Arts & Culture

Who: Taylor Swift, The Eras Tour
Where: Rogers Centre
When: Fri., Nov. 22
Vibe: The world’s biggest pop star earns her crown in a three-plus-hour hit parade
Highlight: witnessing the Beatlemania-like enthusiasm of 49, 000 bedazzled Swifties
Rating: NNNNN (out of 5)

MINUTES BEFORE boarding the UP Express at Bloor Station, a mom approaches a little girl wearing glitter eyeshadow and a sequined skirt. There was no question where she, and her father, were headed.

“Do you want a friendship bracelet?” the mother asks. “We went to the show last night,” she gestures to her own daughter, beaming behind her, before slipping two beaded Swift signatures onto the young girl’s wrist.

I, along with this fan and her father, then squeeze onto a train packed to capacity with buzzing Swifties on their way to the Rogers Centre. Swift’s Eras Tour has not just taken over the stadium for six nights, it has taken over the entire city, a fact perhaps begrudged by the commuters trying to squeeze through bedazzled cowboy hats on their way home from work.

In the past year and a half, Swift’s record-breaking tour has managed to straddle a unique line of universality and exclusivity. The 152-date venture will tie Coldplay’s ongoing Music of the Spheres World Tour as the most attended tour of all time, but acquiring tickets has felt more Hunger Games than fair game. Friendships have been rocked, bank accounts have been depleted, parents have been guilt tripped. Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attended Friday’s show with his family, perhaps earning him some dad points in the process.

Among the UP’s Swiftie sardines is a mom who had made the eight-hour drive from New York with her daughter. They don’t have tickets yet, she says, but hope to snag some at the last minute. (Considering that resale tickets were going for upwards of $2,000 well into the prior night’s concert, one can assume how their night might’ve ended.)

“Good luck,” another parent offers as we exit the train.

With this context in mind, you could look around at the 49,000 other fans in Rogers Centre and somehow still feel like you’re part of some intimate club — albeit one that has already gathered 140+ times across five continents for 9.6 million ticket-holders. At a time of heightened division, there’s some comfort to be found in these increasingly rare moments of monoculture. Swift is perhaps the last vestige of that reality, serving as a shortcut to the communal in a time of isolation — no matter the cost.

That being said, it would be impossible, and irresponsible, to argue that any show is worth the thousands of dollars that many fans have spent on their tickets. Swift herself wouldn’t condone paying $10,000 for a floor seat. We can call this price-gauging what it is — predatory — but that doesn’t change the fact that artists and fans are powerless against the resale market.

So where does that leave us? With a stadium full of fans who went to extreme lengths to get there and a pop star who has committed to “super serve” them with the show of a lifetime.

And she does.

Over the course of three-plus hours, the scale of Swift’s performance continues to one-up itself. Massive, three-tiered structures give way to pyramid-like risers, rustic cabins and see-sawing platforms. Confetti is bookended by pyrotechnics and a sea of light-up wristbands. All the while, hi-def, hyper-real visuals dance across the screen.

Swift, ever the world-builder, has mastered the art of bringing those worlds to life on stage. A nanosecond of video featuring a hissing snake is enough for fans to erupt in anticipation of the Reputation era that will follow. A backdrop of mossy woods readies concertgoers for the folklore/evermore portion of the evening (one that could’ve been a song or two shorter relative to the length of the other eras). A black and white palate ushers fans into the Tortured Poets Department (the evening’s peak of performance and execution.) It’s a script that Swift has been writing for 18 years, resulting in a fan-artist language entirely of its own.

At the intersection of social media and live music, it’s increasingly difficult to integrate surprise into large-scale concerts. This is especially true for Swift when you consider that Toronto is the second to last stop on her long-running tour. With fans live-streaming and dissecting every show for the past year and a half, the Eras Tour isn’t one you go to for its spontaneity. Every mark is hit the way it was the night before and every transition is seamless. Aside from the evening’s surprise acoustic set, which includes Ours, the last great american dynasty followed by a medley of Cassandra, mad woman and I did Something Bad, everything else goes according to plan.

But this predictability seems to be part of the appeal for Swifties, who eagerly anticipate every move, shake, shimmy and word from their idol.

“You’ve all got me feeling really, extremely …” Swift begins some brief stage banter before launching into The Man.

“POWERFUL!” yell the fans around me.

“Powerful!” finishes the star.

They are, quite literally, finishing Swift’s every sentence.

This also speaks to the varying layers of experience at a Taylor Swift concert. At the surface, you have the casual fans bopping along to the hit parade. But go deeper, and you’ll find Swifties who know every cue and call-and-response by heart. You triple-clap during the bridge of Shake It Off while you double-clap for You Belong With Me. In the opening verse of Delicate, you yell “One, two, three, let’s go bitch!” in unison. It has gotten to a point where even Swift expects, and invites, these rehearsed moments from her fans.

“It’s more than just a concert,” she says at one point. “You guys are performing back to me.”

Among the things that you won’t see at an Eras show? Sweat. As a performer, Swift is both generous and unstoppable. While she appears to run multi-marathons over the course of the evening, there isn’t so much as a glisten or gasp for air. Her endurance is objectively impressive and a result of a six-month training regimen that apparently had her running on the treadmill while singing her entire 45-song setlist.

You also can’t take a washroom break quicker than Taylor Swift changes costumes — each more sparkly and bedazzled than the last. I time these many transitions out of curiosity, and they don’t hit the two-minute mark. The longest pause of the entire night is instead a two-and-a-half-minute applause break following Champagne Problems, which causes the singer to remove her inner-ear monitors and stand up from behind her piano.

“This is wild,” she mouths to herself.

The Eras Tour is about as macro as you can get, but the micro-moments happening throughout the crowd are just as resonant. There’s the grandfather and granddaughter taking selfies and singing along to 22 in their matching fluffy cowboy hats. The little girls recording impossibly shaky videos above their eyeline while screaming every word into the backs of the taller adults around them. The men with bedazzled beards. The groups of girlfriends reciting lyrics to each other like spoken-word conversations.

Within each group, across generations, the songs and spectacles also resonate differently. For millennials who grew up alongside Taylor Swift, there’s a catharsis to taking down the lovers who did us wrong on tracks like The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived. But there is something particularly impactful about seeing young girls connect to the power of songs whose truths they have not yet grown into. They don’t need to know about the misogyny that inspired The Man, nor the crushing loss that led to I Can Do It With A Broken Heart. They can take the empowerment that Swift offers without the pain, for now at least, and the net positive results can be witnessed in real time.

After several hours of nonstop showmanship, Swift offers one last wave and pageant kiss before disappearing below stage. Everyone’s wristbands glow a final time before the stadium’s house lights go on. While adults can be seen rushing out of the venue, parking and TTC logistics undoubtedly on their minds, groups of young girls stay behind, trying to catch the remnants of Karma confetti in their popcorn buckets. The significance of attending these shows can easily be reduced to price tags and the ticking of FOMO boxes, but the wide-eyed wonder of Swift’s youngest fans suggests a magic that will endure far beyond one evening. What’s that worth to you?