The Easter eggs were everywhere. In a photo of a coffee cup with Taylor Swift’s black nail pointing to a number two. In a website glitch, where her site appeared to show an error message hours before the Grammys. In Swift’s Instagram profile picture turning black and white. In her many recent outfits splashed with the green color or snake motifs that infuse her “Reputation” era.
All of them were signs pointing to the imminent release of “Reputation (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecorded version of Swift’s 2017 album — at least, according to the legions of online Swifties who tried decoding every pixel as if they held the key to pop star’s brain.
And though speculation reached a fever pitch when Swift walked into the Grammys red carpet with a gown donned in “Reputation” colors — black and white — she would ultimately deliver a bombshell: not the drop of her fifth rerecording, but a new album altogether.
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“I want to say thank you to the fans by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years,” Swift said while announcing that her next record, “The Tortured Poets Department,” will be released on April 19.
The internet had been bamboozled.
Swift “announcing a BRAND NEW album, after Swifties spent 3 MONTHS waiting on tenterhooks & seeing Easter eggs EVERYWHERE for Reputation TV, has got to be the most ICONIC deepfake EVER! Well played Ms. Swift,” a fan wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“I stayed up until almost 3am because I was in shock from Taylor Swift’s announcement of a brand new album,” another fan wrote on X. “We were all clowning so hard for Reputation TV and she GOT us bad. Don’t ever try to figure Swift, she’s a mastermind.”
Was it that Swifties looked for the wrong clues? After all, the Sunday glitch in taylorswift.com came with a message reading “DPT” — the new album’s initials read backward — and a code that, when unscrambled, read as “red herring,” a distraction. Or was it that the obsession with Swift has left fans creating castles in the air and making far-fetched connections?
According to Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard who’s teaching a course about all things Swift, it’s a little bit of both. Truth be told, though, Swift also simply is a mastermind when it comes to playing a game she’s been cultivating since her country music days, she said.
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“She really wants to create a sense of a special but inclusive fandom, and she’s really, really good at that, and stunningly has remained good at that as the universe of Taylor Swift fans has expanded to include a significant part of the globe,” Burt told The Washington Post. “And one of the ways that she does that is by giving us things to think about that help keep us guessing and help keep us talking about what her next move is going to be.”
It’s easy to tie Swifties’ obsessive sleuthing to the singer’s rise as a global megastar. On Sunday, Swift won her fourth “Album of the Year” award at the Grammy’s, breaking the record for most wins in that category. With her globe-trotting Eras Tour, she added about $5 billion to the U.S. economy with shows that have even registered as earthquakes. Her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has not only boosted the NFL’s brand value by some $122 million, but it has also had a staggering impact on female viewership. She has even inspired politicians to drop references to her music in committee hearings — and one presidential candidate is reportedly hoping for an endorsement.
Share this articleShareAnd the more her fans sleuth, the more demand is generated for her music. But Swift’s plotting — or at least fans’ idea of it — has defined the artist’s entire career, Burt said.
🚨| A deep dive into the source code for Taylor Swift's currently down website reveals multiple words in different languages translated to
- Chairman
- Bruises
- Veins
- Cadence
- Apple Cake
- Talisman
- Love Bombs
- Muse
- Ink
- Evidence
- Fake pic.twitter.com/50XroqQBi9
Her earliest albums included lyric notes rife with secret messages that could be deciphered through the capitalized letters. She’s dropped Easter eggs — secret messages that are embedded in her music videos, photos and social media posts — ever since, fueling a frenzy that reached a boiling last year when she tasked fans with solving 33 million Google puzzles before she revealed the five vault tracks for “1989 (Taylor’s Version).” The Swiftie mad dash briefly broke Google.
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“I’ve trained them to be that way,” Swift told Entertainment Weekly in 2019 about her fans’ detective work. “I love that they like the cryptic hint-dropping. Because as long as they like it, I’ll keep doing it. It’s fun. It feels mischievous and playful.”
With millions of TikTok videos devoted to deciphering the meaning within each trinket in a video, adding up the numbers of every date and — of course — trying to spot some connection to Swift’s lucky number 13, the Easter egg hunt is an ingenious maneuver that not only maintains the engagement of her fiercely loyal fans, but also “keeps us focused on the music and her decisions as an artist, rather than inviting us to violate her privacy,” Burt said.
But mostly, the sleuthing has become an inclusive environment for a fandom that spans age groups backgrounds and continents, Burt said.
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Is it slightly delusional? Yes. Does it edge around conspiracy theory territory? Maybe. Call it what you want, as Swift might put it, but it’s also simply a fun, inclusive and harmless hobby — especially when your clues are substantiated, Burt said.
“Many of these standard theories look for clues that aren’t there, don’t make any sense and don’t track with how the adults I know make decisions,” she said. “And that’s okay. That’s part of being a fan of a thing: You get the tendency to look for patterns that aren’t really there.”
Plus, Burt added: “People saying ‘I’m going to make a public policy decision based on the alignment of the stars’ is dangerous. But Taylor Swift fans thinking that ‘Reputation’ is going to drop because one plus nine plus three equals 13, I don’t think that’s the way that she thinks, but it’s pretty harmless.”
As to when “Reputation (Taylor’s Version)” will finally drop, some Swifties hold Feb. 10 as a possible date. In her first stop of her international tour, Swift will be in Tokyo — the city where the music video for “End Game,” a song from the album, was filmed and the same place where her Reputation Stadium tour ended in 2018.
Let the games begin.
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