Billed instantly as a “three-hour career-spanning victory lap,” Taylor Swift’s sixth tour is, needless to say, her most ambitious yet. Part of that ambitiousness has extended to releasing it as a concert film while still touring the world with the production. Obviously, she’s not worried about losing any profits by making it available to the “broke asses” who couldn’t manage to get themselves to the real thing. And even to those who already did, but simply want to see it in an even more “larger than life” format (IMAX being designed to accommodate such a desire). As Swift says, “Too big to hang out/Slowly lurching toward your favorite city.” That she is, as movie theaters across the globe roll out the reel and proceed to endure what can best be described, rather unoriginally, as Swiftmania. Indeed, one wishes Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr would weigh in on the matter, but instead non-Beatle Billy Joel already decided of Swiftie fanaticism and the Eras Tour, “The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania.”
Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone tapped into part of why people are so, ugh, enchanted with the tour when he wrote, “Taylor Swift keeps building the legend of her Eras Tour, week after week, city by city, making every night so much longer, wilder, louder, more jubilant than it has to be. There’s nothing in history to compare. This is her best tour ever, by an absurd margin. It’s a journey through her past, starring all the different Taylors she’s ever been, which means all the Taylors that you’ve ever been.” The thing about that, of course, is, well, Swift hasn’t exactly been all that multi-dimensional over the years. Sure, she’s changed her sound from country to pop and dabbled with some musical styles in between, but, in the end, she’s still the Aryan wet dream wearing red lipstick. Steadfastly committed to delivering a good time without much of any true substance to say in her position of power. Not through the music itself anyway (unless one counts the forced feeling of “allyship” in “You Need To Calm Down”). Over every so-called era, that has remained the most constant of all—Swift’s singular focus on one non-political topic and one non-political topic only: bad boyfriends. And, sometimes, when she’s cresting on the high of being in love, “good” boyfriends…before they inevitably turn bad.
This is one of the key aspects of Swift’s “relatability quotient.” With the “everywoman” seeing themselves in her despite the fact that few “average” women are giraffe tall, thin, blonde and blue-eyed. The Barbie ideal, as it were. Once upon a time, this was embodied by Britney Spears, who experienced a similar level of fervor at her so-called peak (that word always suggesting, somewhat rudely, that a person will never be as good as they were at a certain moment in time). The fundamental difference between the two is that Swift has remained America’s sweetheart throughout her career, while Britney defiantly ripped off the shackles of that role when she shaved her head and, months later, gave a somnambulant performance of “Gimme More” at the MTV VMAs. Up until that instance, Spears had always been a consummate performer. Dancing, (mostly) singing and sexing it up for the crowd. She chose one year in her life to have a rightly deserved breakdown, and things never really went back to being the same for her.
In 2007, Swift (a Sagittarius like Britney) was eighteen, and had just released her self-titled debut one year prior. This reality seemed to reinforce that, when it comes to the music industry, there is always another young(er) blonde pop star in the making, waiting to take over for the current “hot thing.” And Swift would embody the same “I’m a good girl who does as I’m told” aura (that Britney initially did) for the vast majority of her career. Herself admitting, “My entire moral code as a kid and now is a need to be thought of as good” and “The main thing I always tried to be was, like, a good girl.” Even now, after “going political” (a.k.a. making one public statement against a Republican Congresswoman), it’s clear that what lacks most from Swift’s work, ergo her stage shows, is a message worth imparting. Of course, her fans and casual listeners alike will say that there can be no more important message than simply “making people feel good.” To a certain extent, that’s true. However, after a while, one wonders if Swift’s failure to say anything on the same level as a Madonna stage show is an exemplification of how the public no longer really wants to be challenged. “Preached to,” as it were. This, in some respects, is emblematic of the “algorithm effect” that has taken hold of society, with everyone seeing only what they want to see, and no “unpleasant” (read: contrary) viewpoints thrown into the mix. Including the one that would dare call out Swift for being anything other than perfection.
In this regard, too, she differs from Spears, who was far more derided for being a talented blonde girl, but with “nothing to say.” This being most clearly immortalized in an 00s interview during which she said of George W. Bush, “We should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that, you know. And, um, be faithful in what happens.” Alas, Spears’ faith in a few patriarchal institutions has been shaken to its core in the decades since and, similar to Swift, she’s had a reckoning with the “good girl” she once thought she wanted to be in order to receive endless accolades and praise. For someone like Madonna, who provided the blueprint of the modern theatrical stage show with 1990’s Blond Ambition Tour, that was never a reckoning that needed to occur. She was always a “bad girl” from the start. In other words, a woman who spoke her mind without fear or inhibition. This is why one of her earliest stage shows, the Who’s That Girl Tour, addressed political topics ranging from AIDS to essentially directing the missive of “Papa Don’t Preach” at Ronald Reagan and the pope. No other woman, least of all in the hyper-conservative 1980s, would have ever dared to do that, and certainly not at the very beginning of her career.
And yes, it is Madonna, who was once marveled at for staying in the business for a paltry fifteen years, that has allowed for someone like Swift to exist in it for almost two decades without anyone questioning it. Because, as Madonna established, the idea of a pop star, particularly a woman, having many eras is merely a reflection of an inherently misogynistic public that expects to see something new in order to be kept interested in the same woman. Especially when there are more youthful options cropping up all the time. As Swift noted, “The female artists have reinvented themselves twenty times more than the male artists. They have to or else you’re out of a job. Constantly having to reinvent, constantly finding new facets of yourself that people find to be shiny.” This speaks to something Madonna said about the Who’s That Girl Tour: “That’s why I call the tour Who’s That Girl?; because I play a lot of characters, and every time I do a video or a song, people go, ‘Oh, that’s what she’s like.’ And I’m not like any of them. I’m all of them. I’m none of them.” In actuality, the real reason to highlight that title was the fact that she had a movie of the same name playing in theaters (briefly) the summer the tour was happening. A movie that was originally going to be called Slammer before then-husband Sean Penn ended up being thrown in the slammer himself and it seemed like it would be in poor taste.
Swift’s luck with movie roles hasn’t been much better than Madonna’s, but people seem to talk about the clunkers that are Valentine’s Day and Cats far less than, say, Body of Evidence or Swept Away. Both Swift and Madonna are, of late, focusing on what they do best, with the latter kicking off her own world tour the same weekend the Eras Tour film debuted in theaters. Perhaps an unwitting “flex” on Madonna’s part, as she still seems keenly aware that, of all the pop stars, she’s the only one willing to make a truly political statement during her shows. What’s more, no matter how “old” she’s gotten, she has always been an active participant in the choreography expected of a pop star/musical extravaganza. And so, while the Eras Tour film is deft in creating the kind of spectacle that allows the viewer to feel like they’re actually at the show (complete with annoying audience members singing along in the theater), perhaps what stands out more in the movie than it would in person is the lack of choreography that Swift herself engages in. Instead, she’s a master at the art of the illusion of movement as she struts frequently up and down the ample stage. Here, too, Swift can be differentiated from a “real” pop star in that she has always merely dipped her toe into what that means as someone who more strongly identifies with the singer-songwriter qualities that theoretically mean chilling at home and writing poignant lyrics without having to worry about executing a dance move correctly onstage. But this is where Swift makes it clear that, in the twenty-first century, a musician has no choice but to become the multimedia art project that Madonna always was from the get-go. A walking, talking embodiment of synergy. Even if an embodiment that has never truly “ate” (despite Swift’s recent comparisons to the likes of Madonna and Michael Jackson…stage presence-wise, among other ways).
The uninformed accusations that Madonna is jumping on the Taylor and Beyoncé bandwagon of doing marathon, theatrical shows is rather absurd considering this is what Madonna has been doing from the beginning, long before anyone else thought to put in the effort it requires. Particularly the effort it takes to endure the personal risk to one’s life and reputation by speaking out against the injustices of the world. This has not been received warmly by quite a few institutions, not least of which was the Vatican, who urged Italians to boycott Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour for being blasphemous. In response, Madonna made a public statement in Rome during which she declared, “My show is not a conventional rock show, but a theatrical presentation of my music. And like theater, it asks questions, provokes thought and takes you on an emotional journey. Portraying good and bad, light and dark, joy and sorrow, redemption and salvation.”
As the Eras Tour film underscores, that’s not really what’s happening at a Taylor Swift show. And that’s fine, one supposes—it just serves as a reminder that what people go apeshit over often isn’t very thought-provoking. With Swift preferring to, instead, take a page from the name of an LCD Soundsystem documentary by just “shutting up and playing the hits.”
