A Very Special Robcast Taylor Swift Eras Tour Concert Movie Review
Fearless Coverage
Who would want to revisit being a broken hearted high-schooler? Turns out …
I saw it through the eyes of the haters.
I saw it through the eyes of the Lovers.
5 minutes into the 3 hour cinematic must-see once-in-a-generation (or generations) experience, I thought to myself, wow this is fake as shit. I know now that the show opened on the theme of her Lover album, and so everything, from the stage, to the looks, to the songs, to the arrangements, to the way the band was presented (or not yet presented), was based on that era. But seeing it in the moment was jarring. So many people.. so many tears… the emotions of a lifetime. For what?
Peacocks?
For me, it was the worst kind of fake epic. It was fury and sound signifying what her words were worth. For all of the hype, for all of the Taylor Swift journalism, the big moment you’ve been waiting for turned out to be people in enormous peacock costumes stretching 20 feet in the air.
And everyone was crying, and it was the height of American culture, and the resuscitation of our economy, and Taylor took a somewhat unconvincing stab at expressing just how much it means to her to be the center of human attention on a galactic scale, and frankly the songs didn’t even sound good because the track sounded fairly distant in the mix.
But soon everything changed - that was just the Lovers album era.
Then the band came out. Every song had a different choreography, some featuring her (mercifully not overly numerous) dancers, some her backup singers, and about 15 minutes into the set, some of the band took their places up and down the length of the stage that was large even for a half-time show.
I watched carefully, very carefully, to see if they were guitarists or ge-fake-ists. But I was relieved.
Then a few things happened.
First, I enjoyed the songs. Fearless was her third album and was her oldest album to get significant playtime during the show. It was her last ‘country’ album, and the live band sounded great. It was frankly the perfect balance of well-mixed instruments with confident players who don’t need attention but accentuate the singer and let them shine.
I noticed the real drum set, more or less where the pit band would be.
There was a guitar solo played that wasn’t on the album recording, that was mild and short, but tasteful, and the player rose on an elevated platform during it.
And all of these things I know happen during other pop concerts, but they were done well here.
Meanwhile - the kids emerged.
We realized early on, during an on-screen countdown that kicked off the show, that there were dozens of young children seated in the rows behind us. Oh no, I hear you wail.
They were the best part.
By the time ‘You Belong With Me’ hit the first chorus, 20, no, 30 kids, mostly under 10 but a few that were older, were amassed at the front of the theater jumping in time. None of them had been born when the song came out, but they recreated the middle school dances they either weren’t old enough for, or missed because of Covid, perfectly.
They were delightful, and were short enough to jump without their heads reaching the bottom of the screen, which was tremendous.
The scene continued through one more song from the album, and aside from a dance party during ‘Shake It Off’, the kids would never jump again for the rest of the set.
I have a few theories about the rise of Taylor Swift. Not her rise and fall, which took place years ago, nor the the death and then rebirth following the fall, which is story of passion and betrayal my wife could tell.
No, I’m talking about Taylor as the ‘current thing’. Why have we reached a Taylor singularity?
Her recent volume of work speaks for itself.
Casual observers seem to think she has a floor of being at least ok. A Swift album is an ‘effortpost’.
I appreciate that she, for the most part, writes her own songs, and can play them too.
All of that creates a popular artist, but we need to explain a social singularity.
Analysis 1: Taylor as ‘permission to like something.’
Something happened when ‘Midnights’ came out. For some, it was their first anticipated major artistic release since they were back in school physically, back in the office, back face to face.
I think people had become accustomed to performative hating. That is, if they liked something, or if something made them feel anything really, it meant they could soon be expected at least one of the following:
They’d be problematic for liking it.
They’d find out that their liking it was an expression of their pent-up evil or worse, bad taste.
They’d find out that the person they dared to like was problematic, or would out themself soon enough.
(Wake up people, every time you stream Taylor Swift you are intentionally transferring wealth away from more deserving artists you could have listened to instead.)
It was a time of unified expression on everything. It was a time of expressing nothing.
It wasn’t all that of course. But I hypothesize that Midnights was high on the richter scale for three things at once:
Being marketed successfully to achieve massive awareness at once (impressions)
Being mostly liked by a lot of people
Giving no one a reason to hate it (this is due to probably to extremely careful cultural positioning on Taylor’s part)
Pop music has done this before, but for many many Americans, I think Midnights was the first time in a long time they could have the following interaction.
Go to work
Be around people
‘Hey did you hear the thing’
‘Yea I liked the thing’
‘I liked the thing to’
‘Nice’
Millions took to instagram to share this profound experience. And there was no hatred. There was no backlash. There was … peace.
Taylor Swift may possibility have re-invented the act of mutually enjoying art with others on a large scale (or at least on the scale of mega-pop) as a bold act of non-politics.
But then.
Analysis 2: Taylor as re-claiming of youth
This is a perhaps a well-trodden take. But the obvious next step in Taylor’s spontaneous conquest of the United States is that many fans bonded over their enjoyment of prior Taylor works over instagram.
Faced with the profound reality that they can like something people like, shell-shocked culture warriors confided in each other that they’d also liked other works of hers, from so long ago.
The consistent quality (in a general sense) of her discography lends itself to fandom.
Now, my wife tells me that Swift fandom culture has been active on the internet for many years. So if you take the worn grooves of a fandom with deep lore and rules, and millions of new fans re-discover the community. you are poised for an explosion.
That’s all the obvious stuff. What’s, well still obvious but maybe more interesting to me, is how common a feature it is in Taylor fandom to favor different parts of her career. Taylor shrewdly and with tremendous business acumen capitalized on this with her several recent re-recordings of her albums.
“The re-releasing of Fearless opened something in the millennial female consciousness … a rebirth.” - my wife.
It is beyond me at this time to try to put in to words what it means for we cynical adults to re-connect with songs of wistful youth. But it happened on a large scale for many people. None of it is nostalgia for an era. (Ironically, actual eras in history and social progression have nothing to do with Taylor Swift). Instead, her eras map somewhat neatly to eras in development and life progression for many.
She re-rung the heartstrings of younger versions of so many people, after heartbreak was known but before the hardening of adulthood.
It was a reclamation of innocence, or at least fondness for innocence, which we performatively shy away from.
Adding to the effect, it is packaged as a genuine story of female empowerment and fighting against ‘the man’, as the whole business of re-recording albums is really about Taylor capturing enormous royalties that previous contract deals deny her.
The Label: A woman of your talents, really? Do you call this Artistic Expression?
Taylor:
Synthesis: The Tour
So, everyone decided in a rather short period of time that it was ok to feel feelings again. Rather a splendid business opportunity for Swift. She intuited her fans feelings well, or is insanely lucky, because she decided to put out the best-selling concert in history to promote not her newest albums, but all of her albums.
So in the end, what is the verdict of the complete work?
For me it was grand and well-produced of course. But the note that rings loudest in my heart is the sad one. To see kids, small kids, absolutely ecstatic in the best way because they connect with the dreamy heartthrob lyrics of Fearless, and that it’s the best thing in the world to them, like crack really, was priceless. The rest of the concert, to me, hung over it as a painful monument to what growing up would mean for them.
And sure, that’s realistic, but what kind of art is it? Are we thinking of all parts of this cultural explosion as equally great?
My sincere kudos to Taylor for being willing to put it all out there. The juxtaposition of the happy with the cynical misery of her later work was a by-product of business here, but she let it happen and she owned it. For me, it made Lover, Reputation, and Midnights, feel a bit like ash in my mouth. I lack the ability to piece together why it all affects my own winding heart so. The surface level is obvious. But how the culture looks upon vulnerable moments of youth … that stuff gets baked in deep.
So to me, the finished product, the real art of it, was quite accidental. Every time we saw a shot of tear-streaming, ecstatic raving fans cry cry crying along to every song, and every time she humble-bragged or mixed that little touch of diva-flaunting in with her effusive thanks, and made it seem effortless, in all of those moments I felt a bit alien to the spectacle. But I will not be asking nor wishing for a refund.
Bonus Round
Really these are the things I’ve been waiting to say.
The stage was the real MVP. Fantastic visual design.
The VFX artists who produced the behind-the-stage visuals should be hired for Elden Ring 2.
The live arrangements of the songs were really fantastic, transparent in most places, used tastefully when they stood out, but overall very audible. It changed the character of the songs once we got past Lover, and I would enjoy a studio recording of any of her albums based on the same styles three times as much. A special shout to the subtle, satisfying, and worthy-of-emulation addition of rock elements to ‘Look What You Made Me Do’.
Shout-out-to the two lead male backup dancers, who I managed to not hate in spite of my general fear and confusion at the sight of backup dancers, and who added a lot of charisma.
Shout out to the band.
BUT. WE MUST END ON A SOUR NOTE.
HUGE POINTS DEDUCTED FOR A CRIMINAL ACT.
Throughout the performance, Taylor often played guitar. She did so on perhaps a third of the songs.
She did not appear at any time to be a ge-fake-ist, although she has a solid case of James Hetfield down-picking.
Her guitar playing was almost never audible in the mix, which was probably intentional and undermined the effect for me greatly, though I thought her playing was fine in her solo acoustic performance.
This is all irrelevant to me.
IN THE OUTRO.
The final song was ‘Karma.’ It was very mid as a closer but probably the best choice given the constraint of choosing a song from ‘Midnights.’
It had an extended outdo of course, which sounded nice, though it didn’t have any elements particularly distinct from the album recording that I noticed live.
Swift did the shout outs. People bowed. No one else got acknowledged by name but I suppose there were a bunch of them. Yes yes fine.
When the band got shouted out. In the feature film presentation we saw, we were treated to a few shots of the band playing along in the outro, clearly not doing much but having a good time.
Ok.
Then we saw the lead guitar player.
The man who, I am told, has played guitar for her for years.
The man who’s charisma and gentle charm added to so many songs.
In the final moments, they cut to a shot of him very obviously shredding out a lead part that was absolutely not present in the audio whatsoever. You can just tell what it would have sounded like live, and it would have sounded perfect. It was absolutely tasteful and classy and epic. And they didn't have to show it at all in theaters. But they choose to show that as his parting moment of glory, visually, while a synch hummed out a pleasing A major.
That is all.