daniel chigunwe
LOS ANGELES. – Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, a “cultural juggernaut” remarkable for both its scale and intimacy, came to an end at the weekend.
Along the way, it became the most extraordinary live event of our time – and for many, it’s meant even more.
At the weekend, after 20 months, 149 shows, a blockbuster concert film and millions of friendship bracelet swaps, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour finally came to an end in Vancouver, Canada.
Less a live show than a cultural juggernaut steamrolling into 53 cities across five continents, the Eras Tour has dominated headlines, boosted national economies (and craft sales), caused mini-earthquakes and broken countless records – including becoming the highest grossing tour of all time (experts believe it will top $2bn (£1.6bn) – and that doesn’t include merchandise).
Since she kicked off the live shows in March 2023, Swift has released three albums (re-recordings of Speak Now and 1989, and The Tortured Poets Department), snagged her fourth album of the year Grammy – the first artist to do so – and embarked on a high-profile relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce (who made a cameo on the Eras Tour).
She has called the end of the tour “the closing of the most extraordinary chapter of my life so far.”
The sheer scale and cultural dominance of the Eras Tour, from the record attendances to the 3.5-hour setlist, is undeniable.
In the almost two years it’s been going, it has become its own news cycle – even if you didn’t attend, you’ve probably seen the videos of Prince William of Tom Cruise dancing at the show, or heard about world leaders begging Swift to give their country an economy-boosting visit.
We live in an era of blockbuster live shows, but there’s never been anything quite as colossal as this. It’s hard to see how anyone, including Swift herself, will top it anytime soon.
And yet, if Swift’s shows were remarkable for their size, they were also striking for their against-the-odds sense of intimacy.
Attending the Eras Tour felt less like bowing down to a global megastar, and more like a mass, sequinned meet-up.
Earlier this year Variety magazine dubbed her “the world’s greatest community organiser.”
Being relatable has long been Swift’s calling card. Even as her fame and wealth has soared (she joined the Forbes World’s Billionaires List earlier this year), she’s continued to keep fans believing that she’s not really all that different from them.
This starts with her songs: universal experiences – heartache, betrayal, loss, revenge, regret – written about with remarkable specificity.
But she’s also carefully cultivated that feeling of inclusivity at her live shows.
From the stage, which extends two-thirds of the way into the stadium so that Swift spends most of the show in the middle of the crowd, to her use of “we” and “us” (“We’re about to go on a little adventure together…”) to the LED wristbands that turn the crowd into part of the show (Coldplay pioneered this at their gigs), the whole thing is designed to feel like a collective experience.
Swift first emerges from a puff of pastel parachutes to ecstatic, ear-piercing screams.
For a few minutes, up on a raised platform, she seems celestial. Then she smiles, utters “Oh hi!” as if she’s greeting old friends, and the untouchable suddenly becomes attainable.
The show runs like clockwork, but Swift changes just enough to make each night feel unique for the audience.
In her short acoustic set she’s never repeated the same combination of surprise songs and deep-cut mash-ups.
She has greeted the crowds in languages including Welsh, Portuguese, Spanish, and French.
In every city, one of her backing dancers, Kameron Saunders, utters a locally-tailored put down during We Are Never Getting Back Together (in Ireland: “the neck of ye”, London: “up yours…”, Edinburgh: “bolt ya rocket”).
In May, Swift added a new segment to the setlist, featuring songs from this year’s The Tortured Poet’s Department, including the single I Can Do It with a Broken Heart, a track written about performing on the Eras Tour with a broken heart.
The tour has been a rolling stone, gathering not moss, but new traditions and meaning along the way.
Fans have created their own rituals that have become baked into the show – an ecstatic, extended applause after the song Champagne Problems (which Swift dutifully pretends to be surprised by every time), chanting Kendrick Lamar’s lines from his remix to Bad Blood, and, of course, the friendship bracelets – a tradition sparked by a lyric in her song You’re On Your Own Kid. In every stadium thousands of forearms are weighed down by stacks of hand-crafted bracelets that are traded with strangers, security guards and even, at one London show, Sir Paul McCartney.
For fans, taking part in these moments are as much a part of the experience as the music.
Another customis for fans to scream “take us to church” as Swift hits the high notes of Reputation-era track Don’t Blame Me. Philosopher Simon Critchley, , whose recent book On Mysticism explores the transcendent power of music and art, argues that they might already be there.
“I think her fans are going to church, or the closest they can get to church,” he tells the BBC.
Critchley, who sees music as “maybe the last bastion of something like religious transcendence” thinks Swift is scratching a metaphysical itch for fans. “They don’t think she’s God, but to them she’s someone very special, and she mediates a form of communal belonging that is lacking in other areas of their lives.”
People have clamoured to experience the Eras Tour – not just hardcore Swifties, but those not wanting to miss out on an era-defining cultural event. Tickets were famously hard to snag, with some fans paying thousands on resale sites.
Many fans travelled across the world to attend shows. Those that couldn’t make it converged outside stadiums – in Munich, 40,000 ticketless fans gathered on a nearby hill, not just to be nearer to their idol, but to each other. Every night of the Eras Tour, hundreds of thousands of people have watched grainy fan-filmed livestreams of the shows online.
When Swift’s Vienna shows were cancelled due to a terrorist threat, fans gathered in the streets to sing her songs and swap bracelets.
“This is devotional practice and the fans are making pilgrimages,” says Critchley.
“It’s almost as if the difficulty is part of the experience. If you think about medieval pilgrimages, they were really hard.”
Post-pandemic, live shows have attracted huge demand as people have flocked back to in-person experiences.
“That sense of disconnection from each other in Covid and the distrust that went along with that, and the fact that many of us became kind of monks and nuns in ourselves, and were thinking about what we were missing… there’s an intense, metaphysical need to feel together with other people,” says Critchley. – BBC
Online Reporter