On Friday, 25 September 2026, Taylor Swift delivered unto the world The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore in the form of four additional tracks that weren’t part of last year’s album (which spent an impressive twelve weeks at the number one spot on the Billboard 200 and absolutely destroyed the records for biggest opening sales week[1]). The songs are “Patient Zero,” “Pink Clouding,” and “Babylon,” with “Cleveland!” rounding out the set. As happened when The Life of a Showgirl itself came out…suddenly everyone lost their minds! Taylor Swift is certainly a cultural figure who generates BIG REACTIONS but the reactions to The Life of a Showgirl and these new encore tracks particularly fascinates me. I’ve been pondering it for a year now and I thought it would be fun to chat about it. Please feel free to let me know what you think below, too!

To state my bias up front, I dig Taylor Swift. I’ve been listening to her since before Fearless had a platinum edition. I think the new songs are a lot of fun and I love how her style and sound are always shifting via her reinventions. I love that in Taylor Swift just like I do in Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

So the new songs dropped, everyone listened to them, and then everyone had AN OPINION. All it takes is a casual perusal of the social media site of your choosing to see two very divided, very vocal camps. On the one side are the people loudly proclaiming these tracks are wonderful and such fun and every album can’t be folklore and evermore, alright? On the other side we have the people proclaiming just as loudly that she’s lost her way, these songs are flat and forced, and maybe she needs to take a break or even – GASP! – maybe it’s over for Ms. Swift.

And I keep thinking…have we forgotten how being a fan works? Has the internet and social media really ruined us this much?

To give just a wee bit of background so we’re all on the same page, in his brilliant little text Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier illustrates how social media being free means WE are the products it sells – more specifically our attention to the advertisers who pay these platforms to keep us scrolling so our eyes are on their ads. Lanier offers a shorthand to capture this: “Seems like a good moment to coin an acronym so I don’t have to repeat over and over again, the same account of the pieces that make up the problem. How about ‘Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent’? BUMMER.”^[2] In modifying our behaviors in the service of those who pay for our attention, social media elevates the “worst” in us as Lanier explains:

Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Flight-or-flight responses occur in seconds while it can take hours to relax.

This is true in real life but it is even more true in the flattened light of algorithms. [….] Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than it’s own enhancement, and yet the result is an unnatural amplification of the “easy” emotions, which happen to be the negative ones. [….] Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purpose of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors the degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.^[3]

All this is to say, the more a post generates negative emotions like fear and anger the more it will be boosted and the more we see such posts the more we a) realize that’s the way to get our own posts to generate engagement and b) begin to cultivate similar habits in our responses to things. And this, I’d argue, is why Taylor Swift dropping any new music turns her fandom into a fire fight about whether or not it’s THE BEST EVER or THE END OF HER CAREER.

But, to be blunt, that’s fucking stupid. Being a fan doesn’t mean each and every piece of work in the catalogue of whomever you’re a fan of moves your heart and soul the same way. It doesn’t mean it’s an ever-increasing endorphin high with no low points. No band means more to me than U2 does. Finding them as I was just entering college meant they formed me in so many important ways. They taught me the Gospel message was one of justice and, more important than that, they modelled for me what practically working for justice looked like. I learned about our world and began to get involved because of U2. They have shaped my heart, my soul, my mind, and my life in all the ways that matter…but I still don’t like Zooropa. I don’t get it. For that matter, I never listen to Boy or October. And I adore Pop, an album pretty universally derided amongst U2 fans.

This is what being a fan means though! And talking about what I love and don’t love with other U2 fans is part of the fun of being in a fandom.

I can’t even fathom the arrogance or audacity it would take for me to proclaim U2 “over” because I didn’t like an album of theirs. But then again, I fell in love with their music before social media’s toxically corrosive touch was spilled over every part of our lives.

Though I don’t think it’s just this. I think this really heated reaction Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl and The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore have generated touches on something a little bit deeper and a little bit more interesting than that.

Like Black Panther and “Afrofuturism” or Backrooms and “liminal space,” it doesn’t take long for any “intellectual” or “academic” conversation of Taylor Swift to bring up her “parasocial relationship” with her fans. In short, the term refers to people who are deeply into the life of a celebrity to such a degree where they feel like they know them even though the celebrity doesn’t and will never meet let alone know them.

One of the things that has always fascinated me about Taylor Swift’s brilliance is the way she cultivates these sort of relationships. From the way she uses social media to the way she leaks hints and clues and codes for her fans to figure out to the way she talks about her fans to the sense of friendship she helps cultivate between her fans (like with the bracelets at concerts, etc.) – Taylor Swift does a beautiful and brilliant job in helping her fans feel like they know her.

I’ve always marveled at musicians’ ability to write a song that expresses an incredibly intimate moment and simultaneously invites their fans to fill it up with their own lives. When I listen to “She’s Always A Woman” or “The Guy That Says Goodbye To You Is Out Of His Mind” or “One” or “F**kin’ Perfect” or “Follow Me” or “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” I fill those songs with moments and people from my own life. That’s why they move me. That’s why they’re so special.

With Taylor Swift, we often had both. She gave us these beautifully written songs we could fill up with our own lives and we had the fun of trying to sort the clues and the timelines and figure out who they were about. Best of both worlds! And that’s great when we’re reminiscing with our bestie about being fifteen or how Jake Gyllenhall is a dick who never gave her back her scarf. But since getting engaged to and marrying Travis Kelce the landscape has changed.

EVERYONE (maybe even everyone living and dead) has an opinion on Taylor’s relationship with Travis (I mean I don’t know ghosts are paying attention to Taylor Swift but I’ll err on the side of the safe bet and say they are). They were heated. They were intense. And they were personal. Again, Taylor Swift has created a relationship with a lot of her fans that fosters a sense of intimate connection with greater skill than I’ve ever seen a musician do before. So I would bet this reality is affecting everyone’s reactions to the songs on The Life of a Showgirl and The Encore.

Why? Well, there’s no guessing who these songs are about. We know she’s singing about Travis and their relationship.

On “Wood” when she sings about a “magic wand” or says, “Forgive me, it sounds cocky / He (ah!)matized me / And opened my eyes / Redwood tree / It ain’t hard to see / His love was the key / That opened my thighs” we know she’s talking about Travis Kelce’s penis and that feels a little weird.

I have no problem with sex in pop songs and I think we need to be more open about sex in general.

But when Roger Daltrey sings, “Mama’s got a squeeze box / She wears on her chest / And when daddy comes home / He never gets no rest [….] She goes in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out” on the Who’s “Squeeze Box” or Brian Johnson tells us, “She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies / Knocking me out with those American thighs / Taking more than her share, had me fighting for air / She told me to come, but I was already there” on AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” we don’t know who they are talking about so the songs can be ours, too.

Because we all know Taylor Swift is singing about Travis Kelce now, I think the songs on The Life of a Showgirl and last Friday’s The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore land differently. The guesswork and decoding are done which, in turn, makes it a little harder for us to fill those personal songs up with our own lives.

Also, if you’re the sort of fan who doesn’t like Travis or doesn’t like Taylor and Travis together and you feel that deep friendship connection with Taylor Swift that she’s fostered amongst her fans…well what does it feel like when your friend is dating or married to an asshole? The last thing in the world you want to do is listen to your friend rave about their relationship when you can clearly see how bad it is. You love them too much to see them lie to themselves (and everyone else) and suffer like that!

Now, I’m not saying I think Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have a bad relationship. I don’t know. How could I? I don’t know them. I didn’t make the cut for the Madison Square Garden wedding. But I’m theorizing that this sense of connection fans feel with Taylor is helps amplify these heated reactions to her last two releases and I’m theorizing that people’s sense of her relationship may be shaping those reactions, consciously or unconsciously. And I think when you add that to how the internet and social media has already warped the way we react to things we love and hate, well that’s a recipe for the sort of madness The Life of a Showgirl and The Encore have released.

I’m not saying that’s the whole story. God knows as a brilliant, talented, popular, and wealthy woman people will attack Taylor Swift for any reason any chance they get. But it seems like these factors play a role. With this theorizing in mind, I’m also suggesting we all relax. Listen to what you like. Don’t listen to what you don’t. But don’t rant insufferably about either point of view. I don’t like Zooropa so I just don’t talk about it.

What say you? Am I off my rocker? Does this make sense to you, too? The comment section is just a short scroll below and then I can know how wild my theorizing sounds ;D.

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[1] Hannah Dailey, “All 4 New Songs on Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore’ Ranked,” Billboard. Published September 25, 2026. https://www.billboard.com/lists/taylor-swift-life-of-showgirl-encore-tracks-ranked/

[2] Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (New York: Picador, 2018), 30.

[3] Lanier, Ten Arguments, 19-21.