When I worked as a Digital Culture Reporter at Business Insider, we had an expression for how we’d cover the buzziest new stories: Flood the zone. Like a faulty fire hydrant, or a vacuum cleaner whizzing up and down with the uncontrollable hysteria of a feral raccoon, our directive was to suck up as many clicks as possible through every angle imaginable. I recall this happening during the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Titan submersible implosion in 2023, when social media was completely engulfed by updates every minute. Even if your beat wasn’t geopolitics or the economic structure behind deep-sea tourism, you were supposed to drop everything and help perpetuate the flood, or find a way to work it into your coverage, however contrived. I wrote a story about how people were making Zelenskyy fancams and dissected the way TikTokers were spreading misinfo about the war by using fake violent audios.
Taylor Swift is the Titan submersible implosion of music journalism—or a series of them, or one endless sustained ultrabuzz spectacle—driving a rapturous surge of media coverage by churning out so much material. It’s an increasingly rare kind of cultural domination—even at the height of the Beatles or Michael Jackson, there was always a pantheon of other deities. Swift has a monopoly on monoculture, she’s the Elon Musk super-entrepreneur of music. It’s why Gannett, the country’s biggest newspaper chain, hired a dedicated Taylor Swift reporter.
There have been hundreds of positive and punitive articles published about her online since The Life of a Showgirl was released on Friday. People alone has written dozens in the last week, from individual pieces cataloging every song to a story written about a single comment Travis Kelce left on an Instagram post made by Kameron Saunders, a backup dancer in the the video for Swift’s song “Fate of Ophelia.” (“You killed it as always Kam!!” he wrote. That’s the story.) Other article concepts include ELLE Australia’s “213 Truly Chaotic Thoughts I Had While Listening to ‘The Life of A Showgirl’ For the First Time” and Parade Magazine’s “Big Words in Taylor Swift Songs and What They Mean.” Rolling Stone caught immense flak on release day for touting their first ever “homepage takeover” and turning the site into an elaborate “immersive experience” in honor of Swift’s transcendent magnificence. When you visited the site, it was mint green—the palette for Showgirl—and every visible article was something about the record (which they immediately scored a five out of five) or how it slotted into Swift’s ongoing and ever-accumulating legacy.
During our catch-up call last week, my editor made an unusual request: “So, uh, and this is the only time I’ll ask this,” he said with a hint of agitation in his voice. “Is there a Taylor Swift Rabbit Holed angle?”
So that’s how we got here. I embarked on a quest to find some way, somehow, of uniquely covering this megastar who’s been excessively documented, whose every word and manner of dress has been dissected to death by the click goblins at Us Weekly and Page Six. On Discord, I tried to infiltrate s w i f t c o r d and “Taylor Swift,” two servers with thousands of active Swifties. They’re tight-knit communities, with power users who welcome every newcomer and specific channels dedicated to venting, confessing secrets, wishing members a happy birthday, playing games; one channel called “tree” has a robotic tree nicknamed “treelor swift” growing over time. Everyone was surpassingly civil; instead of barking at each other or lashing out with expletives, the Swifties would calmly state that a certain song “isn’t hitting” or “the mood isn’t right for me right now.” While some were clearly dissatisfied by Showgirl—which has been panned by many critics and fans—they displayed empathy, contorting themselves to allow Swift some grace. “We should be happy that our mother is finally happy!” one Discord user wrote. “Can we still be disappointed? Yes, but we aren’t used to this Taylor the happy one.”
Outside the echo chambers of Discord, things have gotten a lot freakier. TikTok brims with both clever and crazed conspiracy theories. Many fans seem to believe, possibly trapped in the denial portion of the Five Stages of Falling Out of Love With Your Idol, that this is a decoy album. Swift simply released it because she’s a “showgirl,” and showgirls play tricks. In one clip calling the album a “red herring,” a fan described Showgirl as “not Taylor Swift songs. They’re catchy and they’re fun, but lyrically they are nothing.” Other fans-turned-critics call the album deliberate tradwife propaganda, and an attempt to recoup the MAGA fans she lost after “going liberal” and endorsing Kamala Harris last year. One popular video even says she’s the woman equivalent of YouTuber PewDiePie, arguing that both are bad actors ushering innocent young women and men into the alt-right pipeline. Others don’t think Showgirl is “republican-coded,” just insipid and uninspired—a symptom of an “anti-intellectualism crisis” wreaking havoc.
For the real monomaniacs, this album has unleashed a bounty of dissection opportunities. Swiftian numerology is all over—one fan picked apart individual promo photos to interrogate why a tiny image within the image shows Swift standing next to two exit signs instead of one. Another speculated that an Instagram promo Swift posted on Monday, which has a caption with the word “vibes” stretched out to have 8 I’s, symbolizes that “Wi$h Li$t,” track eight on the album, will be the second video. Even more intricate are the theories surrounding the number “47”; Swift apparently said it twice in her appearance on Kelce’s New Heights podcast, and then Selena Gomez, in a recent post celebrating Swift, included a screenshot of her phone with “The Fate of Ophelia” playing at the 47th second. That led a Reddit user to hypothesize that there’s a secret thirteenth song on Showgirl that would push the runtime from 41 minutes to 47.
This might sound ridiculous to anyone outside the hive, but Swift actively encourages this kind of analysis and listicle-bait with borderline psychotic schemes. For the video for the Midnights song “Bejeweled,” Swift said her team made a “pdf file” for all the Easter eggs, so many they “could not keep track.” Instead of just one big release, her music unfurls as a drip-stream of puzzles that encourage crowdsourcing and theory-crafting. At a certain point, it becomes less about the music than winning and unlocking a secret from the queen. This can backfire in a sense, because fans have such high expectations that they’re upset when the products (the many add-ons: “Crowd Is Your King: Summertime Spritz Pink Shimmer Vinyl,” crewneck sweater box set, “Sweat and Vanilla Perfume CD With Poster,” “Sweat and Vanilla Perfume Portofino Orange Glitter Vinyl,” deluxe acoustic version with two voice memos from studio sessions with Max Martin and Shellback) are just that: products, with no extra winks or lore.
Another fan went forensic mode and freeze-framed the music video for “The Fate of Ophelia” to claim that a glittery ball in a window proves that Swift is planning to stage a musical at The Sphere in Las Vegas in the summer of 2026 (commenters quickly noted that the ball structure in the window was not The Sphere but Science World in Vancouver). One clip dissecting how the line “onyx nights” from “Opalite” could be a reference to fantasy writer Rebecca Yarros (author of Onyx Storm) spawned comments about witchcraft and metaphysical subtexts Swift could be plotting. Another TikToker theorized that each song intentionally interpolates something from an artist (George Michael, the Ronettes, the Jonas Brothers) who at one point beefed with their record label; Swift, they’re saying, is making “Taylor’s Versions” of these artists’ music. This is what Swifties are known for: ascribing genius to every slight possibility of a creative choice. A Reddit user wrote a mini-essay explaining how this album could actually be a masterpiece in camp, and urged fans to read Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” to get the gist.
Deeper down the Swift sinkhole, one woman says this album’s flopping because it’s her twelfth, and Swift has Libra in the twelfth position on her astrology house chart, which supposedly means she’s in an era of self-sabotaging and had to make something fans wouldn’t like. Another person declares that Swift must have been swapped out for an AI dupe, because her music was never this vapid before. Lost in the abyss of cultic fixations and fantasies about Swift, I discovered that a legion of people seem to believe she’s a clone of Zeena LaVey, the artist and daughter of Anton Lavey, who founded the church of Satan. There are even more conspiracy theories so spurious they’d probably pose a legal risk to print.
Desperate for a reprieve, I cleansed myself with Taylor Swiffer, an Italian brainrot parody of the megastar that reimagines her as a doll-cute figure with a platinum-blonde bob and a skirt and legwarmers made of mop tendrils. The realm of surreal Swift parodies includes “Pigeon Taylor Swift” and a clip of an AI-generated man named Amir groaning about how he needs his ears cleaned post-album. They’re balm for engaging with the confounding theories elsewhere. See the viral clip that pairs the atrocious line “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?” with a dismal tray of lemony chicken. There’s also the dude who ranked every song by how “6-7-able” they are.
This is the real life of a showgirl, emphasis on show: an endless discursive blitz, deftly manipulated by Swift to generate as much fan chatter, gossip, and coverage as possible. Her multilayered, ARG-industrial-complex release strategy is echoed and exceeded by the outlets and content creators firing off an iceberg’s worth of takes to seize on the engagement. Despite the hate, Swift Corporation’s strats have worked: Showgirl sold 2.7 million copies on release day, already her biggest week ever and the number two week for any album in the last 35 years. Haters are geeking out at the idea of longtime Swifties “deprogramming,” ditching the cult en masse because they’re vexed by the album. But where will they go? Once you have the stan bug and devote yourself to the all-consuming, insanity-making project of being a Swift fan, it’s impossible to shake the itch. No one crafts easter egg megahunts like her. This episode will soon become another fold in the grand arc. Maybe she’ll redeem herself, maybe she won’t, maybe none of it will matter because everyone will keep talking about her till the end of time.
What I’m listening to: