The formula behind Taylor Swift’s ‘The Fate of Ophelia’, currently the biggest hit

That the lead single from global pop music phenomenon Taylor Swift would be a smash hit was a foregone conclusion. Yet, even by all those expectations and the extent of the American pop star’s stratospheric popularity, ‘The Fate of Ophelia’, the first released single from her latest album The Life of a Showgirl, seems to have acquired a life of its own.

First, the milestones the song has notched up in the past two weeks or so – 'The Fate of Ophelia' has already hit No.1 in some 26 countries (and counting), including the all-important US Billboard Hot 100 and the Official UK Charts. In the former, it entered the charts at the top spot without even selling a physical copy (as it wasn’t available for the first week) and achieved the feat purely on the strength of its radio airplay and streaming.

In fact, the song notched another feat on the top music streaming app Spotify when it was played 3 crore times on its first day alone – an all-time record for any musician. It was enough to propel the album to become the top-selling album of 2025 in the US, simply on the strength of its first-day sales of 27 lakh copies (total global sales until Oct. 18 stands at 55 lakh copies, besides 150 crore online streams). Chances are that the single could also end up as the top-selling song of the year.

But beyond the records and the numbers, what has gone into this pop music moment, becoming bigger than the sum of its parts? Let’s do a deep crunch:

The Swift ‘Era’ is still on

The singer concluded her record-breaking live concert tour, ‘The Eras Tour’, in December last year, and it is clear that the ‘Swifties’ mania is yet to subside. Swifties, as her die-hard, predominantly teen, girl fan base is known, were sure to give the initial push to make the new album and singles race up the charts, and that’s exactly what has happened.

The cultural heft the country-turned-pop star has on today’s social and entertainment landscape is not just unparalleled, but virtually impossible to replicate in today’s fragmented popular culture scenario – not since the days of Michael Jackson and Madonna from the 1980s has any pop star had such a grip over the collective consciousness of the youth.

And Taylor and team know how to leverage it.

There’s no business like show business

While detractors have long complained of Taylor’s ‘disgruntled love sick’ songs as the type that only young girls bawl their eyes out over, in their candyfloss bedrooms, there has been a conscious attempt to broaden the target audience when it came to the new album. Conceptualised around the glory days of show business in America in the mid and latter half of the Twentieth Century, the songs on Life of a Showgirl at once appeal to the familiarity almost everyone has with American entertainment, and then raises it with its reference to anything from post-renaissance paintings to cabaret artists to old Hollywood starlets (there’s one song titled ‘Elizabeth Taylor’).

Pop art with the help of high art

And who the heck is Ophelia? That’s where Swifties’ constant companion, the Google search on their pink smartphones, comes in handy. Ophelia is a tragic character from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a lady who pines for love only to tragically die. And to be very specific, the video to the song kicks off with Taylor enacting a live painting of Ophelia by Friedrich Heyser (which is in a German museum which was suddenly flooded with hundreds of fans after the song broke the internet), before moving on to a host of cultural references: a blonde burlesque performer imitating Marilyn Monroe, a 1960s go-go dancer stylised based on the 1960s girl band The Ronetttes, a French stage actress , and a dancer doing Busby Berkeley-style geometric formations.

And if all these historical and cultural references, from Shakespeare to Heyser paintings and the significance of burlesque in the history of showbiz, weren’t enough to keep them occupied, there was the film. Taylor’s team released a full-length feature film, The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, released in cinema theatres all over, and featuring Taylor in various outfits and looks of showgirls down the ages.

The personal as the public

The ultimate irony in all this overdose of history and culture is that the song, at the heart of it, is actually a plain and old-fashioned love song for her fiancé, and American football star Travis Kelce. From references to ‘keep it hundred’ (Kelce’s jersey number is 87 while Taylor’s lucky number is 13, together adding up to 100) to ‘megaphone’ (referring to his podcast), the lyrics are awash with nods to what only those well-versed with online gossip and trivia about the celeb couple will get at first hearing.

Taylor’s flimsy parallelism, of how Kelce’s love has saved her from a fate similar to that of Ophelia, is coated up in so many layers that it actually adds character to the song, raising it beyond what could have been just another bubblegum pop love song – thereby attracting a more ‘adult contemporary’ audience.

The viral dance

Of course, nothing works in popular entertainment today if it didn’t come with a sizeable dollop of internet virality. This could well be the area where this song has struck gold – while chat forums are abuzz with Swifties trying to make sense of the overpowering historical context, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are thrumming with fans doing the ‘Ophelia’ dance – a simple, but catchy, hand movement sequence that Taylor does in the video while singing the chorus.

Sounds like...

With the song and its dark and dramatic arc covering art and history, it also seems to have attracted another influential audience besides young girls – the LGBTQ community. If the glamorous setting, ranging from live paintings to the showbiz razzmatazz of a bygone era, was not hook enough, at several points along the song, we get sounds uncannily similar to older gay anthems, from Lana Del Ray’s ‘Summertime Sadness’ to Lady Gaga’s ‘Paparazzi’.

The interesting bit is that instead of this sparking off plagiarism allegations, it is actually leading to added interest in the song from new quarters, including gay men, influencers, artists, and dancers who have taken to social media platforms replicating the dance moves, or amateur DJs putting up their own remix versions featuring the ‘copied’ songs as well. There is no business like show business, and for the moment at least, there seems to be no showgirl like Taylor Swift.

 

Entertainment