Taylor Swift has been featured in too many news headlines to count in recent weeks. Her new relationship with Travis Kelce, 1989 Taylor’s Version (which will be released on the day of this article’s publication, and which I’m fervently anticipating), her ever-ongoing, record-breaking Eras Tour, and on October 13, the Eras Tour Movie—a chronicling of her live music phenomenon—was released. Its box office success has been unprecedented, and it quickly became the highest-grossing concert film of all time. I, along with hundreds of thousands of Swifties across the world, had the opportunity to participate in the secondhand experience, and what an experience it was! My feelings on concert films are mixed: I like preserving my hearing, I like being able to actually see the performer, I like not being sandwiched in between loud sweaty people. But there’s something about being packed into an arena with 80,000 other people, destroying your hearing, and, post-concert, being among people who also know they’ve experienced an almost-supernatural force of pop culture that can never be captured on any movie screen. No concert film can recreate the communality, the rawness, of an actual concert.
But even the recording of Swift’s concert had a magnetism I didn’t think possible.
I’m not often proud to be a Swiftie. Being part of a sector of pop culture that bright-pink-wearing, princess-obsessed 10-year-olds also participate in somehow isn’t always appealing. Also, Swiftie-ism quickly gets similar to Trumpism; they’re conjoined by the common sentiment that “mother/father can do no wrong” (and I know that no Trumpist explicitly says “father can do no wrong,” but the fundamental idea is present to some degree). In my opinion, “mother” can do wrong and we need to stop idolizing her. Taylor Swift has faults! Some of her songs are bad, which many Swifties pretend to overlook (exhibit A: her rhyming of “it’s me, hi” and “teatime,” doesn’t make any sense!), I’d appreciate a musical re-envisioning of her previous songs on her “Taylor’s Version” albums instead of almost-identical covers of those songs, her crypticism isn’t fun, and I’d rather her just announce what music she’s about to release than hint about it five years in advance. (What’s the point of this paragraph? I’m not like other Swifties. Irrelevant, flirtatious interludes aside, let’s continue.)
As I was saying, I’m not often proud to be a Swiftie, but getting to experience her concert—even secondhand—changed that for a fleeting moment. The body and racial and sexual diversity on stage are simply not present in many, if any, of today’s mainstream productions. To an uninvolved-in-pop-culture-liberal, this formula seems safe: Swift knows the cultural diversity expectations and meets them. And she knows she meets them; she’s very self-conscious about how revolutionary this concert is. There are diversity expectations that come as a result of being in 2023, a modern era, but those expectations are almost never met, especially by the naive white popstars who dominate the music industry. It’s refreshing to see a music mogul who’s socially-conscious enough to represent an accurate cross-section of our society on her stage.
I mentioned how successful both Swift’s concert and her concert film have been, but a discussion of why they’ve met such massive success is also important. Swift, as most people who are alive know, has had a career that has spanned decades and ten albums. In this Eras tour, she explores each one of those albums; the concert is somewhat of a dance-heavy greatest hits track. Because she’s been around so long and so many people are acquainted with her albums on different levels, building off of her music empire wasn’t anything but genius, and it’s perhaps the main reason this tour has been such a massive hit.
But she couldn’t represent each album onstage without spending an abnormally long time in concert; the film runs for just under three hours, and various parts were edited out. This runtime, though, means that she’s onstage, dancing, singing, performing, for three straight hours, night after night after night. Even watching her is dizzying, tiring. She’s electrifying and, while onstage, her energy doesn’t wane. Her stamina is incredible.
There are too many things to say about Taylor Swift, far, far too many to touch on in an article. Her relevance is greater than virtually any pop star’s is or ever will be. Swifties like to claim that Taylor is the entertainment industry, and, after watching her concert film, it’s a hard claim to refute.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.