Last Friday, Taylor Swift released the Lavender Haze music video, and in turn, fans set about identifying and decoding the clues it contained. Easter eggs – hidden messages and references, like the image of Taylor Swift’s and Joe Alwyn’s star signs in the video or the abundance of koi fish at the end (an allusion to her guitar on the Speak Now tour) – add layers of meaning to the work and hint at what to expect from Taylor’s next album. These creative and cryptic puzzles have become staples of Taylor Swift’s relationship with her fans. As she told the Washington Post, “When I was 15 and putting together my first album, I decided to encode the lyrics with hidden messages using capital letters. That’s how it started, and my fans and I have since descended into color coding, numerology, word searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs.”
The prevalence of Easter eggs in popular culture recently became significant enough that even the New York Times took notice. In trying to understand why artists put the effort into these little clues, the journalist claimed, “As content floods our streaming devices, the Easter egg has become an increasingly popular marketing tool…. Getting audiences to study a show, rather than simply watch it, helps keep the conversation going at a time when the shelf life for cultural works has become increasingly short.” In other words, Easter eggs keep fans engaged with an artist and her work.
Taylor Swift agrees with the Times’ take. As she described the role of her Easter eggs, “It’s really about turning new music into an event for my fans and trying to entertain them in playful, mischievous, clever ways.” In her song “Mastermind,” she explores this idea – that leaving clues strengthens her relationship with her fans. The song, ostensibly written to a boyfriend (but easily applicable to her relationship with her fans), paints Swift as a cunning schemer orchestrating a complicated plan to make her boyfriend / fans adore her: “What if I told you none of it was accidental/ And the first night that you saw me, nothing was gonna stop me?/ I laid the groundwork and then, just like clockwork/ The dominoes cascaded in a line/ What if I told you I’m a mastermind.” It’s exactly the image of the sort of person who plants elaborate clues that hint at songs five years before they’re released. The song concludes by highlighting the role of Swift’s scheming in developing her relationships: Claiming, “I'm only cryptic and Machiavellian because I care,” Swift shows that her boyfriend (or fans) “knew the entire time” that she was a mastermind and enjoyed the game of it.
The dynamic Taylor Swift explores in “Mastermind” – the tug of war between an author laying a scheme and a boyfriend/fans eager to figure it out– mirrors the relationship between author and reader in mystery novels. G.K. Chesterton, the author of the Father Brown mystery series, wrote multiple essays exploring the key features of an engaging mystery novel, and succinctly summarized that “The detective story is only a game; and in that game the reader is not really wrestling with the criminal but with the author.” Similarly, as Chesterton puts it in another essay, “The detective story differs from every other story in this: that the reader is only happy if he feels a fool.” In the same way that Easter eggs work by forcing an audience to start as fools and think through the clues, good detective stories refuse to allow readers to passively absorb, and thereby foster the audience’s active engagement as readers puzzle out what the author is hiding from them.
But, as Chesterton argued, detective stories offered more than mere games for readers. These stories were art because they forced readers to notice the “poetry of modern life,” typically relying on symbols and details set in urban environments. In a detective story’s city, “there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon.” This sharpened readers’ attention to the details of the environments they increasingly inhabited. The same is true of Easter eggs, encouraging fans to pay attention to the small details in the increasingly inhabited online worlds.
T.S. Eliot, in reviewing a selection of detective stories, put together a list of rules for the genre. His rules – mandates like “The story must not rely upon elaborate and incredible disguises,” and “The character and motives of the criminal should be normal,” and “The detective should be highly intelligent but not superhuman.” – emphasized the importance of fair play. In other words, “In the ideal detective story we should feel that we have a sporting chance to solve the mystery ourselves.” For Eliot, a mystery should allow readers to figure out the puzzle. What, then, could be a better mystery than the real life clues that fans can and do make sense of when artists hide Easter eggs? As such, it’s easy to imagine Eliot obsessing along with the rest of us about the hidden clues in “Lavender Haze.”
Looking forward to you planting Easter eggs for us.
This is such a wonderful analysis! I honestly feel like every TS song is like a mini mystery novel. She incorporates so many literary references into her lyrics that it's like an inside joke: if you get it, you're in the club. If not....well..., haha.
LOL, I can't tell you how fun your substack is! I just started mine, and posted my first essay, which coincidentally, is also about Taylor Swift. We should "collab" sometime, haha.