Taylor Swift’s reputation tour: snakes on a stage
Other than being top-notch entertainers with a theatrical flair, Taylor Swift and Alice Cooper don’t have a lot in common.
But they do share a thing for snakes.
Alice never leaves home without his boa constrictor. Ms. Swift has made the reptile a visual focus of her reputation tour, which stops at Heinz Field on the North Shore on Tuesday.
“The only thing more prominent than the singer herself during her current costume-change- filled spectacle are the massive, viciouslooking snakes that symbolically appear throughout the set,” according to CBS San Francisco.
Fans up close who are not fond of the slithery creatures will appreciate the word “symbolically” embedded in that sentence. Why snakes? “A couple of years ago, someone called me a snake on social media and it caught on,” Ms. Swift told the crowd at the University of Phoenix Stadium on May 8, the opening night of the tour. “And then a lot of people called me a lot of names on social media. I went through some really low times for a while because of it. I went through some times when I didn’t know if I was going to getto do this anymore.”
You know how there’s a Doughnut Day, Hot Dog Day, Caramel Corn Day, Sea-Monkey Day, Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day? There’s also a National Snake Day, on July 16, and the following day, July 17 of 2016, Kim Kardashian West, wife of Kanye, appeared to use that holiday in the West family feud with Ms. Swift when she tweeted, “Wait it’s legit National Snake Day?!?!?They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything these days!”
The internet’s Team West responded by targeting Ms. Swift on social media with snake emojis,
which upset the pop star from Reading, Pa., until she decided to embrace them, symbolically, for the reputation tour. She did have a previous connection having been born in 1989, the Year of the Snake in the Chinese zodiac, and wearing a snake necklace in her “Shake it Off” video.
Pittsburgh gets reputation at the midpoint of what has been a smashingly successful tour. It just sold out three nights at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., drawing 174,764 fans and grossing more than $21 million. (Take that, Kanye.)
This will be her fourth Heinz Field concert — not counting her rendition of the national anthem before the Steelers game in 2006 when she was an up-and-coming 16-year-old country singer — and like the previous, 2015 trip with “1989,” it is heavily focused on the new album. She performs almost all of the 15-track “reputation,” an electropop project she wrote and produced with Jack Antonoff (of Bleachers) and the Swedishteam of Max Martin and Shellback. The 19-song setlist revisits a few songs from “1989” and a snippet of her roots.
Billboard, while raving about the production, with its massive screens and working fountain, concluded that “the largerthan-life show is the culmination of everything Taylor has done in concert, meshing her talent with her prowess in a nearly twohour spectacle.”
And when everything doesn’t go as planned, she rises to the occasion, like performing the July 21 show at MetLife Stadium in New Jerseyin a torrential downpour.
“The thing about rain shows is they’re very, very, very rare, as far as I’ve experienced,” she told the crowd. “And this sounds a little weird, but I think a rain show happens to a crowd for a reason. It happens to a crowd that is ready to take it to the next level.”
That next level involved fans putting away their phones and dancing with her in the rain.
As the website Bustle wrote, “The genuine joy as Swift looked up at the sky and shook her hair around in the rain is something you can’t fake …”
You know what else enjoys a good rain? Snakes.