I've always been pretty ambivalent about Taylor Swift. Like a lot of girls I grew up around, I remember listening to Fearless in my car's CD player and burning Speak Now onto my iPod Touch, but at some point around the end of middle school I mostly wrote her off. It didn't help that the general pop culture consensus was that, really, no one should like Taylor Swift.
To no fault of her own, the sort of mob mentality present in online spaces cultivated the ideas that she ruins the lives of men just to write songs about them, that she would stop at nothing to protect her profits, and that her general political neutrality (prior to her endorsement of Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen in the midterm elections) was indicative of her aligning herself with the alt-right. Following her recent political activism, however, I'd started paying more attention to what she was actually doing, and decided to give the Netflix special a shot.
Going into it, I was dubious that Taylor could pull off an arena show. When I had kept up with her, she hadn't been known much as a dancer or large-scale performer, except during the Bad Blood era with a star-studded cast behind her. However, it quickly becomes evident in the special that this tour is a team effort, with every member of her ensemble being essential to the mise-en-scene. Perhaps most important is her band, who play from atop a large metal rig in the center of the main stage and are most likely the reason why the songs off Reputation, an album I wasn't too impressed with, benefit so greatly from being played live. There's also her large team of dancers, who helped create unique visuals for every song. I was brought to the brink of tears over and over by the spectacle of it all, with Taylor at the center.
Her tour is not only an event, though, it's also a thesis, straddling the line between authenticity and celebrity while hitting back at the media by showing off the empire she has created. "Big reputation, big reputation," she croons while singing into a serpentine microphone at the beginning of Endgame, then referencing her struggle of finding a true connection in relationships because of rumors and gossip in a monologue to the audience.
Even though this experience is probably less relatable than Taylor thinks ("I think at some point, we have all been hurt by our reputations", she tells her fans), it makes you sympathetic to what she's gone through overtime in the public eye. Realistically, we probably know nothing about who she is as a person, but the persona Taylor has created is one of kindness and genuine concern for her fanbase, and it must be difficult for her to deal with such an extent of preconceived negativity towards her. I hope as she approaches the era her seventh album, she can finally reclaim a piece of her public persona for herself.
