In a shocking turn of events, the legendary country music icon Garth Brooks has announced his retirement from the music industry, citing a growing feeling of disillusionment and frustration. The man who once ruled the charts with hit after hit and sold out stadiums around the world now claims that “nobody listens to me anymore.” This decision has left fans and critics alike stunned, raising questions about the state of the country music industry and the challenges faced by aging artists in a rapidly changing musical landscape.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images and Getty Images Plus. Taylor Swift is in London. Even the least culturally clued-in person could not have failed to notice. The city is full of people in “Eras” merch, and social media is awash in concert footage from the tour dates at Wembley Stadium: Travis Kelce donning a top hat and tails to make his own onstage debut, Prince William celebrating his 42nd birthday by shaking it off in his private box. We’ve got an election going on here at the moment, so candidates are busy doing things in public to appear maximally normal. Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition, posted a photo of himself on what he described as a “Swift campaign pitstop” at the “Eras” tour on Friday. Mayor Sadiq Khan posted a version of London’s underground map with all the stops replaced by Taylor Swift song titles and captioned it “London (Taylor’s Version).” For better or worse, this has indeed felt like her town, for a weekend. But one specific place in London is an interesting Petri dish in which to examine the Taylor Swift effect. Before April of this year, the Black Dog pub, in south London’s Vauxhall neighborhood, was an unremarkable sort of place. I live nearby and had been once or twice before. It’s a local joint that does decent food and serves beer—just a pub, in other words. However, after Swift released The Tortured Poets Department, the establishment found itself catapulted to international recognition. The extended, Anthology edition of the album features a song called “The Black Dog,” in which Swift as narrator describes realizing that a lover—presumably one of the two Londoner boyfriends that most of the album is about—had forgotten to turn off location sharing, and she then works out that he is cheating on her by tracking him to a bar by that name. I went down this past weekend to see whether there would be any Swifties at the pub before or after their “Eras” experience and, if so, to ask them to explain themselves. As I walked over there, at 3 p.m. on Saturday, I sort of expected to be disappointed. Why would people in London for a weekend, some of them from as far afield as the States, spend any of their precious time at a bog-standard pub in a part of town well off the tourist trail? Surely they had better places to be? This was just a bonus track, after all. I need not have worried. The Black Dog was swarming with groups of friends with “Eras” tote bags; mums and their tweenage daughters in “Eras” T-shirts; beleaguered boyfriends taking photographs of their girlfriends, all their arms bedecked in lettered bands spelling out their favorite albums and songs and lyrics. On the grass outside the pub, there were even a handful of girls stringing together more of these friendship bracelets. Inside, it was even busier, and anyone hoping for a table without a reservation was kidding themselves