Taylor Swift’s Midnights is coming out soon. Here are the conspiracy theories surrounding it. – News 24

This Friday, Taylor Swift will release her 10th studio album, Midnights. A number of fans eagerly awaiting the release are convinced that Swift is going to use the album release to make a big reveal, as always seems to be the case with Swifties. Moreover, they believe that she sowed Easter eggs for said revelation going back years. Because is this really a Taylor Swift album release if we don’t carefully read the flippant comments she said to Jimmy Fallon three years ago?

There are two big fan theories at play in the run-up to Midnights. The first we will call the theory of Karma. The second is Gaylor’s theory. One of them was almost confirmed, and the other almost destroyed.

Take out your decoder ringtones. Find a comically oversized magnifying glass. We are about to go to the detective.

Is there a secret lost Taylor Swift album?

Swift recently announced that track 11 on Midnights would be titled “Karma”. This title fits perfectly into the theory of karma, which goes like this: there is an unreleased secret album by Taylor Swift called Karma which was supposed to be released in 2016. According to fans, this hypothetical album was scrapped following the infamous #KimExposedTaylorParty, when Kim Kardashian released snippets of tapes that seemed to catch Swift in a messy public lie, and the public went wild. quickly turned against her. (The full tape, released four years later in 2020, would exculpate Swift.) The song “Karma” on Midnightsfans think, will be an unreleased piece of the scrapped secret Karma album, and likely a diss track aimed directly at Kanye West as his reputation continues to plummet.

Here is the proof of the Karma theory. For the first part of her career, Swift released a new album precisely every two years. If she followed established patterns, then her sixth album, the 2014 sequel 1989should have been released in 2016. But after her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West made her a public pariah, Swift skipped a year, releasing Reputation rather in 2017. Was there, ask fans to know, another album that was to be released in 2016 instead, preempted for Reputation after Swift’s fall from grace?

Yes, many of those fans decided after Swift released the video for the first single from the Reputation era, “Look what you made me do”. There, Swift can be seen clipping the wings of an airplane labeled “TS6” — or, possibly, Taylor Swift’s sixth album — and scribbling the word “reputation” on it: perhaps an allusion to the idea that her planned sixth album was scrapped. and rebuilt in Reputation. “The world is moving on, another day, another dramatic drama,” she sings. “But not for me, not for me, I only think about karma.”

Two years later, Swift again seemed to drop some clues about the mysterious and lost TS6. In the clip for ‘The Man,’ the camera pans over a wall tagged with Taylor Swift’s album titles – and the word karma, which appears twice on the wall. Next to one of karma tags is a sign that says, “MISSING / IF FOUND RETURN TO TAYLOR SWIFT.”

Once fans got the word karma, they had gone to scour Swift’s old interviews and talk show appearances for more clues. Soon they hit paydirt. In a 2016 interview with Vogue, when asked about her favorite life lesson, Swift cryptically replied, “Karma is real.” It would have been like Swift, fans concluded, for her to have started hiding promotional Easter eggs for what she thought was her next album as she brought him 1989 era at its end.

So far, so Swiftian. But if Karma was written before Taylor’s feud with Kanye turned red, why do so many of his fans think it’s a Kanye diss track? Here we have to delve into the numerology of Taylor Swift. You will recall that “Karma” is track 11 on Midnight. Good! The first time Swift wrote a song about Kanye, in 2010 after he charged the stage during his VMAs acceptance speech, this song was also track 11. Chance?

The karma theory actually got some kind of confirmation from Swift herself. After Swift announced that a track titled “Karma” would appear on Midnights, his management team tweeted triumphantly a gif from the “Man” video showing the karma-scarred wall. No one on Swift’s team has confirmed just a secret Karma exists or that the new song “Karma” is about Kanye, but the tweet seemed to confirm that there was at least an intentional connection between the karma graffiti in “The Man” and the track “Karma” on Midnights.

Along with the gif, the tweet read: “Like how far is too far ahead? Can we hint at something three years ahead? The quote is an allusion to Swift’s 2021 interview with Jimmy Fallon, in which she recounts how she started planting Easter eggs for her fans on her very first album.

“All I started thinking was, ‘How can I hint at things, like how far ahead is too far? Can I hint at something three years in advance? Can I even plan things that far? I think I’ll give it a try,” Swift said at the time. “I think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to be normal music fans and have a normal relationship with music. But if you want to go down a rabbit hole with us, come on, the water is great.

We’re about to dive a little deeper down the rabbit hole as we turn to Gaylor’s theory.

Is Taylor Swift secretly gay?

The broadest definition of a Gaylor would be: “Someone who is interested in bringing queer reading to Swift’s songbook.” A person who is very certain that Swift is straight and that her long-term partnership with Joe Alwyn is real, but who also thinks “Betty” is a deeply strange song, might identify as a Gaylor. The category also includes people who strongly believe that Swift is gay or bisexual and closeted, but has had secret relationships with women. That’s the crowd we’re dealing with next. In the perspective of Midnights‘, their theory was not so much touted as shattered.

As with The Karma Theory, we’ll start with a reveal of the track title. “Lavender Haze” is the title of the first track of Midnightsand since lavender is frequently used as a symbol of the queer community, Gaylors came to the conclusion that “Lavender Haze” would probably be a pretty gay song.

Then Swift clarified. In a video posted on Instagram, she explained that she came across the phrase in an episode of Mad Men and liked it, and that she took it to describe the feeling of being in the early stages of love or infatuation. Queerness never entered his definition.

Then Swift took her reasoning, for many Gaylors, a bridge too far. When you’re in the lavender mist, she explained, you want to stay there despite obstacles, including other people’s opinions about your relationship. “Like my relationship for six years, we’ve had to dodge weird rumors, tabloid stuff, and we just ignore them,” she continued.

So Swift was not only going to make “Lavender Haze” a song about straight people, but she was also going to call Gaylor theories “weird”?

“We Gaylors, we are Ukraine,” one Gaylor said in a now-deleted TikTok in response. “Taylor, you just handed over nuclear bombs to Russia.” Some have accused Swift of “queer-baiting.”

The ‘Lavender Haze’ debacle isn’t the first time Swift has raised Gaylors’ hopes only to dash them at the last minute. Looking ahead to the announcement of his 2019 album Lover, Swift took to dressing in rainbows (the symbol of gay pride!) and said she had a big announcement coming on April 26 (Lesbian Visibility Day!). She announced the album in an interview with Robin Roberts (famous lesbian!). In the music video for the album’s second single, “You Need to Calm Down,” she donned a wig in the colors of the bisexual flag and sang about gay pride.

So Lover dropped, and it turned out to be full of heterosexual wedding songs. A new set of conspiracy theories have sprung up about whether Swift and Alwyn had secretly gotten engaged or possibly even married. The whole thing was in many ways a classic cycle of queer Taylor Swift rumors: everything almost seems plausible until it becomes decidedly heterosexual.

Gaylor’s response to “Lavender Haze” may seem hyperbolic or unnecessarily aggressive, especially since Swift has never made a public statement about being queer and has had multiple extremely public relationships with men. But it’s in its own way a counterpart to the kind of silly, harmless fan speculation behind the Karma Theory.

Swift associates her music with Easter eggs, then she invites her fans to go find them. It’s part of how she creates the powerful intimacy of her best friend that she shares with her fanbase, that sense that she understands them and they understand her on a magically distant level. Part of Swift’s genius is that her songs portray both universal and deeply specific emotions, so it’s possible for her fans to feel deeply seen by her work. When they go in search of the Easter eggs she told them she hid, they feel like they see her again. They, and they alone, understand Swift’s hidden pain, her secret loves, because only she understands theirs.

But now that she’s sent that invitation, everyone who’s heard her feels empowered to go hunting.

In the rabbit hole, the water is great.