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Concert reviews Music

All hail Taylor Swift, pop’s benevolent ruler

TAYLOR SWIFT at Rogers Centre, Friday, October 2. Rating: NNNN


She sparkles, and her legion of fans sparkle back.

The roughly 50,000 Taylor Swift fans in the Rogers Centre are outfitted with light-up bracelets, as she cruises out on stage to the bouncy synth-vibes of now-tourism-jingle Welcome to New York. There is hardly a breath, and then she pushes forward into the confusingly bonus-tracked New Romantics, one of 1989’s deep-cut highlights. It blasts off out of the Skydome, jumps the CN Tower and resists breezing into orbit, hell-bent on fulfilling its destiny as a shooting star. She breathes.

“Good evening, Toronto… I’m Taylor.”

Everywhere there are lasers, dancers, shiny things, shiny people wearing shiny things. The crowd is not rapt – they are ballistic. There are few public places where you can act like this and get away with it. But Swift, flashing a look more dangerous than a flamethrower at a gas station, is not content to stop there. She bursts into super-hit (and let’s be honest, these are all super-hits) Blank Space, egging the frenzied crowd on.

“All right, Toronto, I’d like to try a little experiment, are you up for it?” She kicks off a massive Blue Jays chant (it’s not exactly Pavlov and his dogs, but… actually, umm…). The theatrical weight of the show becomes clear – numerous costume changes, complicated choreography, complex lighting, multiple props, it’s exhausting – as Swift leans heavy against the back of a sweaty backup dancer. A doomy, slowed-down version of I Knew You Were Trouble hits its boiling point and bubbles over, and she belts out massive vocal runs, silencing the ol’ ‘she can’t sing, though’ gripes. “It feels good to be back in Canada,” she grins. “That’s how I feel.”

But it is only Taylor Swift The Human Being who is here again. No iteration of Swift The Artist is the same from album to album, and this is not the same woman who just two years ago laid waste to stadiums with Red.

With 1989, Swift catapulted herself from being the biggest pop star in the world to being the biggest pop star in the universe. Video segments throughout the show highlight that trajectory while simultaneously making a case for her realness: the two-plus hour set is punctuated by testimonials from Swift’s elite #girlsquad – Lena Dunham, Cara Delevigne, the Haim sisters, Karlie Kloss confirming her down-to-Earthness, her flawlessness, her unshakeable love of cats and snacks.

“I’m surprised that when she walks down the street, stray cats don’t come towards her,” Dunham says. “Because she’s the patron saint of cats.”

Taylor Swift’s career arc has taken her from ‘aw, shucks’ country music nerd to ‘aw, shucks’ ruler of galaxies. There has arguably never been a pop star as perfect a person, but if history is any indicator, that won’t last forever, as much as (almost) everyone, myself included, would like to hope.

Swift has definitely not always been a perfect performer, but tonight there are no missteps. Our benevolent ruler serves up surprisingly varied, dynamic, and even kinda weird gifts, with a long, pulsing intro to I Know Places that features a savagely aggressive guitar solo and big-screen graphics of foxes that look oddly like roadkill surrounded by arrows.

A solo acoustic rendition of You Belong To Me leads into a spiel on heartbreak containing no small amount of wisdom. “You can regret a lot of things in life, and regrets are valid, but trusting someone, letting someone in, and being vulnerable are not valid regrets,” she says. “You should never feel stupid for doing any of those things.”

It’s here that Swift The Friend And Confidant appears, which is one of her strongest qualities as a performer and artist. She explains that the best thing she can possibly feel as a songwriter is when someone tells her she’s helped them through something. Then she eases into the gentle rebirth ode Clean. It’s a reminder that pop music can help people, can heal.

The remainder of the set doesn’t approach this heaviness – we’ve had a moment to reflect on important things, and the party starts back up after a monologue on writing love songs and a blaze through fan-favourite Love Story. Then, like a hurricane, we get the Springsteenian Style, badass Bad Blood, and new rock ‘n’ roll anthem We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, on which Swift brandishes a righteous Fender Jaguar..

Someone expresses doubt that she’s actually playing it, and I’m unfortunately not shocked that people, after all these years (hell, after the first half of this show) still doubt Swift’s chops. Keith Urban comes out, backed up by pyrotechnics and running through his own hits Somebody Like You and John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16. (Would’ve given the show five Ns but Keith Urban was just OK. Where’s Drake at?) Taylor follows with an especially stirring and melodramatic Wildest Dreams and then does Out Of The Woods with giant flying paper airplanes and wolves  diving into the Milky Way.

A short break shows Swift The Everymillennial wrangling her cats. “No cats were harmed in the making of this tour. Just one pop star.” And then that one pop star, the biggest pop star in the universe, Shake(s) It Off on her gigantic, spinning UFO stage, surrounded by her fantastic purple suit-clad backup dancers and the nearby explosion of fireworks, and sets all of our light-up bracelets to flash like strobes in a blitz of green, purple, white.

We sparkle, and she sparkles back.

music@nowtoronto.com | @mattgeewilliams

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