I was never a Taylor Swift fan.
Me? A fan of Taylor? Pfft, please. I’m 30 years old! In the words of Cher Horowitz, as IF.
Recently, though, I found myself at one of her sold-out Melbourne concerts. So how did I get to this point? Last year, my husband Igor and I were on a long-haul flight back to the motherland when I began to peruse the in-flight entertainment, as you do. Decisions, decisions.
I noticed “Taylor Swift – Live on the Seine (Jan 2013)” and I smirked, and maybe I even scoffed. Because, well, I’m a music snob bitch like that. Ha! But then I was like, oh what the hell, I like half a dozen of her songs; why not. I’d always had a soft spot for the ridiculously catchy You Belong With Me (oof, big-time guilty pleasure) and, let’s face it, I Knew You Were Trouble is bloody brilliant pop music; I mean, it’s bonkers how good it is. (That dubstep rhythm? Inspired!) The angsty All Too Well is also a pretty great tune.
This here Red song was the opening number of the concert. I was pretty impressed. The backup vocalists kicked serious ass, as good backing singers are wont to do. Taylor herself sounded lovely in the video. I decided to watch the whole half hour, and lo, it was good. I had begrudging respect for the lass. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. She was starting to wear me down a little, in spite of myself. Dammit! (Apparently we experience heightened emotions during flights…well, there’s the culprit, folks. Gee, thanks, altitude!)
Where before I had said I’d only go see last year’s “Red” tour if someone gave me tickets for free, now I was tentatively pondering seeing her live one day and actually forking out money for it. Huh. Go figure. Allow me to explain: I love music, PERIOD – all good music irrespective of the genre. I love both semi-obscure stuff, indie and alternative, blues, jazz and classical, hip hop, everything, and I also unabashedly love good, catchy pop music. On the one hand I love The National, The Jezabels, Jeff Buckley, Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, R.E.M, First Aid Kit, Lianne La Havas, Heather Nova, Sarah McLachlan, but I also love Adele, Lana Del Rey, Britney, Madonna, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, etc.
And yet, for a while there, Taylor Swift seemed like “the final frontier” in terms of it being acceptable to like her past a certain age (in those early years she used to largely be the focus of kids and teens), and maybe in part because she used to do that overly earnest, annoying “wide-eyed, open-mouthed” shtick. I liked her okay but I was indifferent to her. I respected the fact Taylor was a songwriter who also played guitar and piano. (And she wasn’t getting her kit off to promote her music so, you know, big plus. Fistbump, Taylor.) I also made fun of her a helluva lot, especially when she totally blew her performance with the legend that is Stevie Nicks at the Grammys in 2010…I mean, that horrid off-key singing was a major crash-and-burn situation if there ever was one.
The fact that she’s a singer-songwriter was definitely appealing. It has to be said: the girl has some wonderful, evocative turns of phrase. They speak to the writer in me. “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter” is just one that makes me smile. Then there’s, “I was a flight risk with a fear of fallin’ / wondering why we bother with love if it never lasts.” Another favourite is: “Hey, you call me up again just to break me like a promise / so casually cruel in the name of being honest / I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here.”
Swiftian…Pavlovian even
My friend Nina and I walked into the stadium that Friday night and surveyed the scene. Fangirls ahoy. A variety of Taylor-inspired outfits, some straight out of her Shake it Off video. Nina and I looked askance at each other and chortled. It was an unseasonably chilly evening but, no matter, girls wore skimpy cheerleader outfits. “Jesus, so many of these girls are going to freeze, what the hell?” Nina observed. I countered with, “You do realise we had essentially the same conversation when we watched Justin Timberlake? Bloody hell, we really are going geriatric.”
Upon entering, Nina and I were each handed a LED bracelet. (Ooh, shiny thing!) It flashed in various eye-popping colours and would do its flashy, colourful thing when we began to wave our hands in the air like we just don’t care.
Before the show started, we noticed a peculiar sight. To wit, a young girl, no older than 15, a few rows down from us had her back to the stage and was dancing to the pre-concert top 40 hits being blasted. The dance moves were…well, interesting to say the least. They weren’t so much dance moves as they were something akin to interpretive performance art. The chick looked stoned (and not in a good way), vacant-eyed, and she kept repeating the same “dance” “moves” over and over, much to both our chagrin and amusement. Vance Joy the support act? Nope, nuh-uh – Vance Joy, eat your heart out, because this wacky teen girl was the real support act. Needless to say, we skipped Vance’s opening act because, having seen the dude perform on The X Factor several months ago, he had all the charisma of a box of hair.
Taylor started the show with 1989 opener Welcome to New York, and the stadium went off like gangbusters. The crowd’s thunderous screeching was such that, for a split second, I wondered if I may have perforated an ear drum, which was quickly followed by a thought that went something along the lines of, “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, and I’mma let you finish, but I will send your people the best, biggest otorhinolaryngologist bill of all time!” I saw some things I’ll never unsee, including young fans flailing about as if they’d gone into epileptic shock.
Several songs in, and I began to feel annoyed – the teens in the row behind me, after virtually every song, began to whisper-squeal, “Oh my God, the next song is […], SQUEEE!” I fought the urge to whip around and roar at them to shut the hell up with the song announcing because, hey, if I’d wanted to know the order of the songs, I would’ve gone to goddamn setlist.fm, but, uh, I don’t think so. (Seriously, why look up the order of songs and kill the one shred of spontaneity in this acutely technological age? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t one of the best parts of a concert anticipating what song might be next, and/or wondering if you’ll recognise it from the first few opening beats? That can’t just be me, right?)
The concert itself was very, very good. Great, even. Fantastic concert, truly.
You’re…sensing a “but”, aren’t you?
(Eh.)
…but. (We’ll get to that in a moment.)
Taylor sounded fantastic – no pitchy shenanigans. (I guess she’s learned from the Stevie Nicks Grammys debacle. Seriously, if I’d sung like that with FREAKIN’ STEVIE NICKS of all people, a queen, I would’ve crawled into a hole and hibernated there a while. Like, circa forever.) So, yes, vocally Taylor was excellent and very engaging, particularly in the quieter moments of the night, such as Fifteen, Clean, the sultry LanaDelReyish Wildest Dreams (juxtaposed with old hit Enchanted), and Love Story. Taylor exuded confidence, too. She is definitely a sophisticated, independent woman now (and a formidable businesswoman, to boot). None of that Britney-esque “not a girl, not yet a woman” limbo. She’s not a kid playing dress-up and faking it. Taylor sauntered about the stage with purpose, a knowing look; sexy and coquettish, a little playful, a little vulnerable – all in one hit. Taylor is the consummate professional up on that stage and she knows it.
The highlights were many and came in rapid-fire succession: Blank Space, New Romantics, the fantastic, anthemic I Know Places, Bad Blood, I Knew You Were Trouble (which came with a film noir twist that ultimately blended into an 80s power rock anthem), Style, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (Taylor giving the kiss-off on electric guitar), and Out of the Woods. Throughout the show, there were moments when Taylor was on a hydraulic catwalk that moved above the crowd like hands on a clock. Cue young girls fangirling and hyperventilating all over the place.
My first gripe is that the show was…too choreographed. Taylor was hitting all her marks brilliantly and she’s definitely got good dance sense (which is more than I can say for her alleged arch nemesis Katy Perry who can’t dance for shit), but there was just so much structured choreography (almost to the point of distraction), most of it strenuously executed by about a dozen outstanding backup dancers popping and locking all over the joint. The choreography emphasis struck me, rightly or wrongly, as a little paint-by-numbers, even though the energy was great and the moves spot-on.
But the biggest problem by far (or disappointment), as far as I’m concerned, was the crowd.
The crowd?
Here’s the thing: they gave up too easily, you know? They would applaud and cheer but go quiet waaay too quickly. Like, I don’t get it, were they…exhausted? Is applause exhaustion a plight I’m unfamiliar with? Several times Taylor would disappear under the stage (which instantly brought to mind Mr Burns’s diabolical bottom-drops-out floor shaft in his office) and, as if on cue, the audience would stop clapping and cheering. It was annoying to say the least. (Nina and I still whooped and clapped, others too.) Was the solution for Taylor to wait a wee bit longer and soak it all in, wait for the applause to die down before getting Mr Burnsed by the stage? Maybe, I don’t know. (I’m no tour planner or strategist, dammit!) I wonder, too, whether the crowd stopped applauding too quickly because of the glorified testimonials flashing on the screen from Taylor’s crew (or “squad” if you will – if I never hear that term again it’ll be too soon). When Taylor would go get changed, we got video snippets of Selena Gomez, HAIM the band, IT girl Cara Delevingne, Lena Dunham, and others talking about their great friend Taylor, their “epic squad” and blaaaah blah blah OMG no one cares. Like, I think WE GET IT. It’s almost like, methinks the ladies doth protest too much. So, yeah, those videos were totally gratuitous; big time. And the young kids were so intent on hearing the grand wisdom being spouted by Taylor’s squad that they shushed themselves – the videos would flicker to life and the kids piped down. (Pavlov would’ve been proud.)
The encore of the concert was the infectious, gleeful Shake it Off – a fitting end, to be sure. Taylor burst back on the scene in an outfit Tina Turner would approve of, dancing and shimmying and doing the twist. Confetti was released, people’s LED bracelets lit up the stadium, and then, as if out of nowhere, fireworks started. (You know you have some sort of mild, dormant form of PTSD from the Yugoslav wars you mercifully survived when the first thing you think is not, “Ooh, fireworks, cool!” but, rather, “Holy shit, where is that shelling coming from?!” Gee…thanks, war, you gnarly gremlin bastard.)
As we left the stadium, I knelt down and touched the patch of grass peeking through the special-event floor mats. I grinned at Nina and exclaimed, “I touched the pitch! The pitch on which the Socceroos won the Asian Cup opening match which Igor and I attended!” (Ah, it always comes back to football somehow with us wogs, doesn’t it?)
Exiting amid the borderline-claustrophobia-inducing crowd, Nina and I launched into our concert post-mortem: “Is it just me or was there…passion lacking in this stadium tonight? Like, I feel like I’m about to start convincing myself what a wonderful experience this was when…not so much.” Nina concurred and thus began a dissecting of the pseudo-apathetic crowd who didn’t clap or cheer nowhere near as loud or for as long as they could have. It had irked the bejesus out of us both. We almost instantly started a compare and contrast with how Serbs/Bosnians/Croats are at concerts – we create an astonishingly electric concert atmosphere, I can assure you. We are loud. We are overjoyed. We scream the place down, to the point where the musicians we holler at are essentially forced to do three encores. (Read: we’re exhausting and demanding.) Stuff like that.
So, after getting down to Taylor’s sick beats and her admittedly incredible band and dance crew, instead of feeling overjoyed and exhilarated, I felt…happyish, mildly pleased and simultaneously deflated. I felt…Prozac happy. Buzzed and happy(ish), but…subdued, inhibited, and veering dangerously close to “meh” territory. Like, every time during the concert I thought, “Yes, YES, I’m close to that awesome stoked feeling” (insert obvious climax joke here) it’d be dulled before it even had a chance of flourishing. We were about to depart AAMI Park and I wasn’t riding that post-concert high I love. The crowd had harshed my buzz. It’s like they were…pre-programmed to cheer on cue and stop suddenly. It was weird, unnerving.
Balkan epilogue
The next night, Igor, Nina and I were in Sydney to see one of the former Yugoslavia’s most beloved bands, Bajaga & Instruktori, and, well, virtually losing our minds with delirium. We walked into the Enmore Theatre not expecting much, even though Bajaga, who have been around since the early 80s, are traditionally excellent live, but maaaaaan. It was all kinds of wonderful. It was exhilarating, it was moving, it was uplifting, it was so much. It made us feel alive. (I know, right? It sounds hackneyed but, dammit, that’s how it was.) For Pete’s sake, certain ballads made us teary. The crowd was in the throes of ecstasy. Hands swaying, fists pumping, energised jumping, spirited dancing.
I’ve gotten this far and I have to ask myself, what the hell is the moral of this loquacious story? ‘Wogs do it better?’ Ha! (Er, well, now that you mention it…) There’s no question Taylor is fantastic and her “1989” concert was fun, enjoyable. I suppose, if you’re onto a good thing – you’re a talented singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who is hands down one of the most successful, popular singers in the world – then definitely continue to amplify all of those elements that make you a captivating live act; there’s plenty of them to pick and choose from, no doubt. The crowd response might not have been as stilted; who knows. A little more of that great spontaneity and the flashes of brilliance from the concert, a little less sudden-disappearing below the stage and those questionable, eye-roll-worthy “squad” videos splicing the concert during Taylor’s outfit changes.
Seriously, Taylor, those videos have got to go. Nix ’em, pronto. And while we’re at it, let’s also totally nix “squad” and phase it out from the pop culture vernacular, for that matter Starting…nnnnnow.
