Taylor Swift just rocked swifties’ worlds last night when, as the clock struck midnight, she announced a new track title for her upcoming album Midnights.
Although she had revealed seven tracks already in her “Midnights Mayhem with Me” TikTok series, this one (track number 11, called “Karma”), was different. Keep reading to find out why.
The #KarmaIsReal theory
Taylor Swift doesn’t usually do things on a whim, and that can be said for every aspect of her usual album rollouts. So, when she captions a video with “been excited to announce this one,” and giggles after saying the track title “Karma”, then you know something is going on.
As much as swifties love theorizing about every little detail, Taylor is not without blame when it comes to teasing and hinting, and she is definitely in on all the theories. The “Karma” theory is simultaneously one of the most obscure swiftie theories, and one of the most widely believed, especially with this announcement.
It is believed there’s an entire unreleased Taylor Swift album dating back to 2016 that was scrapped by the artist after the entire internet/world turned against her, for that infamous phone call with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
Up until that point, Taylor had released an album every two years like clockwork, but two years after 1989, Taylor’s reputation was in a particularly tough spot, and the moment did not feel right to release an album. So, quite fittingly, Taylor dropped out of public life, and redirected her plans toward a brand-new release, Reputation, which came out in late 2017.
Clues in the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video
More or less farfetched, swifties have theorized that a number of references to the long-lost TS6 album can be found in the music video for her Reputation lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do”.
The most obvious one would be the ominous grounded plane Taylor can be seen destroying and spraying the word “Reputation” on throughout the video. Astute fans noticed that “TS6” was written on the back wing, so, by chopping off the plane’s wings, Taylor stopped the album from taking off, and instead covered it up with Reputation.
Ever since then, swifties have been looking everywhere for confirmation of the existence of this mysterious unreleased TS6.
Clues in the “The Man” music video
The reason why it’s believed this album was meant to be called Karma dates back to Taylor Swift’s “The Man” music video. In the scene where the protagonist (a male version of Taylor) is relieving himself against a graffitied wall, drawings of all of Taylor’s discography – from Fearless to Reputation – can be seen sprayed across. But there’s one word that doesn’t fit the theme, “Karma”.
“Karma” is written twice, once in orange, once in white, and Taylor being Taylor, there was no way the word didn’t have some type of double meaning. The official account for Taylor’s management team, Taylor Nation, took to Twitter to confirm that the graffiti from the early 2020 music video was indeed hinting to (at least) the Midnights track.
Whether or not this song was meant to be on an album of the same title hasn’t been confirmed yet, but Taylor Nation also made a series of tweets with the phrase “Karma is real” that has always pertained to an album, not a song.
Wait, there’s more!
Fans also usually mention Vogue‘s “73 Questions With Taylor Swift” video from 2016, published before the whole Kimye fiasco, where Taylor says the phrase “Karma is real”. At the time, she didn’t know she would be releasing Reputation, so it makes sense that she would be dropping Easter eggs for her new album – which was supposedly meant to drop later that year. This is something Taylor is known for doing.
Likewise, Taylor tends to match her aesthetic – from fashion, to hair, and makeup – to whatever musical era she’s in at a given moment. For Reputation she wore a lot of black clothes and heavy makeup, whereas for Lover she was almost always seen wearing bright colors.
Around the time the 1989 era was wrapping up, Taylor debuted her iconic bleached hairstyle, and swifties assumed this meant the new era would see the Pennsylvania native go for an edgier, maybe rock-leaning sound.
We’re actually just scratching the surface here. The details to this theory go much deeper, and for once, they seem to make a lot of sense, especially now that Taylor seems to have at least partially confirmed them.
The hashtag #KarmaIsReal in the swiftie lexicon doesn’t necessarily mean that someone got what was coming to them, but is used by Taylor’s loyal fans every time they find new clues that somewhere out there, an album called Karma is sitting idle, ready to be released.
