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When the gong rang out across the world just two weeks ago, announcing that not only would Taylor Swift be releasing her new album The Life of a Showgirl, but she’d also be releasing an accompanying movie-adjacent thing, the response was two-fold. Firstly, it was hart not to marvel at her marketing genius. But also, what is it, exactly? Titled Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, the “movie” is a grandiose music video premiere, a showcase for all Swift’s newest jams, and, it turns out, a place for Swifties to commune and determine what they care about this album cycle. Below, find a full rundown of what’s going on in the life of our most famous showgirl.
She’s debuting a new music video, twice
The “movie” both begins and ends with Swift showing her newest music video for “The Fate of Ophelia.” The video is a tour through various eras of showgirl-ism. It begins with Swift inside John Everett Millais’s famous “Ophelia” painting from 1852 in a museum scene. Then, it transitions through the next 175 or so years of showgirls. Swift is a Ronette dancing all ‘60s-like in a club; she’s Esther Williams in a Busby Berkely-style production, wearing a swimcap; she’s a stage actress fighting pirates on a ship set; she’s a pop star, etc. At one point, she catches a football while singing “team.” She does it cleanly, but there’s still abject fear in her eyes, which is charming. She ends the video in a green bathtub as a reference to her album cover, which is in turn a reference to the “Ophelia” painting. Closing the loop is what Taylor Swift does best.
Then she gives some BTS
Interspersed throughout the rest of the movie-thing is some behind-the-scenes footage of Swift filming the music video. The whole production was made with her team from the Eras Tour, including iconic choreographer Mandy Moore (no, not the popstar-turned-actress, the So You Think You Can Dance alum). Throughout the BTS, we get details like the fact that the bread you see was baked by Swift herself, duh. We also hear her say the words “that’s a really great take but let me try to do one perfect,” which is the most “Taylor Swift” sentence ever uttered.
She gets shady with it
The real meat of the whole display is Swift talking through each individual track on the album before the lyric videos, including why she wrote it and what it means to her. Showgirl is, often, an antagonistic album, with potential shots taken at, in no particular order: Charli XCX, Joe Alwyn, Matty Healy, Scott Borschetta, Scooter Braun, and Olivia Rodrigo. Swift does not mention any of these people by name, but she does work to either control the narrative around her responses to them and, often, stokes the flames.
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Introducing “Father Figure,” she says that the song is about two people, one of whom is a mentor and the “betrayal and wit” between them. She makes a point of saying that she went to the George Michael estate to ask if her sample of his work would fly, because “I know how sacred songwriting is.” That could be a shot at Olivia Rodrigo — with whom she has a rumored dispute over credits on one of Rodrigo’s songs — or either Borschetta and Braun, who she blames for not giving her control of her masters.
When it comes time to chat about “Actually Romantic,” her veiled diss track about Charli XCX following Charli’s song “Sympathy is a knife,” Swift has an irrepressible smirk. She describes it as a “love letter to someone who hates you.” “Sometimes you don’t know that you’re a part of someone else’s story, but you are,” she says. “There can be this moment where it’s unveiled to you through things that they do that are very overt. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to be like ‘Oh my god, that’s so much. You did so much with this.’”
But the music is “CENSORED!”
Much to the audience’s dismay, the lyric videos are all the clean versions of songs. Appropriately, the biggest reaction of the whole night are to lost favorite lyrics. Nobody reacts much to the change from “my dick’s bigger” to “my check’s bigger” on “Father Father” (is it a better lyric?). But on “Actually Romantic,” the audience all but revolts when the line about “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave” gets changed to “when you’re out feeling brave.” They are fully “booing” by the time that “it makes me wet” changes to “it makes me sweat.”
Then, perhaps even more violence arrives on “Wood.” The horniest song Swift has ever released, she introduces it by joking that it’s about “superstition,” given that she knows that we know that it’s about Travis Kelce’s penis. There is utter disbelief, loudly, when the lyric “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was thе key that opened my thighs” gets changed to “opened by skies.” Finally, on the final chorus, the entire audience simultaneously shouts “Thighs” over top of “Skies.” It’s proof that, once again, when it comes to the Swift to Swiftie relationship, the Swifties have the power.