A phenomenon... but not for me
GIG OF THE WEEK
Taylor Swift
University of Phoenix Stadium, Arizona
(Plays Croke Park, June 15-16)
★★★★★
Outside Phoenix, Arizona, stands a stadium like a giant saucepan, plonked in a field. ‘Build it and they will come,’ I say to my twentysomething Uber driver. She looks at me blankly.
On a sweltering night, the stadium is icily air-conditioned for Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour. There are merchandise stalls everywhere, attracting queues like airport security. In a crowd of 59,000, most of the seven ages of woman are represented – tots in frocks, tweens in jeans, students in mini-skirts, young professionals in suits, mums linking arms with their daughters. Welcome to pop in 2018: it’s a woman’s woman’s woman’s world.
Whoever said ‘you can’t please all the people all the time’ obviously hadn’t come across Taylor Swift. ‘For 14 months,’ she confides, ‘I was following what you guys were saying online. I saw what you were hoping for from this tour and tried to put
together a combination of all the things you wanted.’ She’s not a pop star at all. She’s a focus group. Her researches lead, inevitably, to overkill: dancers, lasers, fireworks, flame-throwers, a flying cage to whisk her to the B-stage. She merrily borrows ideas – from George Michael (2006) a main stage that’s also a video screen; from Coldplay (2012) a wristband for everyone, flickering to the beat.
Her own stamp takes the form of supersized snakes – a retort to Kim Kardashian, who called her a snake on Twitter.
‘I went through some low times,’ Swift says. ‘Didn’t know if I was gonna do this any more. But I wanted to send a message to you guys that if someone is mean to you on social media, and other people go along with it, it doesn’t have to defeat you. The lesson is you shouldn’t care if you feel misunderstood by people who don’t know you.’
Amid the life lessons and the eye candy, the music is incidental. Mostly serviceable dancepop, it leaves me as cold as the air-con. Still, you have to admire Taylor as a phenomenon. Glamorous but relatable, she appeals to the little girl inside the grown woman, and vice versa. You can draw your own conclusions when she plays Croke Park on the 15th and 16th of this month.