may have been slightly misleading for her to tease the album as a return to her folklore-era storytelling, but there should’ve been some understanding that working with Max Martin (who she collaborated with on songs like “22” and “Shake It Off”) meant there was slight unseriousness in store.

Most obviously, this album’s lyricism is her attempt to let loose after spending multiple eras taking herself too seriously. (Branding yourself as a tortured poet seems literally exhausting.) At the same time, given the limited attention span of the modern listener, every artist now has to resort to a bit of lyrical clip-farming to spark discourse and extend a song’s shelf life (even if the language itself will soon feel dated).

But my other read of this era’s very online style is that today, the literal life of a showgirl is tied to the internet. By loading her album with digital slang, maybe she’s winking at the chaotic online culture that stars of her caliber have to be fluent in to stay relevant—even if they insist on podcasts that they avoid it all.

But I totally understand why my reading of TLOSG isn’t a common one right now. Even if this was Taylor’s intended strategy—cleverly commenting on the internet’s role in a showgirl’s life this way—the online language she employed is so tightly woven into the internet’s everyday lexicon that a casual listener basically has no choice but to dismiss this as lazy. This method’s effectiveness would rely on a patient, open-minded-listener base. When almost everyone on the planet listens to you, it’s unrealistic to assume that’s how the vast majority of passive fans will receive your music.

Not to turn this all back on the consumer or whatever, but in a way, we’re all showgirls online, performing for the biggest audience. If Taylor’s version of acknowledging that truth is saying someone “girl-bossed too close to the sun,” then I choose to accept it as a fun risk and trust that she’ll return to her tortured poet ways at some point in the near future.