So Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film absolutely is the dazzling, five-star extravaganza of much-loved songs, inventive stage sets and kinetic camerawork that we were promised. As someone who tried and failed to get gig tickets for the UK leg of the tour, I am truly grateful for a front-row seat.
But there’s just one niggle I’m surprised no other reviewers seem to have pointed out. Half an hour in, I started to find it odd that Taylor hadn’t missed one note. I mean, dancing and singing at the same time is tough, let alone with 70,000 fans screaming along. You could be forgiven the odd fluff.
But no: as the 40 songs unfolded, I couldn’t hear a single one. Is Taylor really that superhuman?
Google led me afterwards to this fascinating article in the New York Times. It suggests that the best bits of three nights’ filming will have been stitched together, and notes digitally tweaked, to create the illusion of live perfection.
If so, I wonder if that’s a shame. Taylor’s brand is authenticity, and loving yourself despite your flaws. And surely part of the excitement of live performance is the danger, the feeling that on the night anything might happen – good and bad. Removing this reduces the film to a succession of beautifully stitched together music videos. And Taylor has already released a string of the best vids in the biz.
Then again, creating filmed perfection does play into the other part of Taylor’s brand: the artistic control freak (I mean this in a good way) and hard-headed businesswoman who set about rerecording and rereleasing all her albums when she couldn’t buy back the rights to them, and who set the Eras film ticket prices in the US at $18.89. This was celebrated by fans as being in honour of the soon-to-be-released “Taylor’s version” of her album 1989, recently named by Ed Potton in The Times as the best pop record of this century. It’s also considerably higher than the average film ticket price, which in 2022 was $10.53.
Taylor negotiated directly with US cinema chain AMC, cutting out the usual Hollywood studio route, to retain a bigger share of the pie. Which, at a $100m opening weekend gross in the US alone, will be considerable. (The tour, meanwhile, is predicted to make $2.2bn revenue from its US dates alone.)
If I was a man…
I don’t resent this. I admire it. Taylor celebrates her own business acumen in one of the best-staged songs in the film, The Man, which attacks the casual industry sexism that holds her back. “If I was a man,” she sings, “what I was wearing, if I was rude/ Could all be separated from my good ideas and power moves” – before concluding, “If I was a man, I’d be the man.”
The song was also, in its own way, an act of defiance and statement of intent: that she was becoming more political, with both a small and a big “p”. Another song on the same Lover album (2019), the bouncy You Need to Calm Down, joyously stands with the LGBTQ+ community against hate-mongers: “You just need to take several seats and then try to restore the peace and control your urges to scream about all the people you hate. ‘COS SHADE NEVER MADE ANYBODY LESS GAY.” [Sidebar: I swear Taylor came up with the “uh-oh” chorus of multiplying ascending voices by asking herself, “I wonder what a rainbow sounds like?”]
That this departure is A Big Deal is made clear in the excellent documentary Miss Americana (on Netflix), where Taylor is seen arguing with execs over her desire to break political neutrality and declare for the Democrats – which might antagonise her Country base. (Remember what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they spoke out against the Iraq War?)
And you know what? No one burned her records. She’s bigger than ever. She’s come into her own power, and, as is clear from watching her on stage, she’s loving it.
She’s so big, in fact, that she’s in danger of losing the “outsider” status that makes her so beloved of fans. My guess is that she is alive to that danger. Is it a coincidence that, on her most recent album, Midnights, the strongest song is the self-deprecating Anti-Hero? “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby, and I’m the monster on the hill/ Too big to hang out, slowly lurching towards your favourite city/ Pierced through the heart but never killed.”
To underline the point, Taylor sings this in the Eras film in front of a huge video screen showing her as a gawky giant, accidentally destroying tower blocks.
Taylor may overtly be singing about body-image insecurity, but there’s surely another layer. Most stars who get as “big” as Taylor face a backlash – what Australians call “tall poppy syndrome”, the desire to tear down the over-successful. This song seems to artfully pre-empt and thereby defuse this.
What will become of me?
If so, Taylor has form. Back in 2012, she wrote Nothing New for her album Red. On it she sings of the fickleness of stardom, “Lord, what will become of me/ Once I’ve lost my novelty?… Will you still want me when I’m nothing new?” It didn’t make the final cut for the album, resurfacing only on the recent “Taylor’s version” rerecording. I’d theorise that it was dropped because it mournfully painted herself as a passive victim.
It was on her next album, 1989 (released in 2014), that Taylor worked out how to “own” her detractors by clapping back with head-held-high defiance – and with work that soars effortlessly above that of her competitors. In its hit single, Shake It Off, Taylor creates a compendium of the criticisms levelled at her (“I stay out too late, got nothing in my brain… I go on too many dates, but I can’t make them stay…”), in order to own the abuse and then give it the finger through a breathtakingly catchy piece of dance-pop and one of the most joyous videos ever filmed.
Look What You Made Me Do joined this lineage of clap-back songs in 2017. The video is filled with snake imagery, and her dress for this Era in the film is also wreathed with serpents. This references her second public spat with Kanye West: the one where she expressed horror at his lyric “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous” (this was by humiliating her on stage at the 2009 MTV video awards), after which Kanye replied that he had her permission for the lyric, then Taylor said she didn’t, then Kanye’s (later ex-) wife Kim Kardashian released partial footage of the conversation, then Taylor went to ground, and then #snake started trending against her name.
Phew. Just writing that makes me feel tired, let alone what it must have been like to live through. So, again, the snakes are Taylor’s way of owning and reclaiming this rare downward turn in her trajectory.
“But I got harder I got stronger in the nick of time/ Honey I rose up from the dead I do it all the time” is the chorus to Look What You Made Me Do. The song also contains a section in which Taylor stops singing to answer the phone: “I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh – ‘cos she’s dead!” The 2017 music video hammers home the point with the new, harder, stronger Taylor lording it over an army of bickering ex-Tay-Tays, each wearing the different clothes and hairstyles of genres and videos past.
Truly, Taylor’s career has been a masterclass in reinvention, all backed by stoking the fervent adoration of her fans (now up to 275m Instagram followers). I didn’t realise it was possible to flirt with 70,000 people at once, but there’s Taylor in the film waving coquettishly, winking, pointing at fans one by one when she sings the word “you”. But the most telling moment is when she thanks her audience for “allowing” her to keep shifting musical genres, to keep reinventing herself. And it’s true, they – we – stay with her loyally through all her different phases, even the quieter, more introspective pandemic albums.
Pop is the most unforgiving genre. There are few who manage to remain relevant for more than a few years. Madonna managed it. Taylor’s one-time rival, Katy Perry (publicly reconciled on You’d Better Calm Down), has not.
You kept me like a secret
So how has Taylor done it? By applying a savvy business head, yes. By never forgetting her fans, of course. Addressing political and social issues at last, rather than just navel-gazing at her own relationships, now that was a plot twist. But most of all, it’s because she is quite simply the peerless songwriter of our century, a wordsmith and storyteller who can hold her own with, say, Bruce Springsteen – whose The River her best song, the 10-minute All Too Well, thematically resembles.
If anyone doubts Taylor’s gift for poetry (we’re looking at you, Damon Albarn), here’s just a few zingers from it: “You called me up just to break me like a promise/ So casually cruel in the name of being honest”; “Every time you double cross my mind…”; “You kept me like a secret/ But I kept you like an oath.”
I cried at Taylor’s acoustic rendition of All Too Well in the dark of the cinema, as I often do on listening to it (ditto The River). To move an audience to tears one moment with the expression of lost love, and to dancing with joy the next – or, as she puts it, to write some songs with a fountain pen, some with glitter gel and some with a quill – is quite some gift. Though “gift” is the wrong word, as it suggests this all comes naturally.
I mean, yes, she wrote the charming and clever Our Song (also featured in the Eras film) in ninth grade, so she’s not short of native talent. But Taylor works bloody hard at her craft.
Of the 40 songs in the Eras film, I found myself mouthing all the words to about 30 of them. As I have perhaps only at Paul McCartney, Springsteen and Bowie concerts. And as did most of the audience.
That level of recognition and memorability across ten albums is something special. Here’s to Taylor’s next reinvention in her next era, whatever it might be.
London, Hollywood 