In Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” which I consider a perfect song, there’s a giggle she releases between the lines “I go on too many dates” and “But I can’t make ’em stay.” Driving around suburban St. Louis, listening to the radio, I’ve wondered many times if Swift includes this giggle—which acts as a vocal eye roll, or maybe a middle finger, to those whose judgmental comments she’s parroting—during her live performances. Surely, I thought, the temptation to include the giggle would be diminished by the cumulative evidence, as she performed show after show on her “1989” World Tour (which started in May and is still going), of the giggle’s utter lack of spontaneity.
As a forty-year-old woman with unapologetically mainstream musical tastes, I’ve followed Swift’s career with increasing interest. From my vantage point, the defining aspects of her identity seem to be—surprise!—not her romantic partners but rather her appetite for hard work (that is, her ambition); her savvy and apparently early-adopting use of social media; and the enjoyable accessibility of her art, with songs that alternate between deceptive simplicity and actual simplicity. Also, she’s articulate in interviews, she’s become a vocal proponent of feminism, and apparently she’s friends with Lorde (and a bunch of other glamorous female singers, models, and actresses in their twenties).
In June, when Swift wrote an open letter, on Tumblr, to Apple (titled “To Apple, Love Taylor”), criticizing the company’s decision not to pay artists during users’ free three-month trials of its music-streaming service, Apple reversed its policy the next day. “I unsarcastically love that Taylor Swift has acquired enormous economic & cultural power by being very good at singing about her feelings,” I tweeted, and my friend Annie tweeted back asking if I’d like to join her to watch Swift perform at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, in July.
Immediately upon Swift’s appearance onstage, the naïveté of my question about the giggle became apparent. If there was a single millisecond of spontaneity in the entire evening, I missed it. Swift’s first song—“Welcome to New York”—was not only as choreographed as a Broadway musical but was indistinguishable from a Broadway musical, complete with the backdrop of a glittery nighttime New York skyline and, in the foreground, a park bench on which Swift beamingly sang and posed while surrounded by male dancers. Subsequent songs were performed with the accompaniment of the dancers, plus, respectively, videos laden with B.D.S.M. imagery and a kind of lighted, rotating dock that raised Swift above the heads of the audience. Swift wore perilously high heels and an array of skimpy outfits as her image was reflected not only on large screens on either side of the stage but also on the single biggest screen that I’ve seen in my life, which, curiously, faced the backs of most of the crowd and the front of only Swift herself, lending it a mirror-above-the-bed quality of self-interest notable even in these highly narcissistic times.
The crowd at Gillette represented the whitest and femalest gathering I’ve ever found myself in, which I say as a white female. Interspersed with songs, Swift delivered monologues to us about the specialness of the night, how much she loves her fans, and how uncool she’s always felt. Tonally, these fell somewhere between the speeches of a dim high-school student and a tipsy bridesmaid. Sometimes, during a set or costume change, the screens showed videos asking Swift-related trivia or featuring testimonials from her coterie of famous girlfriends about the fun that they have and the enormous quantities of food they like to consume, which seemed a preëmptive rebuttal to anyone noting Swift’s thinness.
Of the three people I attended the show with—in addition to Annie, my sister Jo and my brother-in-law Thad, both of whom are photographers—I’m confident that I was there the least anthropologically and the most earnestly. Not that I take pride in this, but I could actually answer the trivia questions about, say, Swift’s cats. And I swear that I was ready to enjoy myself—to sing along to “I Knew You Were Trouble” while feeling cheerfully silly about my own middle-aged dorkiness. Instead, the cognitive dissonance induced by the show bewildered me: Why was Swift, a shrewd businesswoman, blathering on so cheesily? If she were trying to speak in terms understandable to the youngest members of her audience, many of whom looked to be in grade school, then why was she wearing a garter belt and showing those B.D.S.M. videos? When she floated above the audience in her high, high heels on that lighted dock, facing a stadium of sixty-eight thousand people, how could she feel anything except either a messiah complex or profound loneliness?
Later that night, I said to my husband, “I thought of her as a singer-songwriter.” And my husband, who has never voluntarily listened to a single word escaping Taylor Swift’s mouth, laughed. “Singer-songwriters don’t perform in stadiums,” he said. But before all that, before my buzz-killing realization that my admiration for Swift should not have been confused with a wish to see her live—before, in fact, the concert even started—I felt the sweetness and promise of what she offers. She encourages audience members to dress like her, either as she does now or as she did in a previous incarnation, which meant that, upon our arrival in Foxboro, when we’d parked about a mile from the stadium, we’d passed women and girls sporting all manner of red lipstick, cowboy boots, braided headbands, tutus, metallic temporary tattoos, glittery hair spray, cheerleading outfits, fringed homemade T-shirts, and Swift’s name and favorite number (thirteen) painted on their arms and hands.
It was a lovely summer evening, and among the tailgaters there was a preponderance of tweens and mother-daughter duos. Their giddy anticipation of the night ahead emanated from them as they snacked on fruit and cheese, beaded, and drew posters. In fact, the tailgaters were so winning that, the next night, my sister went back to photograph them. (You can view all of the photographs here.) One mom told Jo that she’d bought her tickets eight months prior and given them to her daughter for Christmas. They’d screen-printed T-shirts at their local mall, and, after driving two hours to the concert, they were sitting on the asphalt by their car applying beads to the shirts’ tassels. On both nights, many audience members wore shirts that bore the phrase “Taylor Swift’s #1 Fan.” I’m not sorry that I went to the show, even if that isn’t an article of clothing, or a title, I’ll be fighting anyone for.
Jo Sittenfeld is a fine-art and commercial photographer in Providence, Rhode Island.
