I’m writing this at the end of day 2 of a phase of intense fandom, likely to last about 2 more. I have spent the entire day gingerly getting closer to her. Googling this turned into looking up lyrics to that. Throwing on reputation during the walk from the train just to have something on became putting on specific tracks to fix the tight knots they were winding in my brain. I’m hooked dude.
It would be cooler if some part of my aesthetic tracked some part of her history, which has thus far been rocketous ascent into generational phenomenon; if my eye recognized a great emergence in a corner of pop culture and knew to track it upwards. But I am thoroughly late on Taylor Swift. The song I can’t get out of my head right now is “Blank Space,” which is not only four years old, but which already featured in a personal memory of a hookup that took place when it came out. In the ten years I’ve known of her existence, I’ve done nothing but write her off as a straight-bodied pop confection. Maybe the last aggressively white superstar for a while, I’ve wondered. I saw her less as a good/bad talent than simply as a necessary filler in the landscape, the way some people used to think of the president.
My turning point came when I heard “Gorgeous” about two weeks ago. I was hanging out with G, a lusciously cute girl who had been my friend and occasional reverie for two years, but who had just broken up with her boyfriend and conscripted me out of the blue as a stopgap. The arrangement was still new, and absorbing a mid-July night from a beach chaise on top of her building, I was open to liking what she liked. She moved around the empty roof like a lightning bug, singing and arabesqueing to the Taylor Swift playing out of her phone. I started picking up on the lyrics: articulated and simple, clipped out of earnest young loose-leaf but undeniably strong.
If you’ve got a girlfriend, I’m jealous of her / But if you’re single, that’s honestly worse.
The words were magnetic. Hearing them, I felt what she was feeling.
You’re so gorgeous, I can’t say anything to your face, Cause look at your face.
The lyrics hit a clear note, building little folded fortresses of visceral experience. They were girlish, but they were relatable and lucid.
Long night with your hands up in my hair, echoes of your footsteps on the stairs, stay here honey, I don’t want to share / cause I liiiiike you.
The reputation album was the only music downloaded on G’s phone, and with each song, even the singles I had heard before, I was listening with new focus. The production was poppy, but it was perfect. Her melodies weren’t challenging at all; they were tools of intimacy, as if the feelings they freighted wanted to get as close to you as possible, with all the openness of a friend.
I was pretty much hooked then. We went downstairs and watched more Taylor Swift videos, and man, her whole thing just struck me the right way. Each track painted a clear picture. Accessible language became genuinely elegant turns of phrase. Elusive experiences were distilled outright, but gently. She was laying bare complex and conflicting emotions in discrete bundles, coming off as genuine the whole time.
I did recognize why some people don’t like Taylor Swift. When her earnestness failed, it failed hard. The opening lines of “22” made me wince, and her attempt to sound like fucking Future on “End Game” made me understand why she’s often called a poser. But even her failures drove home how disarmed she was. For all the advice of experts, she was capable of doing something super annoying and uncool, not that far off from how you would be if your bedroom-mirror-stardom became world famous.
Suddenly I saw the source of her monstrous popularity. Yes, she is a prototype of non-threatening, wholesome zest, with a curveless shape that makes her look more like your favorite doll come to life than a girl who could steal your boyfriend. Yes, she has the most generic female voice imaginable. (But in the goals of relatability and career longevity, this has to be a feature and not a bug, right?) Yes, her songs are Willy Wonka’d by Max Martin. But I saw that outside help the same way I see 30 Rock: the handiwork of a professional production team, sure, but also of a singular creative vision that spawned something perfect. If it were really that easy to bottle what Taylor Swift has, every boy band and plastic diva would have her earthy appeal, and pop music would be better.
But they don’t. There have been plenty of singers with better toolkits. Vanishingly few have had her emotional acuity. In Taylor Swift I see the power to interpret the experiences of girls of all ages and present it back to them. She is a troubadour pop star in the mode of Bruce Springsteen, providing the service of articulation rather than idolatry, and thereby burrowing more deeply than most manufactured stars can. I finally got why Taylor Swift means something to her audience.
Swept up in this appreciation, I proposed to G that we go see Taylor’s show at MetLife Stadium the next night. G is a superfan, and wanted to badly, but couldn’t take off work. So a few days later, during the work week, she texted me that we see that weekend's show in Foxboro, MA. That’s a casual $500, I figured, but I was into the idea. Ever since going to Rio de Janeiro earlier this year, I’ve developed a taste for tourism taking place in someone else’s wheelhouse. At first that meant always taking the opportunity to tour a city with a native / knowledgeable resident, but it made sense to extend the maxim to participating in someone else’s peak experience. That’s how, six days after essentially discovering Taylor Swift, I found myself at Gillette Stadium for the third and final night of her run there.
The stadium, as an aside, could not be more Patriots. Fuck Robert Kraft. What a soulless megaplex he’s built. You feel like you’re walking through an artist’s rendition. And it’s located far from everything, in a nothing town selected purely on fiscal rationale. American sports capitalism at its worst. (European soccer is the global worst.)
Approaching the stadium (via crawling traffic, because they neglected to build any public transportation at all) I saw SUVs with lyrics written on the dark windows, groups of fans walking in matching homemade t-shirts, sororities-ful of girls repping their houses. The few men were either gay or dads; relatively few were the boyfriend type, as I was. It was a positive, thrumming, female atmosphere. I recalled Keith Richards’ account of how terrifying adolescent girls’ sexuality was en masse, and I noted how different this felt. It was healthy and confident, if a little desperate; but the wailing in the air was for Taylor, and she’s always going to be there for you to accept it, and to give it back. These were privileged young white girls from New England who deserved every kind of optimism. Looking out over a sea I was a head taller than, I realized: I am standing among the most powerful demographic in the world right now. It was easy to imagine one of these facepainted friends terminating my obsolete ass thirty years from now. If I had the ability to sprint onstage and say something into the mic before security demolished me, it would have been to please have mercy, please, thank you.
Taylor was everywhere. Looking down from large screens scattered around the complex, her smiling face spoke to us from a perfect visage about her favorite color and other inanities designed only to get the fans closer to Taylor. There was no nuance about this, which sort of disturbed me after appreciating the pinpoint tenor of her lyrics. The people love Taylor. They want Taylor. They paid to be close to Taylor. So give them Taylor. It struck me that capitalism gives you the choice of which Orwellian dictator controls you far more than it liberates your thoughts. Maybe art has always been like this, who knows.
The men’s bathroom was totally empty. And that’s really something to see. This was a megaplex bathroom, industrially designed to absorb the heaviest imaginable use case of male toiletry: thousands of drunk football fans rushing to piss. It’s the kind of place you see only in degrees of congestion, like the subway or something. It was starkly empty for Taylor. I took a picture of it and texted it to some people, and they all got the joke immediately.
Soon after settling into our seats and establishing a system of conveyance for stadium booze with G, I was extremely excited to hear that the opener, Charli XCX, was in fact playing “I Don’t Care” or “I Love It” or whatever it’s called. (Those are opposites, by the way.) The evening’s openers played songs like Fancy, Boom Clap, and Havana by Camila Cabello, and I would wager good money that none of them end up as evergreen as “I Don’t Care (I Luv It).” Seeing that was pretty cool because I had a minute with that song five years ago and never once considered I might see it performed live.
The crowd was vibrating by the time Taylor was set to come on. The ambient volume swelled, the sky got darker, the selfies became more frequent. The stadium was blinking anxiously with thousands of iPhone flashes. You know, older generations spend a lot of time fretting about the implications of teens adopting these extra-biological devices as appendages — as if humans haven’t been offloading our anxieties onto extra-biological media since we could draw — but you have to hand it to the phones: for their ability to physically manifest the inner temperature of the user, nothing else has come close. All of which is to say, I could see this crowd getting jacked up.
The next part weirded me out. The giant screens at the center of the stadium unceremoniously started playing a video of Taylor Swift welcoming a group of superfans to a listening party of reputation at her home in Rhode Island, I think. The music playing over the PA system as part of this video was, in fact, the album’s music, which we were going to be hearing any moment now. And the images were of a smiling Taylor. Who we also were dying to see.
This was a new level of saturation that caught me by surprise. On the drive up to Foxboro, G had wanted to listen to Taylor Swift the whole way. Which I was actually happy to do, being that I had decided to anthropologically take the deepest dive possible into Swiftiness this weekend. Approaching the stadium, Taylor was everywhere. But leading into the actual show, seeing the artist and the music we were about to see — had paid to see in its glorious reification — on screen, which is how most of your relationship with Taylor exists, jarred me. At a rock concert, you’re supposed to rep a different band on your t-shirt, in the pre-show mix, etc. This was fixatedly Taylor World. It was more than a little pathological.
Soon the video gave way to a pre-show mix, which ended with “Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett. The lights went low. A video montage reviewing Taylor Swift’s lifelong battle with fame ensued, after which the opening drone of “...r u ready for it” blasted out and we all went nuts. Through the fog, on the screens, we saw the silhouette of Taylor, dressed in a sequined monastic cloak, WWE-like against a gloamy background. Huge doors opened on the stage, and she stepped out. Yay! Here’s a video from someone else’s POV.
Turns out the show wasn’t that much different than the live performance of a music video. Not because of the high production value — the stage work looked expensive, if not particularly artful — but because you literally spend most of the time watching the screen. We had pretty good seats, but still she was a tiny speck among other specks, who were her dancers and musicians. Even my eagle eyes couldn’t make out any particular movement. At some point she took a magic gondola right in front of us while she sang “Delicate,” performed “Shake It Off” (very annoying song) on a small stage, then did what I later found out was the only un-scripted part of the night, which was a couple acoustic renditions from her fairly extensive back catalog. I think she did “Once” but I was getting more beer at that moment, and also that song is derivative & shitty.
It wouldn’t be Taylor Swift without a few earnest moments that missed the mark wincingly, and she provided those with the heavily practiced stage banter. “I can’t believe you all made it! You all look so good out there!!” Everyone screamed. “I see a lot of shirts, a lot of amazing signs” — there weren’t really any signs — “and it’s so nice to meet you!!” I’m sure there were more than a few kids in the audience who reasoned that if they couldn’t see Taylor, who was well-lit and prominently displayed, then she definitely couldn’t see them, who were poorly lit and indistinguishable in their distant box seats. I hope that for some of those kids, it was the first moment of realizing that idols always lie.
Taylor put on a good show, I guess, doing the best any pop star could with a stadium. (The show made me appreciate Phish so much more, for being the only authentically stadium-sized band I’ve ever seen.) One interesting thing I noted was that she’s definitely starting to look 30; after a meteoric rise in which she basically had the same body and face from age 16 to her mid-twenties, would a fuller, mature looking Taylor Swift (who’s actually looking better with age, in my opinion) start singing mom songs?
As the show ended, this was what I was thinking about. Where were these girls going to go? Where would Taylor take them? Would she be the true Bob Dylan of teen-girldom, and rebel against her appointment?
I’m confident of this: Taylor Swift has what it takes to stay relevant for a long, long time. She’s modestly talented in any outward sense, but she’s set apart by her ability to write accessible, moving words and not let the music ever weigh them down. She has a universe of fans who love her for her, and would totally follow her into wedded bliss and motherhood. So, yes, she will be around.
And honestly, if Taylor Swift is as good at writing about the feeling of parenthood and watching your parents die as well as she writes about the tempest of a crush, I might follow her into the future too.
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