Taylor Swifts' Eras Tour is the best sporting event I have ever been to
It also showed me how far we’ve come together.
I’ve never felt as safe in the concourse of a massive stadium as I did on Sunday night at MetLife. The place was packed — a sea of sparkles, sequins, silver. Pink cowboy hats, purple blazers, pleated cheerleader skirts. Shirts that said, “A lot going on at the moment” and many white knit cardigans with green stripes around the armbands. There were kids with their parents, teens let loose for the night in packs, and Millennials who, like Taylor Swift — and me — were also born in 1989. People who grew up with her and her songs.
It was the Eras Tour.
On Sunday night, I entered whatever the opposite of the twilight zone is. Instead of feeling uncomfortably aware of my body, instead of jostling against men wearing jerseys, instead of fighting the urge to say “fuck off” to the guy who spills beer on my shoes and doesn’t apologize, I wove through a crowd mostly made up of women. There were men, of course, like my wonderful fiancé, or like the dads holding their children’s hands. But they were all behaving.
I’ve been frustrated that many of the biggest publications sent male music critics to review Swift’s tour. Not all, there have been great reviews by women, but The Atlantic, Variety, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Uproxx, Spin, The Houston Chronicle, The Philly Inquirer — a few even sent two different men to two different shows. Which is fine, men are allowed to do their jobs, and most of them wrote very accurate reviews from a technical and musical standpoint.
I do, however, think that watching this show as a woman sports reporter hit different, as Swift would say.
There have been many times when I’ve walked into a stadium’s press box and had men turn and look at me like I had three heads. There have been even more times when I have stood on the sidelines and thought, “if I were a man, I’d be much farther along in my career.”
So it was pretty mind-blowing to see one of those same stadiums filled with women screaming at the top of their lungs with Phoebe Bridgers. And to hear Swift sing, “If I were a man, then I’d be the man.” When the entire stadium scream-sang “fuck the patriarchy,” I totally lost it.
My personal connection to the spaces Swift performs in aside, the Eras Tour is a detailed, massive, gorgeous spectacle. It provided the same pomp and circumstance as a football game, but everyone won at the end of the night. It has the narrative arc of a theater piece, but with pyrotechnics and fake snow. Swift knows how much time, money, and effort it took for everybody filling those stadiums to be there, and she is determined to make it worthwhile.
For three and half hours Swift entertains her way through every album she’s ever written. She’s a sexy pop star when she sings songs from Reputation, and she’s a folksinger with a light touch when she sings songs from Folklore. She shifts within the eras, too — during Red, she’s a sassy 22-year-old one minute, and then she’s a savvy, wise, older woman the next.
Swift is an athlete, a musician, and an actor all at once, and she appears to be having the time of her life. Her joy is infectious. She never loses the crowd. She commands attention in a way that requires an insane amount of confidence. It also requires a lot of humility, and a high tolerance for the discomfort that can come with being the center of attention. I can only imagine how exhilarating but strange it must seem to be put on such a high pedestal. To feel herself become a myth, something bigger than one human being.
But Swift knows how much she means to her fans, so she sits in that spotlight and shows us everything, even the parts of herself she loathes.
I’ve had a relationship with Taylor Swift and her music that I’m not entirely proud of. On the one hand, she’s been the soundtrack to my life. I sang “Tim McGraw” with my friends in the car when I first got my driver’s license. I belted out, “we’re happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time” when I was 23-years old and had no idea what I was doing with my life. I listened to 1989 every day as I sat at my desk — which was in a closet that somehow had brick walls — during my first, post-college job as I worried I’d never get where I wanted to go.
But I also turned on her when everyone else did. I came of age in a time when tabloids were tearing Britney Spears down as she fell apart. I’d never seen a woman be successful without being punished, so I came up with reasons not to like Swift simply because she was popular (until she wasn’t).
Even so, I still surreptitiously listened to Reputation when I moved to New York City and felt the addictive rush of those painful mistakes you make in your twenties. I seethed listening to “The Man” after my boss told me he had no negative feedback about my work, but that I had to prove I deserved my job title because older men at the company had the same one. They didn’t like that they had to share it with me.
And then, during the pandemic, I listened to Folklore as I had way too much time to think. And I realized how totally lame — how embarrassing — it was not to admit I loved Swift’s music.
I also realized that I’d been so hard on Taylor because I’d been so hard on myself. There was a devil on my shoulder telling me that the men were right, that I had to prove it, that I would never fully belong in this career, that I needed to operate at a higher standard. That maybe I didn’t deserve the job titles I had earned.
But someone else (it wasn’t an angel, just a very self-assured woman) sat on the other shoulder, telling me it was okay to feel the same burning compulsion to prove everyone wrong that Swift exhibits. I have to believe in myself. If I don’t, who will? It’s exhausting and it’s vital.
The Eras Tour is Swift’s victory lap. She’s saying, “I believed in myself and outlasted all of your bullshit until you believed in me, too. And I’m now going to give you the greatest concert-going experience of your life.”
She does. Taylor doesn’t know I exist, but we’ve come a long way together. And the fact that millions of other people are showing up to see her proves that The Eras tour speaks to something both deeply personal and totally universal.
Taylor sure must have felt the love - and your love in the middle of that sea of it surrounding her. I hope she reads your sweet acknowledgement of what she's meant to you. It's beautiful.