she's making the whole place shimmer//

'What if I told you I'm a mastermind?'

The Taylor Swift effect

Leading up to the weekend of Taylor Swift’s Vancouver run of the iconic Eras Tour in December, the city lost its mind — and I was no exception.

I managed to snag a ticket to the second of three Vancouver Eras shows. These would be Swift’s first performances in the city since she took over BC Place for one night during the 1989 tour in 2015.

The fact that I would be seeing the same artist in the same venue nearly a decade later reminded me of a specific photo my mother took of me at her 2015 show: I was 11 years old and standing up in the nosebleeds wearing smeared red lipstick, a striped romper and holding a lit-up sign reading “1989” in neon yellow bubble letters. I ran a Taylor Swift fan page on Instagram. I knew her cats’ names, her relationship timelines and every conspiracy theory about her. I was obsessed.

Since then, my music taste has shifted away from mainstream pop and I’ve slowly drifted away from the Swiftie universe. But why do I keep listening to her songs and shelling out hundreds for a chance to see her perform? What about her captivates retired fangirls all these years later?

Dr. David Metzer, a UBC musicology professor and music historian specializing in popular music of the 20th and 21st centuries, spoke to me about the unique impact of Swift’s brand and music.

“Even from the beginning, [Swift] was very strongly aware of her image and how to present that image, and then built this huge commercial enterprise around herself,” said Metzer. “[It’s the] type of career that is going to be significant.”

Looking back at notable female musicians throughout time, especially those that rose to fame as adolescents, Metzer pointed out that they are made into commercial products. They don’t write their music — they are often just faces that can sell an album, singing other people’s songs.

But Swift leads the process behind writing her songs — she is the primary and sometimes only mind behind them.

Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo are taking hold of their careers in a similar way and finding great success, Metzer noted. While many will judge these women based on their appearance, they are using pop music as a vessel for their thoughts more than was common in earlier music of the genre.

That isn’t to say that music must be written completely independently for it to have artistic value.

Swift has been accused of taking songwriting credit where it isn’t due — Blur frontman Damon Albarn made this mistake and faced intense wrath from Swift’s loyal fanbase — and many mainstream artists are criticized for listing a substantial number of names in the credits of a song.

Jack Antonoff of working-with-every-pop-artist fame and The National’s Aaron Dessner have been collaborating with Swift since 1989 and folklore respectively. For Metzer, this is a testament to her musical curiosity and interest in diversifying her sound.

“She still maintains her unique voice, but now she’s been able to add to it and enrich it with another person’s perspective … She’s very open about it. There’s no hiding it whatsoever

He noted how we hold household singer-songwriter names like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Leonard Cohen to a high regard, and definitely for good reason — but there’s also value in embracing the collaborative nature of pop music.

“If you look at a lot of mainstream pop music, it’s written by four or five different people, with six, seven producers, so that’s often viewed as not real music,” Metzer said.

“We still maintain this idea of singer-songwriters, and Taylor does that — some of her best songs are just by herself. But I think this idea that she is willing to explore partnerships and draw upon partnerships is something that also sets her apart too.”

Swift does parallel artists like Mitchell in a lot of ways, particularly in their shared interest in rejecting the idea that a musician should be confined to a single genre for their entire career.

“When Joni Mitchell first emerged, she was doing this folk music revival scene of the 1950s, 1960s,” said Metzer. “And then she got into what we call singer-songwriter music of the 1970s, and then she started exploring jazz idioms.”

That’s why the Eras Tour exists — Swift has experienced so many changes in image and sound that they can be separated into distinct “eras.”

“If you think about it, each of [Swift’s] albums is different in many ways. Each has a new kind of sonic world that it creates, a new emotional world that it creates ... With each album, she’s exploring new ideas and moving along. And that’s what kept me listening.”

In addition to having explored a number of genres, Swift is blurring the lines between them. Metzer recalled how a student asked how he might place Swift’s 10th album, Midnights, into a genre. Unsure, he turned to Wikipedia.

“I always joke with my classes about Wikipedia … they’re always trying to pigeon hole things into genres. But even this one defied them, because there’s all these different ways of viewing it,” said Metzer. “I find this quite fascinating, that she’s now in a sound world which I don’t know how to classify.”

You could never have predicted what The Tortured Poets Department would be like based on the direction she took her 2006 debut album. And maybe that’s how she reels people in and keeps them there — she’s changing as a person and that shines through in her art.

“She’s a musician with a rich and restless imagination, and she is constantly exploring new ideas in terms of both music and poetry, and she, of course, has the talent to realize those ideas in very interesting ways.”

While most aspects of her life are untouchable to the average person, she captures the experiences of growing up a woman in ways that count: in friendship bracelets, in sequined skirts, in feeling a bit too much and not being afraid to run with it.

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