Swift leads star-studded ball
ASEISMIC rumble. L i g h t n i n g - f l a s h strobes. A walloping kick-drum beat topped by a buzzing bass tone and hissing pink noise. Video screens pulsating in black, white and red. And at centrestage of what looked like a Nine Inch Nails concert was Taylor Swift.
It was the New York City rollout for the new image – grownup and nearly invulnerable – that goes with Swift’s latest pop blockbuster, Reputation, which sold more than 1 million copies in its first week of release in late November. She headlined Z100’s annual Jingle Ball, a marathon of pop hitmakers, at Madison Square Garden on Friday night (and a similar iHeartRadio show December 1 in Los Angeles). At this time of year, even the biggest stars pay obeisance to the “contemporary hit radio” stations that are still a gateway to mass attention.
The lineup also included Sam Smith, the Chainsmokers, Halsey, Demi Lovato and many others, all greeted with happy screams from a young audience. It represented some, though by no means all, of what “hit radio” delivered in 2017: hardheaded women and eagerly importunate men in the eternal strivings of young love. But after a year in which a song in Spanish, Despacito, was ubiquitous and when hiphop (and YouTube) generated ideas and attitudes, the concert was an oddly homogeneous look back at 2017. Even its few rappers were white.
Lately,Swifthasgearedherself to the hit radio format. Singing, rapping, striking poses and trying dance steps alongside her four backup singers and dancers, she looked back no further than her 2014 album, 1989. Although she strummed an acoustic guitar and sang I Don’t Wanna Live Forever (originally a 2016 movie anthem) like the country singer she was on her early albums, for the rest of her mini-set Swift was a celebrity citizen of current pop, flaunting her “big reputation” over booming electronic tracks. Ed Sheeran joined her to add his rap on Endgame, a song that longs for lasting romance after high-profile flings.
Sheeran had opened the concert more than four hours earlier, alone with an acoustic guitar and using loops to construct complex tracks on the spot. He was the first of the night’s many nice guys, offering flattery and supportive, long-term devotion.
The night’s most affecting performance came from one of those nice guys: Sam Smith, who let the soul and gospel underpinnings of his new songs Too Good at Goodbyes and Pray infuse loneliness and longing with spiritual fervour.
On the more unctuous side, there were two former members of One Direction now trying different paths: Niall Horan, with ardent ballads leaning toward arena-country, and Liam Payne, whose seductive songs draw on R&B. A newish boy band, Why Don’t We, paced its choreographed come-ons to electronic dance music.
The piano-playing crooner Charlie Puth provided a few more plot twists; his songs refused the blandishments of an ex who only wanted Attention and tried desperately to apologise for straying in How Long. The rapper Logic, whose suicide-prevention song 1-800273-8255 has a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year, was a different kind of nice guy; he delivered snippets of his songs amid an ongoing spiel promoting self-esteem.
But in the Jingle Ball universe, women are the ones allotted emotional complexity, self-assurance and retaliation. Lovato proclaimed herself Confident and Sorry Not Sorry about asserting herself. Camila Cabello flaunted her desirability in OMG and, in the concert’s only nod to Latin culture, hinted at salsa and homesickness in Havana; Cabello was born in Cuba. Julia Michaels, though she squandered too much of her brief set on excerpts from hits she has written for others, drew an arena-wide singalong on Issues, another Song of the Year nominee, which finds romantic potential in complementary neuroses.
Halsey smiled her way through a set of downtempo songs that juggled desire and ambivalence: Bad at Love, Strangers (a song about female lovers, sung with Lauren Jauregui from Fifth Harmony, that Halsey dedicated to “the LGBT community”) and the more hopeful Him & I, joined by the rapper G-Eazy. Halsey also provided some sorely needed stage charisma when she sang Closer with the Chainsmokers: a team of songwriters and producers who dedicate themselves fully to halfheartedness, using dance-music effects to animate songs that wrestle with selfdoubt and low expectations.
In a night of well-groomed, often partly canned pop, the odd band out was Fall Out Boy, the long-running, punkrooted band from the Chicago suburbs whose lyrics take literary twists. It had loud electric guitars and blasts of pyrotechnics, and it wasn’t going to acquiesce to current pop fashion. Its opening song, Centuries, insisted, “We’ll go down in history.”