There’s a 1976 Eve Babitz essay about a magazine reporter who noses into a scoop while watching Elizabeth Taylor eat room-service caviar with onion, right in front of the used car salesman whom she’s supposedly dating. Surely, the reporter thinks, the one and only Elizabeth Taylor would not subject a lover to onion breath? Indeed not—the telltale allium portends that at this very moment, dear Liz is deep in secret negotiations to remarry Richard Burton! That’s world-historic gossip. I don’t usually go as far out of my way to think about Taylor Swift’s upcoming wedding to Travis Kelce, but then she announced her new album on his podcast, and one track on it is a song-length dick joke. At least everyone’s having a giggle—I don’t even know what happened to the poor used car salesman.
What’s the harm in a little fun, I thought, as I headed off to a screening of The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, a music video premiere and behind-the-scenes documentary that played at all 540 AMCs in the country this past weekend. “I didn’t realize we were coming here for one music video,” said the woman behind me on the out escalator, with no appreciation for the other 85 minutes’ worth of making-of clips, artist commentary, and lyric visualizers (the clean versions). Taylor Swift fans are eating, catered by Target exclusives, TikTok effects, a “content capture activation” at the Century City mall in Los Angeles, and “Showgirl Era”-inspired cupcakes that come in “orange vanilla” and “teal vanilla,” which are the same flavor.
New Swift songs are prized commodities, and we’re insatiable. “You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby,” she warns in the new song called “Elizabeth Taylor,” pondering fame, exposure, and the ever-tenuous nature of celebrity marriage. But, like most ordinary rules of pop music stardom, this one doesn’t fully apply to Swift: Her 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, had a big hit in the Post Malone adult-contemporary duet “Fortnight,” but in the same year, the Eras Tour and savvy marketing sent her 2019 song “Cruel Summer” to the top of the charts, too. More than any other pop singer, Swift has the luxury of setting her own agenda. Even before it came out, The Life of a Showgirl was already the biggest pop album of the year.