Five, maybe six thousand years ago, the people of ancient Sumer would move from city to city for the different festivals, often associated with phases of the moon, represented as the celestial feminine. Tent encampments sprang up, cities swelled to twice their size, ornaments and decorations were made and exchanged. Markets may well have been a product of these divine processions, rather than arising from any utilitarian purpose. Whatever the goddess shines on has value.
Thus it will be at Accor Stadium, as Taylor Swift takes the stage, and as it was around the MCG in Melbourne last weekend. Sydney probably won’t raise to the level of total commitment that Melbourne was able to muster, if only because Melbourne is only ever half-real anyway. With its little trams toot-tootling around baroque ornamental Victorian neighbourhoods, it’s pretty much a Wes Anderson movie. So it wasn’t much of a stretch to have it invaded by an army of girls in shimmering silver paillette sequin dresses and pink tasselled cowboy hats, swapping and giving out homemade beaded bracelets.
The scene outside the MCG across those three nights was very strange, and striking, and moving, and it spread across the whole city. It would have been foolish to deny its deep, tidal pull. Outside the vast concrete walls of the G, like the temple walls of the old cities, tens of thousands gathered, hours before Swift came on at 7.30 sharp, mothers herding small-daughter-and-friends groups, mother and tweens in matching spangles, tassels and cowboy hats, teens of all genders and none, in all variations.
The scene was possibly more simple and uncomplicated joy than I think I have ever experienced, something which various grizzled veterans I ran into attested to. The Fabian in me felt sorry for those kids who couldn’t get a ticket, still more for those whose parents would never have had a hope of affording one. Tay Tay, with a little help from the state government, could have set up jumbotron TVs outside on the last night, so all comers could see it.
But the sound came through the walls anyway, the thousands who had sat down on the grass among the merch stalls and ice-cream vans and hot dog concessions seemed to get something like as much pleasure from the self-created event, from its solidarity and make-do, as they might have from the event itself. Everyone who was there felt they had been at something strange and beautiful, and very much welcome.
The various grinches who have descended on Taylormania down under like to suggest that Taylor Swift is a fad without content, pure craze. It’s extraordinary how many, and from what sort of ideological corners, such accusations come, because it’s so extraordinarily olde-worlde sexist, the sort of thing said in 1963, and, really, a repurposing of old notions of female hysteria. What drives Swiftmania (whoops!) from its core is not the fashions, the style sub-culture, the glitter jumpsuits, the dance numbers, or the endurance rally of the three-and-a-half-hour concerts.
What drives it is the songs. The songs are simply excellent. They’re the acme of the white pop canon, multi-genre numbers that draw in every motif and innovation since “pop” emerged as a distinct genre in the early 1960s. The songs are why Swift has ascended far beyond Britney, Christina and the rest. Those who dismiss Swift’s songs as sameish simply don’t understand them musically, or their internal complexity.
Swift’s dozen or so greatest numbers more or less sing themselves spontaneously, emerge from people. Kitchen staff bursting into “You Belong With Me”, a woman in a traffic-jammed car singing along to “All Too Well”, a late middle-aged journalist singing “Blank Space” anytime he is not prevented from doing so. These songs are, essentially, perfect, unimprovable within their genre. Taylor Swift soars above her peers not because her fanbase is addled and easily led, but due to the exact opposite: they’re pre-teen epicureans, attuned to finding the best that is sung and strummed.
The whiteness? Dear me, yes, Taylor Swift is white. Look, in a way, nothing in pop is white these days. Swift’s early bubble-blonde and baby-fat hardcore country stuff aside, there’s always enough off-beat to put it in the pop-rock register. But, yeah, while it draws in K-pop and other influences along the way, Swift’s stuff is other to Rihanna and Beyonce.
That doesn’t seem to limit her appeal. There were quite a few brown kids around the MCG last weekend — although their parents might possibly have been a little less thrilled to be there than the white daggy dads using their kids as a barely concealed alibi to be there. But yeah, you can’t help but ask about the deeper processes underway.
Swift is essentially the last pop star of a certain type, the omega point of wall-of-sound, girl groups, doo-wop, country-pop, power-pop, alt-pop, pop-punk and every other variant. Does her totalising success reinscribe a white mythology in a way that leaves black music nothing else to be but the “dark other”, more exciting and dangerous, but also supplemental and secondary?
The ancient moon goddesses would eventually become Artemis/Artemisia in the Greek/Roman pantheon, the white light of eternal girlhood, chaste and chased, but never caught (unlike the mighty Aphrodite who was, let’s face it, a bit easy). So, yes, in the way she’s deployed, she does draw a line between Europe and the rest. But, well, even if you wanted to, you can’t make a law against the moonlight.
Taylor Swift, the whole cultural entity, equal parts she, her co-writers and producers, is something many many millions want, more than they want anything else, and in that, their taste is correct by definition. Not much has changed over the millennia in what we seek in the ethereal — to be weightless and in the air for one evening, lifted by the spirits.
The truth is, in any matter that does not involve mass killing, the masses are always right in their tastes, and it is worth either trying to join yourself to it as much as you can or not deny its power out of embarrassment that something so basic has joined to you. A culture is a cult that keeps going, and that’s what one saw outside the MCG last weekend. And if you want to suggest, using a now-discarded 2000s parlance, that it’s a little lame, well all that can I say is, shade never made anyone less gay.
