To say that the whole of Paris was captivated on Thursday by the start of the European leg of Tayor Swift’s Eras Tour is as much of an exaggeration as saying that the singer in question has the gift of brevity – her new record The Tortured Poets Department contains 31 songs. The city is still licking its wounds after PSG’s ignominious defeat the German in the Champions League, but thanks to a bright spring sun, the terraces are all full. A rare girl in a glittery dress passes us on the metro, but it is only when we arrive at La Défense in the early afternoon that we see the fans queuing in long lines.
It’s a mystery why, because the hall is still a long way from opening and the audience, which looks like countless magic balls, often dressed in long dresses or exuberant glitter suits, a fair portion of whom speak English, is sweating heavily in the first sun. As if Halloween, its most cheerful variant, falls on Ascension Day: the glittering snake of beautiful young people, bursting with anticipation and anticipation, is taking selfies and breaks out into song or cheer at unexpected moments, especially when movement is detected.
Behind us in the line, some American star girls grumble that they got to their seats much more quickly in the Yankee Stadium in New York, which can accommodate many more people than here. Reportedly, 30 percent of the tickets in Paris have been sold to foreigners, including many Americans, and they expect 10,000 soon for the concert in Stockholm. It must have been since the Second World War that they crossed the lake with so many at once and this time they did not land on the beaches of Normandy but in La Défense, a somewhat dreary suburb full of high-rise buildings and concrete, with squares without a single tree: you imagine yourself at the Opera in Antwerp, but bigger and more megalomaniac.
Swiftie dads
76 percent of the tickets were sold to women, but fortunately I also see something Swiftie dadswho – as the trade press wants it – uses Swift’s music to unions with their daughters. That’s very true in my case: I love Swift for many reasons, but mainly because my daughters love it and I love them. The trip to Paris is therefore a sublimated family trip with a coincidental concert at the end: all excuses are good to be together.
Turns out the family’s millennial, Generation Z and boomer fell for her music at the same time: Folklore and Evermore, the two glorious albums that she released in a span of just five months in 2020, in the midst of corona. They are Swift’s most introverted records, where there is a fog between the songs in a world without color and they formed the soundtrack to those strange years of face masks, illness and social isolation. Her music created a connection that did not take into account ages or stages of life.
Her records are like a kind of Rorschach test, where the ink stains are replaced by vocal lines and lyrics that are open to everyone’s own interpretations, but especially to
a lot of identification: Swift does not sell music but love and life lessons and tells the story of many people.
When Ghent University started a course that uses its music as a starting point, eyebrows were raised on many fronts: unfair and unjustified and often coming from – how could it be otherwise – men, who do skew from emmoootsie and weep when that narrow Steve Albini comes along, but laugh about popular culture, especially when it comes from women. Sexism disguised as skepticism.
People like to forget that Swift, to say the least, is lyrically at least the equal of Bob Dylan, who received a Nobel Prize for this. I like to forget that she often chooses strange men: how on earth you can fall for a type like Matty Healy from The 1975, who has so much testosterone that he cannot cope with a triple scrotum, is a complete mystery to me. But if you can believe the lyrics of her latest album: for herself too. That all those men are simpletons: someone should write a book about that at some point.
Bedroom music
Corona also caused a peak in bedroom culture, which is a standing concept in sociology, a custom that was already popular in the last century, when mostly women, who withdrew with their music and books in their bedrooms, built a fortress under the blankets and so on allowed the world in and kept it out at the same time. I also had a phase like that when I was 17 that lasted twenty years, even if it involved the music of the Beatles and the books of Jef Geeraerts, and even if it was without the contact with the outside world that is now constantly present, thanks to the eternal digital stream of image and sound.
In addition to a brilliant DNA, that is also something that connects me with my daughters. It may be bedroom music, but tonight everyone is wide awake: even the support act for Paramore – think Blondie, but forty years later – can count on enthusiasm, although most of their songs are of the forgettable variety. But this audience would even like a concert with covers of ‘t Kliekske: they are ready to celebrate.
When the curtain opens at eight o’clock sharp with a scene that could have come from Cirque du Soleil, a sound unknown to me erupts that will only stop forty-four songs later: this is what collective ecstasy sounds like, I think, but luckily I have professional earplugs bee. From the very first notes of the first song – ‘Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince’ – the audience levitates towards the Eiffel Tower, only to land again after the last notes of ‘Karma’, three hours later, in a daze and with a sobering crash. .
“Karma is that guy from the Chiefs”: all lyrics are sung along at full strength, although singing is a big word for some: enthusiasm makes up for a lot, but not everything. In front of me are two American girls taking selfies, screaming and talking into their phones all the time: influencers, I hope, because otherwise they would have missed the concert of their lives.
‘Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince’ perfectly summarizes almost Swift’s entire repertoire: not a song is without it being about yearning love, endless infatuation or its impossibility, with accompanying fathomless depths and it is with her audience like Katrin Swartenbroux once talked about that of Billie Eilish wrote: “the attendees do not sing along because they know the lyrics, but because they mean it”.
The bridge from ‘Cruel Summer’ is now more popular than the one that connects Brooklyn with Manhattan and everyone is shouting along as if it really is the last time. Rarely have I seen that such a deeply sad text can generate so much enthusiasm.
Tableau vivant
Swift presents a generous sample of songs that span her entire career and you notice that she is at home in so many markets that she seems like a chameleon. From muscular power pop à la Bryan Adams light to electro tunes and hopping chart music to intimate folk and tranquil and tranquil piano ballads: there is no genre that she has mastered down to every last detail.
It all sounds loud and clear, thanks to an army of anonymous musicians, who are cleverly carried throughout the show: it is a constant tableau vivant of dazzling dancers and musicians on moving stages who play hits at a blistering pace and almost without breaks. hit into the audience, with so much visible pleasure that it cannot have been faked.
Changes of clothing are conveniently packaged as vaudeville or musical theater and people sometimes dance a French cancan, because the Moulin Rouge is not far away. When Taylor the audience in the Frengels addresses (Bonjour et enchanté), then – as we experts always say – the roof finally falls off and when she asks if we have ten minutes left, she plays ‘All Too Well’, the breakup song to kill all breakup songs. Not an eye remains dry.
It turns out that Swift has reserved a chunk of her show for songs from her new record: dressed in a daring wedding dress – my interpretation – she sings about the troublemakers from her
love life, with the ultimate sneer of The smallest man that ever lived as a bouncer. This is “Female rage: the musical”, she says, after which she adds a festive curl to the evening with the best out Midnights. Even after three hours of running and jumping, she never gets out of breath and she hits the highest notes: if she wanted to, Nafi Thiam could do it in the Olympic heptathlon, soon in Paris.
After this high mass for people who do not believe in God but in Taylor, we shuffle exhausted from the hall: after three hours of almost orgasmic connection, somewhat sobering, ‘You’re on your own kid’ sounds from the speakers. I refuse to believe it. Outside, fans who have a ticket for tomorrow are already lining up for the best seats. Never grow upI hum happily, arm in arm with my two dearest fans, on the way to our hotel.
