“girls and mothers, all adorable and almost all white, who had come to the annual Taylor Swift Young Leadership Conference to engage in the safest possible fantasy with 41,887 of their best friends.”
“The 1989 tour is an extended set, and her face, her body, her chirrup, her attention, her effort, and her notably improved voice were all stadium macro—clean, symbolic, magnificent—while also so tuned on the micro-level, so whittled to the essentials, that nothing about Swift seemed remotely capable of causing offense.”
“Those are the terms of her triumph: she’s now so fully aligned with conservative ideals of perfection that she can stand up to the scrutiny of every possible audio/visual close-up.”
“Or, of course, she’s achieved the girl-in-2015 dream of so carefully orchestrating your self and environment that even the most trickily intimate moments look good.”
“The interstitial highlight reels featuring all her famous girlfriends—Selena Gomez, Lena Dunham, Cara Delevingne, Karlie Kloss, etc—pop up between songs, evincing nothing interesting about female friendship other than the fact that it fits very neatly into the thing Taylor Swift does best, which is aggressive large-scale flexing off the strength of the most sweetly-hued ideals.”
“Then Derulo ripped off his shirt, and the crowd hit a note they never hit again—a hormonal fever that for the only time in the show erased Swift’s bland but mesmerizing nu-sexuality from the stage.”
“There was an ache in the screams from the 11-year-olds, that ambient desperation.”
“The orchestration of the show was mostly on that register—broad, cheesy—and the set direction is resolutely in the aesthetic middle class.”
“But everyone knows this about Taylor’s dancing, anyway; she’s phenomenal at posing and can’t move her hips. It’s a funny feature of today’s pop snowglobe—one that adds to the try-hard and racially retrograde feel—that all the white girls have this block on their abilities. Katy Perry moves like a new mom at Zumba, Miley like a seventh-grader on PCP. (Love them both.) Swift doesn’t even try to get any moves popping; she just dramatically repositions herself, sometimes acting the lyrics out so literally it’s like an elementary school play. She gets 80 percent of her stage mileage out of a kicky runway strut, and generally operates like a thick invisible layer of bubble wrap is separating all her body parts from the pocket of the beat.”
“Her utter assured appeal with an instrument is a part of Old Taylor that fits into New Taylor’s omni-dominance, but not necessarily with New Taylor’s desire to try out and then win everyone’s game.”
“Swift is not only at the height of her powers, she’s outshining everyone else—militantly and pointedly so, while maintaining a truly impressive set of impenetrable defenses, which range from deliberate (the Slumber Party Supermodel Just-Like-You Posse) to earnest (the avowed feminism, the open letter) to innate (the fact that she’s white, blonde, bone-thin, and beautiful).”
“Most of her costumes on a curvy black woman would be viewed as aggressively lascivious; on Swift, lingerie is almost businesslike. When she came out in a white two-piece and black garters, the golf-clapping bro in the row in front of me briefly, respectably, averted his eyes.”
“Pop music draws on the sublimity of being rendered generic; Swift does it in a way that’s domme, inspiration and therapist all at once.”