I said I was going to write about this, and I generally do everything I say I’m going to do.  However, as soon as I decided to set aside the time today to finally tackle the topic of The Glittery Weekend Taylor Swift Came To Vancouver (TGWTSCTV doesn’t really work going forward, so we’ll just call it Taylor Swift Weekend, or the more readable TSW), I was filled with dread, annoyance, and resentment that I had the not-very-bright idea to tackle it, and even more self-loathing that I mentioned on this blog I would indeed do so.

I’m not interested in this topic at all anymore, but during the weekend itself (Friday, December 6 to Sunday, December 8) I was somewhat fascinated by the startling fervor that had gripped the city, which was completely unavoidable since I live a ten-minute walk from the heart of downtown where all the preparation and action took place.  Long before the indescribably-famous woman was even due to land at YVR, there was no escaping her imminent arrival: there were endless advertisements interrupting my nonsense-watching on YouTube, billboards and bus-shelter posters squealing in two-hundred-point font about her three shows, and enormous friendship bracelets draped over local landmarks such as BC Place, where she’d be performing for three nights; Capilano Suspension Bridge, from what I heard and saw online; and those weird laughing statues at English Bay that were commissioned for no reason apart from giving people the photo opportunity to stand alongside them and imitate the poses, which I’m sure is a fun delight for tourists, but I find them creepy, tacky, and lacking any artistic sensibility whatsoever (like pretty much all the English Bay public art, which I might actually write about someday).  

I have no idea what the friendship bracelets were all about, but apparently these bronze cretins do.

I don’t think I’ve experienced Vancouver so amped up about something like this since Expo 86.  Okay, maybe the 2010 Olympics, but I was living in Central and South America for all of 2009 and half of 2010, so I can’t really say.  The city was going all-out to promote and hype and publicize and blitz out over this three-day event in which an extraordinarily wealthy blonde 35-year old would sing song after song about mean boys to 60,000 people each night, and the citizens wouldn’t even have the opportunity to experience it for themselves; my understanding is that “Swifties,” which is what her obsessive fans call themselves, were scooping up tickets in any city they could.  

Her Eras tour appeared to be similar to when Deadheads would follow the Grateful Dead on tour from show to show, except I have a feeling Taylor Swift fans would be very, very averse to piling into a van, hitting the road, and taking quick whore’s baths in Chevron restrooms just to see their hero in every major city.  Also, I doubt Jerry Garcia and co. were charging thousands and thousands of dollars to give their fans the chance to mash themselves into a crammed, hot stadium just to watch the band on a Jumbotron.

Clearly, I’m not a fan of Taylor Swift.  I don’t dislike her, I simply don’t care for or about her.  In fact, when I think about Taylor Swift–which, believe it or not, is almost never–and her persona, image, and music, this is what comes to mind:

Or even this:

However, just try to criticize–or even critique–Taylor Swift in print.  Just you give it a shot.  As it is, I’m side-eyeing my pepper spray and double-checking that my door’s deadbolt is firmly in place.  Her fans are so rabid, so vehemently protective of their ka-ween, that any inkling of anything even remotely negative expressed about her (or simply just an individual opinion) will be met with life-ruination tactics that rival that of Luigi Mangione, someone so instantly infamous I don’t even need to link to him.  

It’s astonishing that someone who is, at least to me, the musical equivalent of those two bland foodstuffs has become one of the most famous people on the planet, with commercial success and riches and attention and fame that are comparable to Madonna during her peak in the very early 90s…except Taylor Swift’s career trajectory has continued to ascend and accumulate stardust for nearly two decades. I won’t get too deep into her origin story, except for the Coles Notes version of what I know off the top of my noggin:

She comes from a rich family, she grew up on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania or something, she wanted to be a singer, her rich daddy bought a percentage of a record label so Taylor would have a record deal, she started off as a teenager singing country music despite not really having the sturdy pipes to do so, she somehow got a gig at the legendary Grand Ole Opry at sixteen, her transition into being a pop star was apparently all preplanned, she officially became massive around 2014 or 2015 with her album 1989 (the year she was born), and we’ve all had to endure the unendurable single “Shake It Off” ever since.  She also allegedly has a team of songwriters assist with her musical output, although Taylor does appear to write songs, and she can adequately play both guitar and piano.

Taylor is harmless and quite mediocre, and for this reason, she’s a chart-topping superstar who keeps winning awards and collecting sacks of money and snagging headlines for her numerous, uh, boyfriends. As a pop star, however, it’s like she was randomly picked out of a mall crowd, because I don’t see that “it” factor anywhere. She is indeed pretty, but no striking beauty.  She has a very nice body, but about as much sex appeal as Stephen Hawking.  She can hold a tune, but has no vocal range.  She can’t dance, and strikes nothing but poses onstage in her gaudy figure-skater costumes. She sings about breakups, and unfair treatment by boys, and relationships and…I’m not sure what else, actually.  Needless to say, the enormous industry known as Taylor Swift, LLC knows her target demographic and what keeps the girls screaming for their idol.  She’s unthreatening, she’s unchallenging, she’s not dangerous, and she keeps those fans in a warped parasocial relationship with her by making them feel as though they are, somehow, close to her.  Except Taylor is actually shrewd, remote, and carefully aloof, based on everything I read and any interview I may have accidentally stumbled upon (I am not linking to any of that).

However, Taylor is in a league of her own, and that’s why she is the megastar that she is: she has absolutely no competition.  There is, currently, no other pop star gal who is doing what she does, which is sing harmless songs about love while strumming a guitar onstage, and absolutely no trace of scandal or controversy following her around or surfacing. Unlike the 90s, when you couldn’t kick a hacky-sack without it hitting a guitar-wielding female singer-songwriter in the face, this is a most dire time in popular music.  Prefabricated pop starlets are all doing the same thing, sounding the same, looking the same, unable to play instruments, warbling along with Autotune to a generic track they didn’t write, going through the motions in cheap-looking videos where they do uninspired choreography in cheap costumes with some faceless backup dancers…this is the current trend, and has been for some time. 

The only reason I know about these pop tarts is because every gym I’ve gone to has its own music-video channel playing on the overhead television sets, and this is where I become unwillingly exposed to the current climate of what’s trending…and it is a dire, awful, forgettable, depressing mountain of shit.  This isn’t the old codger in me talking, it’s the music fan and former musician expressing what she sees and hears, and there’s no way my four-year old niece is going to look at these disposable, fluffy industry puppets and become a fan.  Not if my sister and I have anything to do with it.  The fact that my brilliant niece was born the same week that this howlingly offensive trash became a #1 hit thankfully won’t factor into anything; apparently, this was rocking everyone’s world the week I was born, and it didn’t make a whit of difference: I was absorbing my parents’ Beatles albums when my Kindergarten classmates were singing along with Raffi.  

The last interesting pop star who became a worldwide craze was Lady Gaga circa 2009 – 2012, and she most certainly held appeal. In spite of being a manufactured, gimmicky performer, I feel she actually has legitimate theatre-kid talent: she can belt her lungs out, she can switch between genres, she can write songs, she can play piano, she has mesmerizing stage presence, and she does her best to dance despite very little natural ability.  She captivated everyone for a few burning-bright years, seemed to be a wide-open book during interviews, and appeared to be close with her family, but there are only so many nutty costumes you can wear and so much insane pressure you can take when you’re a highly-sensitive individual, which Stefani Germanotta always came across as being.  My belief is that she actually crumpled from too much too soon too quickly and had to, uh, “go away” for a while, but I do feel she was the last of the Great Pop Stars.    

Back to Taylor: it’s fine that the girls like Taylor.  She’s a decent role model, and if she inspires any young lady to pick up an instrument, write some songs, and resurrect the beloved open-mic trend from years past, then she’ll have actually done her job.  I would have no issues with my niece admiring and singing along to Taylor.  I really don’t have a problem with the woman; I simply don’t understand how she’s close to having a planet named after her.   This phenomenon is completely out of my wheelhouse.  I liken it to the fanaticism of sports fans who are blindly dedicated to their home team no matter how consistently abysmal the professional performance might be; they will wear that jersey, shell out big bucks for a nosebleed seat in a stadium, and scream with rapture anytime someone on their team does…something.  I know as much about team sports as I do about Taylor Swift’s discography, so I feel cluelessly confident enough to compare the two.

(A peculiar thing is that Taylor had hit the road for this colossus of a world tour in spring 2023, and countless major, Earth-altering events have taken place on a steady basis since then.  This Eras tour had been going on for months and months and months, had seemed like yesterday’s news for a long time, and I didn’t think anyone would care so much by December 2024, but the Swift Machine makes money for many, many people, and her PR leviathan is second to none.  I have to admit, it’s incredibly impressive.)

On Friday, December 6 (Day One of TSW), I was down by the Vancouver Convention Centre for reasons that aren’t interesting, except two things were immediately apparent: one, the small Christmas Market the city had been constructing around that area decided to open its doors that very morning, an ingeniously well-timed event to coincide with the thousands of Taylor Swift fans who would take over downtown Vancouver.  

Friday, December 6: Swifties descend upon Coal Harbour. Oh, you also get the privilege of paying twenty dollars to enter this tiny area so you can spend money.  God Bless America Vancouver!

Two, Taylor Swift fans were, in fact, swarming around this area, and I couldn’t understand why they were here, of all places.  The Christmas Market?  Not even us locals care about it too much, and certainly weren’t jockeying for position to hit its opening day.  The Swifties were immediately recognizable: mother-daughter combos simply everywhere, groups of young ladies hauling their suitcases behind them, women in their thirties wearing custom-made shirts saying WE ARE NEVER GETTING BACK TOGETHER and SHAKE IT OFF, and girls (and even a few boys) wearing remarkably drab blue-grey Taylor Swift tour sweatshirts and hoodies.

If you look closely, though, this girl’s hoodie is from last year, meaning that all the fans I saw wearing this merch were still following the show from 2023!  

As I trudged up Thurlow, I started to see Swifties everywhere.  I knew tens of thousands of them were going to descend upon Vancouver, but it was actually startling to see them all over the place at eleven in the morning.  I made up my mind to take care of my tasks for the day, and then head out on Saturday morning to snap some shots and see just how overtaken the downtown core would be.  

SPOILER: Very.  Very, very overtaken.  And it was actually kind of great.

  *   *   *   *   *

Okay, lads and lasses, I’m going to end it here tonight.  At least I got the preamble written, which is more than I expected to do.  I’ll tackle the second half of TSW in my next post–you gotta finish what you start–which will be after Christmas.  Speaking of music and Christmas, I must leave you with a holiday clip of some serious due-paying performers, always an uplifting treat at this time of year.  There’s Taylor Swift, and then there are these consummate pros.  David Alan Grier’s flawless, high-hitting note at 1:30 is always the only Christmas present I need.

Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noel, Feliz Navidad, С Рождеством, and Happy Holidays.  Thanks for all of your support and readership over the last year, and I wish you and your loved ones all the best.  Even if I don’t know you or like you.

Love

Nadya.