Even addressing a stadium of 70,000 people, Taylor Swift seems to be speaking directly to you, confessing something urgent, amandapetrusich writes.
Online, fans discuss Swift’s concerts with a fervor reminiscent of the grizzled heads who analyze old Grateful Dead set lists.Save this storyCritics are always bellyaching about the death of the monoculture—we no longer consume the same cultural objects at the same time or in the same way, and as a result we feel disconnected, adrift, lost. The mind-boggling inescapability of Taylor Swift’s latest endeavor—a sixty-date stadium romp known as the Eras Tour—offers one enormous exception.
Swift has for years been a savant of what I might call “you guys” energy, a chatty, ersatz intimacy that feels consonant with the way we exist on social media—offering a glimpse of our private lives, but in a deliberate and mediated way. When Swift addressed the seventy-four thousand people who had gathered to see her, I felt as though she was not only speaking directly to me but confessing something urgent.
Swift’s voice has become richer and stronger over the years; its clarity and tone foreground her lyrics. Played on piano, absent the R. & B. production of the studio version, “False God” felt, suddenly, like a reflective song about resigning yourself to failure.
Still, the intensity of her fandom manifests so differently offline. Swift’s performance might be fixed, perfect , but what happens in the crowd is messy, wild, benevolent, and beautiful. I was mostly surrounded by women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. As Swift herself once sang, on “22,” that particular stretch into post-adolescence is marked by feeling “happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.” The camaraderie in the audience invited a very particular kind of giddiness.
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