As the news of Taylor Swift’s three canceled dates in Vienna over an elaborate terrorist plot make the rounds, it seems a general “dark pall” has been cast over the singer of late. It started earlier in the year, with the “conspiracy theory” (a.k.a. totally plausible hypothesis) that every time another female pop star has a chance of making it to number one on the charts, Swift chooses that week to release a new iteration of The Tortured Poets Department. Which is why there are now thirty-plus variants of the album. Yet another reason many people felt that Billie Eilish was shading Swift specifically when she told Billboard, “We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging… which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money.” The shade was felt whether Eilish intended it or not because everyone knows that Swift is the “queen” of doing this.
Eilish also remarked, “I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is. It is right in front of our faces and people are just getting away with it left and right…” While Eilish was sure to say “some artists,” it was difficult for many readers, Swifties included, not to automatically think of Taylor’s album release methods. Or tactics, if you prefer. And yes, she weaponized them just in time for Eilish’s release of Hit Me Hard and Soft, her third record. Alas, it was blocked out of the top spot thanks to the three variants of TTPD that Swift unleashed the same day, May 17th. This precise “phenomenon” (and hardly what Chappell Roan would call a “femininomenon”) also happened when Charli XCX released Brat (after which the world was never the same).
A week after the album might have slid into the top slot on the UK charts, Swift conveniently decided to release six—that’s right, six—TTPD album variants that were exclusive to the UK. The geotargeting on this front felt especially calculated (to use that word Swift hates being called), and totally merited XCX writing a song called “Sympathy is a knife,” suspected to be about Swift specifically because of the lyric, “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show/Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.” This being a reference to the brief period when Swift was “canoodling” with The 1975’s Matty Healy, for which XCX’s fiancé, George Daniel, is the drummer. There were other “nods” to being made to feel insecure by Swift throughout the song, including the part of the chorus that goes, “‘Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried/I’m opposite, I’m on the other side.”
Charli fans were “moved” enough by the track and its supposed muse to start chanting, “Taylor is dead” at a show of hers in São Paulo on June 22nd. When XCX was informed of the “mantra,” she spoke out on social media, saying, “Can the people who do this please stop. Online or at my shows. It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community.” So yes, that’s just the first piece of the kind of darkness that’s been following Swift lately, this “varietal” ostensibly of her own making. To be sure, this aspect of said darkness is rooted in her competitive nature and insatiable drive to “succeed”—or, as Lana Del Rey put it earlier this year, “She’s told me so many times that she wants it more than anyone.”
That much was made clear early on in her career, not just in her willingness to take a bum deal with Big Machine Records, but even in the mention, during an 00s-era interview, of why she decided to play a twelve-string guitar instead of a six-string one. The reason, as she told the interviewer, in the country twang she was then putting on, “I had this one real jerk of a teacher… he goes, ‘There’s no way that you’ll be able to play a twelve-string guitar at your age and your fingers aren’t developed enough and there’s no way you’d be able to play it.’ …So I got that twelve-string guitar and I would play it every day until my fingers bled, and, you know, at first it seemed really hard, and then I just realized that if I put my mind to something, then it was really mind over matter.” This seeming to be her ongoing philosophy for “winning” at the charts. Yet even her continued “domination” in numbers hasn’t fooled “the culture,” with The Guardian publishing an article titled, “Taylor Swift may have captured the charts, but Charli XCX captured the zeitgeist” the same week Swift blocked XCX from the number one spot.
However, even if the cracks in Swift’s “reign” have started to show this (Brat) summer as the “Gen Z girls”—namely, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan—take over, there was still The Eras Tour to prove her “crown” undisputed. What with the hordes willing to schlep across the world and pay any price to see her (this also resulting in the “Taylor Swift economy” effect, as the business the tour brought to each stop bolstered the revenue of restaurants, hotels and the like). Including an American stalker of Swift’s, who made threats to both her and her current boyfriend, Travis Kelce. The stalker in question flew all the way to the Gelsenkirchen, Germany show, where he was arrested the day of the July 18th performance. Thus, the dark pall surrounding Swift got a shade darker. Ratcheting up on July 29th during a Taylor Swift-themed yoga class where twenty-five children turned up to participate. Tragically, three of those children, all girls, would not make it out alive after a stabbing rampage by a seventeen-year-old named Axel Rudakubana.
In the aftermath of the attack, misinformation regarding the “background” (read: ethnicity and origins) of the stabber began to spread rampantly online, prompting ongoing political unrest throughout the UK that was propelled by proponents of the far-right. With Swift in the eye of the storm as the “link” to it all, any theories that the use of her name and music might have been a factor in the targeting of this class seemed to be corroborated by yet another, more ambitious terrorist (two, in fact) attempting to infiltrate her August 8th show in Vienna. The plot was foiled (ergo averting another 2017 Dangerous Woman Tour-level tragedy), with Swift spooked enough to cancel all three dates of her slated Vienna performances.
This means she’ll be “on break” until August 15th, when her next rash of dates for The Eras Tour have her circling back to London’s Wembley Stadium, meaning that she’ll be in the heart of one of the sources of her recent darkness (apart from Joe Alwyn). And it wouldn’t be surprising if she mentioned the Southport stabbings while onstage (then again, Swift tends to disappoint when it comes to being open about anything “too political”).
To round out the recent tincture of darkness enveloping the pop star, and almost as though to mock everything Swift and her fanbase represent, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap was released at the beginning of August. It’s a movie that takes place at a “Taylor Swift-esque concert” where, you guessed it, a trap has been set up to lure and arrest a notorious serial killer (played by Josh Hartnett, in his villain era). Indeed, Shyamalan pitched the premise as: “What if The Silence of The Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?” It doesn’t exactly help the current non-rosy image Swift seems to be embodying/attracting at the moment.
But perhaps this darkness all goes back to what was initially referenced above: Swift’s obsession with being “ahead.” And while Swift herself loves to talk about karma, perhaps she didn’t consider the way in which she might have tipped the karmic scales by being so consumed with the number one (not, in this case, thirteen) spot. For it doesn’t feel like a cosmic coincidence that all of these horrible things should be happening after her summer of chart-blocking, preventing other women in the game from getting their flowers. All thanks to this thorny rose by the name of Swift.
