Screaming, Crying, Perfect Storms

My night with the Swifties

I joined the throbbing feminine masses this Friday the 13th to experience Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour movie. Devoted readers of this publication will know that I’m a somewhat begrudging but longtime fan. I’ve found ample reason to write about her both here and for Pajiba, where I write celebrity news. I would never refer to myself as a Swiftie because I abhor anything that could be considered cutesy, and I’m not one of those people who scour every public statement Swift makes looking for clues to her coming work or emotional state. I didn’t bother even attempting to get tickets to the tour. I was living in Pittsburgh when she announced it, including two stops there, but I saw what was happening at the presale and knew I didn’t belong in that mess. (By the time she did get to Pittsburgh, I didn’t live there anymore anyway.)

All of that being said, I wasn’t gonna miss this.

My boss was the one who booked us seats for the movie months in advance. Before our arrival, we said we hoped it wouldn’t be “people standing up singing and dancing.”

I’m sure you can guess, dear reader, that we were wrong.

We knew we were in for a long night when we walked into the theater and saw the throngs of teeny-boppers dressed in sequins and faux fur. Actually, we knew we were literally in for a long night when we learned that the movie was two hours and forty-five minutes long.

“Don’t worry, our seats are all the way in the back row,” my boss said. I had a feeling it wouldn’t matter.

Once we’d procured our popcorn and found our way to the seats all the way in the back, we understood what was ahead of us. The vibe was decidedly manic—middle schoolers bouncing in their reclining leather seats as if their heads were about to explode clean off their bodies. Part of me found it sweet, the earnest innocence. Another part of me (the inner child who is still crying in her mom’s lap because she didn’t get invited to the sleepover) was scared. There was so much unbridled energy in that room. If someone had a mic they could have rallied the troops for an uprising, and the world would have been trampled to smithereens. In the same way that the reception of the Barbie movie did, it reminded me of the power of tween and teen girls. These are the people whose tastes and desires rule the economy, and people—people like me who once were one of them—forget to take them seriously.

This isn’t a review of the movie except to say, I’m kind of glad I wasn’t at the tour. Yes, of course, when you’re in the room at a concert you’re so caught up in the energy of it all that it really is magical, but I remembered while watching the movie that Taylor Swift is an entirely auditory experience for me. There’s a sincerity that she lacks in the performance of her songs that confuses me because the sincerity of her lyrics is the whole reason she’s Taylor Swift, the whole reason the teeny-boppers in that theater that night stomped and screamed for nearly three hours at a volume that truly made my ears ring. She’s campy when she performs, and it takes me out of it. She rolls her eyes playfully and twirls her hair sarcastically and smiles at odd moments. It’s like she’s trying to separate herself from her work; like she doesn’t feel connected to most of it anymore. She was careful to tell the audience, at the beginning of the show, that she was a different person when she wrote most of her songs, and what mattered was not the memories the songs were based on but creating new memories, together, that night. I mean, I guess it’s fine if you literally still don’t feel the same way you did when you were 21. On a personal level that’s good, actually. But this is music. I have to believe what you’re saying. I have to believe that you believe it.

The closest she got to seeming like she still felt an inkling of what she was singing was when she was at the piano for the songs “Champagne Problems” and “You’re On Your Own Kid.” These were the only moments when she wasn’t acting; when I saw what felt like actual emotion on her face. I don’t know if that’s because these are fairly recently written songs and so they’re still relevant to her, or because she simply feels more comfortable behind the piano.

I know because I’m a fan and I’ve had this thought myself, that sometimes you hear a Taylor Swift song and you think, “It’s like she read my diary.” Many great writers can do that, and Swift is nothing if not a great writer. So it bothers me that when she’s on tour she acts like she didn’t write these songs in moments of great pain, like that’s not the point of the songs. Of course that’s the point, the 7th grader screaming “PLEASE DON’T BE IN LOVE WITH SOMEONE ELSE,” a few rows in front of me could tell you that.

“That kid is going through it,” I said when her voice cracked as she screamed a line about wanting to die.

“7th grade is hard,” my boss said.

7th grade is hard. I remember being in the 7th grade so acutely. Everything was painful. Everything. Most 7th graders have experienced very little, and yet each experience is steeped with longing and angst. What struck me in that theater, though, was that I would have been too embarrassed to scream and dance the way they were when I was in the 7th grade. I would have sat in my seat, bristling with the thrilling sensation of having my heart sung to me, wanting more than anything to scream and throw my body around, but I wouldn’t have done it. That’s what I’ll remember. They felt safe, those girls. Taylor made them feel that way. She’s more than God to them, she is them. Which is why I wish she didn’t pretend she wasn’t anymore.

Pam Houston has a line in her indomitable collection of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, that I return to again and again in both my writing and personal life: “A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.” Taylor Swift’s subject is not herself, it’s desire. To be a teenage girl is to be desire walking; it spills out of you at inopportune moments and threatens to drown you completely. Those girls, for three hours, got to let it out. They opened their mouths and their desire gushed from them in a collective tsunami the likes of which I doubt I will experience again.

I hope they get to though. I hope they ride that wave into the sunset and leave the rest of us behind.