Review: Taylor Swift risks her reputation
Taylor Swift, ranked as Forbes second highest paid woman in music, has just signed a new record deal with Universal Music and topped Billboard’s year-end album charts. Yet in January 2018 music magazines were flooded with reports that the stadium tour of her latest album Reputation was selling poorly. Those reports turned out to be a little off the mark, and Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour ended up being the biggest selling US tour in history. On New Years Day Swift released a film of the tour on Netflix, enshrining everything the star does as a global event.
Swift is famous for her songwriting. She knows that she could stand on a bare stage with an acoustic guitar and still put on a show that will have pundits lauding her genius in the pages of Rolling Stone. There are moments of this approach in Reputation, but at its core this tour was about excess, camp melodrama and spectacle. The opening number Ready For It? sees the stage screens split in half revealing Swift, silhouetted. As she sings the opening lines “are you ready for it” jets of smoke erupt from the entire stage and pyrotechnics set the tone. Swift could go pared back and make a success of it, but if she’s going to put on a show she’s going to do it properly, in for a penny in for a pound.
The opening loud, synthy tracks, Ready For It? and I Did Something Bad allow Taylor Swift to show off her performing credentials. She can hit the high notes, she’s a pretty good dancer too, she has a presence that is never swamped by the swathes of dancers and back up singers thronging her. But the draw of these opening numbers doesn’t sacrifice the intimacy that Swift wants to create with her acoustic tracks and ballads. Part of this comes from the strength of the film-making – director Paul Dugdale relies on close-ups, allowing us to see the minutiae of her expressions and choreography.
I saw the show live in Croke Park in Dublin. The intimacy Swift achieves in such a large stadium is a feat. It’s not easy to convey that on film, but Dugdale managed it, manipulating the camera with close-ups, and POV crowd shots, replicating the atmosphere that you felt live.
This show was all about Swift, the singer, the songwriter, the dancer. But she wants you to think it wasn’t. Swift throughout her career has worked hard to make personal connections with her fans: Liking their social media posts, holding meet and greets after every show, even inviting a select few to her house for a pre-release listening party for her last three albums. The film captures this performative intimacy well. Alongside the intricate close ups, Dugdale zooms out, panning over the entire stadium making Swift look as if she could be in the crowd, same size and same level as the screaming fans. She’s one of you is the message.
No better is this captured than with her performance of an old classic Long Live. She mashed up the song, a love letter to her fans, with her quirky piano ballad that is the last track of Reputation, New Years Day. “I had the time of my life, with you” she coos over the piano as she glances out to the crowd. Similarly, in the finale Swift sings This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things and gestures out to the crowd with the lyrics: “And here’s to my real friends.” Of course, the hundreds of thousands of fans that flock to see Swift are not her real friends, but she does a pretty good job at convincing you they are.
The finale, backdropped to technicolour lights, fireworks, water fountains and confetti ends on the same drama as the show opened. But the tone is different. When Swift released the lead single for Reputation in August 2017 Look What You Made Me Do fans were was convinced the album would involve biting back at the media which, well, destroyed her reputation. Instead, the album surprised everyone with its vulnerability, levity and joyous description of love. The tone of the finale in the film was just that – a loud and unapologetic expression of the joy of pop music, and the intimacy it can create between Swift and those she loves, perhaps even the crowd.
Swift doesn’t entirely pull off this mission, however. The performances are punctuated with saccharin speeches delivered by the singer, who has practised her gracious if rehearsed stage chat too much. She tells the crowd that there’s something quite “gorgeous” (the title of the third single from Reputation) about all the fans coming together to hang out with her at her stadium tour. She later explains how the fans shape the songs she writes, giving them new life, before launching into fan favourite All Too Well. These sentiments ring a little hollow, considering she delivers identical speeches every night, claiming the crowds have come to do something as casual as “hang out” with her. Usually when you hang out with your friends you don’t scream at their every move, hang off their every word and film them constantly for posterity.
The tour film captures the faux-intimacy Taylor creates in vast stadiums. It cements her as status as one of the all-time great pop performers. But I’d like it better if she stuck to that, just being genre-defying, superlative songwriter turned megastar. I don’t need her to pretend to be my friend.