I Went To The Taylor Swift Show So You Don’t Have To, But You Should, Although You Probably Can’t

👏👏👏🪩💃🏟👏👏👏

Here’s Keith, with a report on the tour for which no journalist has been able to get a ticket:

How open are you to the vicissitudes of the universe? When the fates come a-callin’, will you submit to their will? If super-agent Mike Mori texts and invites you to accompany him to the Taylor Swift Eras concert on Friday, May 26 at Met Life Stadium in New Jersey, will you drop your big plans of making Mai Tais and watching select films from Criterion Channel’s Erotic Thrillers collection in bed, and join him? I know I will, because I did do. I did do it.

But first, I had to get there. Traveling to Met Life Stadium from my corner of Brooklyn is, on paper, a simple matter. You take a ten-minute subway ride to Penn Station, hop onto a New Jersey-bound train one stop over to Secaucus Junction, transfer to a stadium shuttle, and you’re there, genuflecting before the temple of the NY Jets or Giants or whoever normally throws balls there.

Anyone who’s ever been to Penn Station, though, knows it’s not going to be that easy.  Under the best of circumstances, Penn Station is a gauntlet. It’s a poorly-plotted subterranean warren of cinematically decrepit tunnels, jam-packed with working joes who are just trying to get back home to the suburbs, tourists lugging seven oversized suitcases out to Newark Airport, knuckleheads jaunting out to the Jersey Shore, etc. Add 82,000 deranged Taylor Swift fans, all aiming to cram onto one train at fifteen-minute intervals, and the scene is straight out of a Bosch triptych. Each time the boarding platform of the latest stadium-bound train was announced, the news was met with a deafening squeal of enthusiasm by the Swift cohort, followed by a madcap crush of bodies toward the single door leading, via double-wide escalator, down to the tracks. I strongly considered abandoning my trip and hopping on a transport to Connecticut or Long Island, where everyone knows there are no Taylor Swift concerts.

Penn Station is ordinarily a haven for terrifying hordes of depraved nomads.  Today was no different.

It probably bears mentioning that there appears to be a specific dress-code for fans attending a Taylor Swift concert. I’d heard reports that for the Eras tour — this career-spanning compendium set — fans were meant to dress up as their favorite Taylor (e.g., if you like the early country stuff, you’d wear a ten-gallon hat and a sundress, whereas if “…Ready For It?” were more your speed, you’d come to the show in like a nude bodysuit tattooed with a neon-blue network of cybernetic exo-skeletal neurons, or whatever). Maybe I just don’t have an eye for Era-differentiation, but this “voting-via-costume” notion wasn’t really borne out, in my experience. Penn Station was jam-packed with people of all stripes pretty much wearing the same thing — exceedingly short shorts, heeled boots, sequined tops, and small, cute cowboy hats. It looked ludicrous there in the station, but it had the accidental benefit of eliminating any second-guessing about whether one had boarded the correct train. One would expect precious few passengers in pink, feather-lined hats on the after-work train to, say, Newark.

Anyway, after about half an hour crammed on an overstuffed train next to some ten-year-olds in short-shorts, we found ourselves in the thick of the Meadowlands Sports Complex. This zone comprises the stadium, some sort of race track, an ominous-sounding thing called the “Izod Center,” and the cynically-named American Dream Mall. It was a bit heart-rending, exiting the train upon arrival and separating from the throng of infectiously-ecstatic fans, but we knew the hard truth: they belonged with their ilk in the great mixing pot of the stadium. We, on the other hand, were to be ushered to our quarters in the show promoter’s private box, a stately and plush viewing station located, by my rough estimation, about sixteen miles from the stage.

We can see our houses from here, and also the houses we grew up in, many states away.

But, look, at a show like Taylor Swift’s, you don’t WANT to be right up front. The scale of the production is so huge, it rewards this commanding bird’s-eye view — you’re seeing the entirety of the stage, the intricacy of the choreography, the totality of the outsized pageantry. Plus, in the private box, there are mozzarella sticks.

Mozzarella sticks warm contentedly in the urn on the lower right.

Mozzarella sticks in hand, with backup mozzarella sticks in each jacket pocket plus my front pants pockets and also tucked behind my ear like a 1950s greaser’s cigarette, I bravely left the air-conditioned room and tried to find an available space on our balcony.  Just kidding, there was plenty of empty seating out on our balcony. A cruel part of me fantasized about bringing a photo of our capacious, near-abandoned space down to the Swift fans who, unable to secure last-minute second-market tickets, remained outside of the arena, but I resisted. I didn’t want to get my mozzarella sticks all mushy with their tears.

Super-agent Mike Mori enjoys the ultimate status symbol: elbow room at a Swift concert.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for the tour of the year, the support was top-tier. Up first was Gayle, whose name meant nothing to me, but whose final song was instantly recognizable — “abcdefu” has haunted the American Top Forty since it was released in 2021. I can’t say I’ve historically been a huge fan of the tune, but it’s a bona fide ear-worm, and sustained exposure has had the desired effect. I’d be lying if I claimed that I haven’t caught myself humming it randomly, here and there, going about my business, selecting tangerines at a grocery or waiting in line for a Mountain Dew Baja Blast Freeze at Taco Bell, or whatever. Truth be told, the song sounded great live. Improbably (at Met Life Stadium in this day and age), Gayle’s band is a rock trio, and they delivered their songs with an appealing scrappiness. Two thumbs up for Gayle, and two thumbs up for Taylor Swift, so titanic a headliner that her first-on can be an act who’s enjoyed a number one single in at least thirteen countries, by Wikipedia’s count.

Main support: the generational talent, Phoebe Bridgers. I’ll go ahead an admit now that Bridgers was the real draw for me at this show. Like, yes, I wanted to see the Taylor Swift extravaganza, for sure, but that was at least partly out of anxious curiosity. It was a little like “wanting” to see the notorious 1980s snuff-compilation Faces Of Death on VHS, as a child. I like to be abreast of the cultural conversation, to speak with firsthand knowledge of the people’s prevailing touchstones. Part of me could readily admit that I might be thrilled by what I saw, but that interest was also tinged with some amount of dread. Could I ever un-see the Taylor Swift show?

In any case, I might have come to see Taylor Swift, but I came to hear Phoebe Bridgers, and she delivered. Despite having been a massive fan for many years now, I’ve somehow never managed to seen her live, and I was worried about this show. A gargantuan stadium doesn’t exactly strike one as the ideal place to see a performer like Bridgers, who largely traffics in intimate, delicate tunes. I needn’t have worried — the band sounded massive and potent and she was charismatic as hell, and now I’m wondering if maybe the finest context in which to enjoy her quiet confessionals might indeed be amidst 80,000 fans making their way to their seats in broad daylight? It worked for me.

Stadium-size talent before the main event.

After all of this high-grade opening action, I needed a break. I’d heard a lot of chatter on the wire about Taylor Swift’s positively batshit merchandise trade, and I wanted to take a look for myself. She’s apparently been setting up merch outposts in the venue parking lots to satisfy the demand from fans who couldn’t nab tickets to the show, and one shudders to imagine what sort of business was going on out there, with animal pelts or lug-nuts or whatever passes for currency in stadium lots. Inside the venue, though, standard merch was going gangbusters. The line for t-shirts extended beyond the standard boundaries established for sales in the lobby and stretched well down the hall, past the restrooms and the Mrs. Fields cookie stands (you could differentiate the two by their signage, if not by their wafting scents). It’s perhaps notable that Taylor Swift’s crowd is the first I’ve ever observed whose thirst for official swag outweighed their thirst for actual beverages. The line for t-shirts was easily one-hundred shoppers deep. The line for alcohol? Less impressive.

Maybe they just hate Corona?  Fair.

Or maybe they were just saving their money. A 16oz. can of Modelo, available at my corner bodega for $1.50, was priced at an almost admirably villainous $15, before tax and tip. I bought four. A happier purchase was the Strawberry SwiftieRita, a cleverly-marketed beverage on tap that tasted not at all of strawberry nor of margarita nor of Taylor Swift, yet it still satisfied our group’s palate so completely that we were cast into utter despair when we returned for second helpings only to find that the bar had closed at 10:00pm, a full 90 minutes before the show’s conclusion. The merch booth remained open, of course. Such are the priorities of the Swift fan.

Then, the main event. Much has been made of the volume of the audience at a Taylor Swift show, but you just really have no idea until you’re in it, cowering like a cat in an aluminum foil factory (cats hate aluminum foil, and also, I’d imagine, factories). This crowd had the decibels, but holy crap, it also had the frequency. Such high-pitched squealing, at such high volume, so sustained. I am an idiot, and have failed to wear earplugs at my own very-loud performances, which have sometimes numbered in the hundreds per year for like 25 years now, and this noise hurt my ears. Surely, for miles surrounding Met Life stadium, local dogs spent three hours that evening baying and drooling and climbing atop refrigerators in abject terror at a sound that their masters simply couldn’t explain to them was the roar of tens of thousands of activated pre-teen girls.

And you know what? Taylor Swift earned that noise. Several times throughout the night, I wished that I could hit those adolescent pitches, so that I too might pay appropriate tribute to this mighty woman. Instead, I perched silently in my aerie, gawping like an idiot at the sheer spectacle of her performance. Costume changes galore, pyrotechnics, a squad of crack dancers who never — never once — stopped smiling in a convincingly beatific manner.

See?

There were trees that emerged out of the floor like surface-to-air missiles of delight. There was a crack band who performed in a penned-off area to the side of the main stage, which looked at a distance to be almost cruelly compact but which likely had a larger footprint than most of the stages I’ve played on.

It’s like they’ve got their own little Kentish Town Forum up there.

The real highlight of the production, though, was Swift’s catwalk, a peninsular mass larger than many runways I’ve personally landed upon (what I’m pointing out here is that I’ve flown on private planes). Her stage was plated entirely in LED screens, which flashed and projected video and pretty much just made it constantly appear that Taylor Swift was wandering around on the CGI background of a latter-day Marvel film, except that it looked good. This fucker also had multiple trap doors, which randomly elevated Swift and her gang for moments of exultation or sucked her quickly below the stage for another in the dozens of costume changes she enjoyed throughout the night. Presumably, all of the long-distance sprinting she was doing meant she was sweating through outfit after spectacular outfit.

If the intra-tour shorthand for this stage isn’t “The Hammerhead,” everyone responsible for naming things on Swift’s team should be fired.

It would be disingenuous, though, to pretend that any of this really made one damn bit of difference. Her incredible catalogue of songs was the real show. I’ve never been a particularly rabid fan of Taylor Swift. I think she’s an undeniable talent, and, yeah, I do think she’s got some undeniable bangers. “Ready For It?” is the shit. “Bad Blood” is perfectly crafted pop. “I Don’t Want To Live Forever,” which she wrote for the Fifty Shades Of Grey soundtrack, would be one of the best songs of the 2010s even if it weren’t irrevocably associated with images of people in garters swatting each other’s butts with cat-o-nine-tails, or whatever happens in that movie (I like to pretend that I don’t own it on Blu-Ray).

But look, that song didn’t even make it onto Friday night’s 3h40m(!!!!) setlist. Why? Because whether or not you think you love Taylor Swift, she has an unbelievable roster of songs and she will use them to beat you into absolute fandom. Live, she’s a better singer than I’d anticipated. Her voice is full-bodied, and is nimble and potent even when she’s doing wind-sprints and climbing upon tables opposite dancers in business garb in weird tableaus that don’t appear to have any relevance to the song being performed. Amongst the 45(!!!!!) songs played that night, there were maybe like four that didn’t exhilarate me.

I should add that I was in an infinitesimally small minority during those moments of mild resistance — the fans kept up their hurricane alarm shrieking for the entirety of the show. There was a moment during a quiet, solo-piano moment when Swift paused to deliver what I assume is a scripted and routine declaration of generic thanks to her fans. It was met with — I shit you not — like three minutes of sustained cat-in-a-blender screaming from the many tens of thousands of grateful fans. Three minutes is an awfully long time for nothing but shrieking to occur in a football stadium. As the crowd erupted, Swift sat on her piano bench, sort of taking it in with a blankly professional countenance (she performs like this all the time, after all). Slowly, though, over the course of this extended massive shriek of adulation, her mien sort of morphed — first to quiet delight, then to genuine bemusement, and then (and this seems almost impossible, given that Swift has been one of the most revered celebrities since before she was old enough to legally see films like Fifty Shades of Grey in theaters, even with adult accompaniment) to what appeared to be legitimate overwhelmed astonishment. She was moved. I was moved. I choked up, watching this enormous celebrity who has kissed Jake Gyllenhaal become teary-eyed, up there on the crystal-clear jumbotrons that peppered the stadium, above the incredible swell of humanity, many of whom had paid ungodly sums of money to lay eyes upon her. If she was only acting just then, she is a truly great actor (I’ve seen her in Amsterdam, and she is maybe not a truly great actor). It was one of the most profoundly human moments I’ve experienced at a live show, and it humanized this titan, and endeared her to me, and made me — just one tiny speck in her sea of idolators — feel an electrically personal connection to a superstar. I feel lucky to have seen it.

Then she invited Jack Antonoff out to perform with her, so we went home to make Mai Tais and watch erotic thrillers.

Oi! Mate… Snarglepip — full name Snarglepip@hotmail.com — thank you! Thank you so very much! Want to know what you did? Here’s what you did:

They sure seem to love those green bottles.

You made yesterday’s rehearsal very goddamn pleasant indeed. See, we used you annual paid subscription $$$ to buy ourselves a beautiful 6-pack of Peroni coldbeer. Even at midtown prices, your generous endowment was more than enough! Boy oh boy, we can’t tell you how much nicer it was to run through classics like Great Escape and Buckle, and new heroes like Settled Accounts and Less From You, while sippling on these glassy green delights. Yes, tomorrow’s show outside of Baltimore, Maryland, will be an ecstatic affair thanks in large measure to your now-legendary generosity. Thanking you with love and beer burps!

(A flood of details coming early next week on S.D.I.R.’s new paid-subscriber benefits! ⏰🎁)

– The Sci-Guyz