![]() ![]() In April, it was revealed that she had split with her partner of six years, the British actor Joe Alwyn, an unnamed figure in many of her songs since 2017. It has also provided ample material for fans to dissect, at a crucial time in Swift’s personal life. ![]() The Eras Tour offers a physical space for many of her fans to coalesce and a tangible hold on the real world. The ever-bubbling Swift online ecosystem was at full boil and, as one expert put it to the Atlantic, had almost all the hallmarks of a true metaverse: a huge virtual community unmoored from a single platform, based on a world around Taylor Swift, missing only the 3D virtual space to hang out in. Swift teased track titles in a TikTok video series called “Midnights Mayhem With Me”, and published a full cross-platform release schedule on Instagram. The fixation on details reached a fever pitch last October, during the rollout for Swift’s tenth album, Midnights. Taylor Swift performs onstage at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Photograph: Lisa Lake/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS As Swift told Entertainment Weekly in 2019 of her fans’ detective work: “I’ve trained them to be that way.” The result is a very loyal (and enormous) fan base primed to close-read Swifts every move, on-stage or off, as an all-consuming search for clues with personal ties to the star. ![]() With each album cycle, she has expanded on Easter eggs and clues playing on color coding, numerology and of course her lyrics. Ever since her debut in 2006, Swift has cultivated a uniquely close relationship with her fans, posting on MySpace, commenting on their Instagrams, embedding secret messages in the liner notes of her CDs. It’s also the culmination of years of world-building and Swiftian mythology. Especially considering the hoops people jumped through to obtain tickets, it is fan service at its most bombastic and virtuosic – a flex and a celebration, tying together years of growth and hype. ![]() I reviewed the opening show in Glendale, Arizona, and found it stupefying – a concert the length of the movie Titanic, covering 17 years worth of potent nostalgia, turbocharged by the screaming of 70,000 people. The national takeover by The Eras Tour owes in part to the show itself, which is a stunning showcase of pop’s most prolific songwriter’s ridiculously prodigious catalog. After viewing a few videos several months ago, my discovery pages on Instagram and TikTok are still predominantly Eras Tour content even the algorithm loves Taylor Swift. (One Massachusetts father, for example, shelled out $21k to go last-minute.) And it exists in a vast, ever-expanding digital world of clips, reactions, live-streams, dissections and analysis. It has generated unceasing buzz, with headlines on anything from how demand broke Ticketmaster (and led to lawsuits and a congressional hearing) to her romantic life to how far people are willing to go for tickets. It exists in the physical world, bringing record-breaking crowds to a different US city each weekend. But the Eras Tour has surpassed mere pop spectacle and become an ongoing mass cultural moment. A Taylor Swift stadium tour – her first since 2018, owing to the pandemic – was always going to be an event. ![]()
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