Inside the Fan Insanity Unleashed by The Life of a Showgirl

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?”