About Last Night | Taylor Swift, Colonial Life Arena, March 20

Blogs

The Playlist

By Patrick Wall

Sunday, March 24, 2013

words, below, by Patrick Wall. photos, above, by Thomas Hammond.

Better Than: Watching your bracket dissolve before your eyes.Also Better Than: Dating Taylor Swift, then having her write a song about you.Bottom Line: As her RED tour proves, its Taylor Swifts world, and were just living in it.

Around the time Taylor Swift was taking her final bow, Fred Van Vleet, backup guard for West Region No. 9 seed Wichita State, drilled a three-pointer, the dagger in the heart of No. 1 Gonzaga. Gonzaga was a heavy tournament favorite, but the Bulldogs loss wasnt exactly surprising; they barely survived a tough game against No. 16 seed Southern. The Zags, Deadspins Sean Newell notes, remain one-and-done in the tournament since 2009, and everyone who argued their No. 1 seeding and they were myriad now looks like a genius.Its a larger problem with this years tournament, Newell argues, and that the committee totally screwed up seeding in the bracket.Oregon, for instance, won the Pac-12 tournament over, it should be noted, a UCLA team that was gifted a No. 6 seeding but was slotted in a No. 12 seed, and the Ducks are in the Sweet 16, upsetting No. 5 Oklahoma State and rolling past No. 4 Saint Louis. Ole Miss, another No. 12 seed, upset No. 5 Wisconsin. Tiny Florida Gulf Coast University, a No. 15 seed, downed perennial choke job Georgetown, a No. 2 seed.And then theres that whole Gonzaga ordeal. The Zags are the first No. 1 seed to bow out of this years tournament.Literally no one is surprised, Newell writes, and, what's worse, that could have been some team really worth hating, like Duke, losing as a No. 1. Instead, these upsets seem predetermined. They feel less like The Stirring Underdog Story and more like The Stirring Underdog Story 2: Back In The Streets. Some hack took a great idea and ruined it with a lousy script.

+++

It wasnt a matter of if Taylor Swift would emerge from her country crooner cocoo! n a full-fledged pop princess, but when.The 12,000-strong crowd overwhelmingly female and overwhelmingly teenage and overwhelmingly losing their shit at the same time can certainly attest to that, breaking into TAY-lor! TAY-lor! chants roughly every five minutes following Ed Sheerans not-brief-enough (and interminably boring) opening set. Then, at 8:30 p.m. sharp, around the time Oregon was pulling away from Saint Louis, the arena lights went dim, the only illumination coming gigantic video screens, which rose from the floor blaring RED and TAYLOR SWIFT as if one could forget who they came here for in iridescent letters.Then, suddenly, there she was: Taylor Swift, in a lacy white top, black fedora and tight, high-waisted shorts, which showed of most of her considerably long legs.Wait, what happened, to paraphrase Swift herself, to not wearing short shorts?When Swift arrived well, exploded is more like it with her self-titled record 2006, she was an innocent, gawky teenager in cowboy boots and bright sundresses.But no longer is Taylor Swift starring in The Stirring Underdog Story. Now, Taylor Swift, in basketball terms, is the odds-on favorite, the No. 1 seed armchair bracketologists gripe is maybe a little too inflated.Gone are the days when we felt bad because the then-still-teenage Swift was usurped at her Grammy victory speech by Kanye West. Now, her ubiquity is starting to stir what feels like a bit of backlash. Her Q rating, which takes into account public familiarity, has dropped by a third since her mid-2010 high point, The New York Times wrote just more than a week ago. And her negative Q score, a 21, now tops her positive Q score, a 20, for the first time. Like, ever, mostly due to her public sniping at Golden Globes hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who took jabs at her laundry list of celebrity exes.Can Swift, 23, take a joke?, The New York Times wonders. Has she been overexposed? Worse, is Americas reigning golden girl, sweetheart, country-pop crossover star and breakup-song specialist g! oing thro! ugh a quarter-life crisis?

+++

In the middle of her set, around the time Butler and Marquette and underseeded six-seed and overseeded three-seed, at least in popular perception were duking it out, Taylor Swift casually mentions that shes nominated this year for five Academy of Country Music Award nominations.The voting is fan-driven, she notes.So if you want to go and vote, she giggles, Im not going to stop you.The crowd shrieks. Two girls, no older than 12, a few yards in front of me in floor seats scream, We love you, Taylor! in unison.Swifts literally just flown over the crowd to a smaller, secondary stage on the north end of the Colonial Life Arena. (No, not figuratively. She was literally hooked onto a harness and glided, gracefully, across the arena. It would not be the only time shed be airborne.)She picked up an acoustic guitar first a six-string, then, for Sparks Fly, a 12-string, which came with a math lesson (Six times two is 12, Swift joked, theres your math lesson.) and started to play Forever and Always, prefacing it with the fact that this is the spontaneous portion of the show.We dont know whats going to happen, she says.Then, as if to prove her point, she starts singing Forever in the wrong key.See, she laughs, anything can happen!While the moment seemed spontaneous: Was it? Reviews of the RED tour cite the same maybe-real-maybe-fake-gawkiness; the same aw-shucks homespun quotes, as if they came from a script Swift memorized; and largely the same songs, in the same order.The drumline comes out at the same time: Holy Ground, the second song. The introduction to the gist of the tour comes at the same time: Hi! I'm Taylor, and I write lots of songs about my feelings. I'm told that I have lots of feelings," she says before performing "Red," always the third song. The snippet of The Lumineers Hey Ho even comes at exactly the same time: after the bass solo in Stay Stay Stay, the seventh song.The whole ordeal is meticulously choreographed, ruthlessly timed, and paced within an ! inch of i! ts life reminiscent, even, of **Les Miserables**, playing next door at the Koger Center.But artifice is impressive. And, at between between $31 and $87 a ticket, it had better be.And it was. Taylor Swifts RED tour is a stunning visual spectacle, one part Broadway theatricality, one part Cirque du Soleil acrobatics, one part pure pop music.As for the music: The show might be impressive, but it wont win over the haters. Even the pubescent girls abandoning TayTay in droves, disappointed with the slick and commercial **Red**. The albums variety from saccharine pop to acerbic dubstep drops to big arena rock is on ready display, and her band performs ably and admirably. And Swifts voice, dinged in some corners for a thin voice that gets extra-shaky in a live setting (see: this years Grammy awards), held up remarkably well in the Colonial Life Arenas sometimes challenging acoustic, disappearing only when aiming for quiet, falsettoed notes.The shows pace, too, was impressive, given the myriad costume and setting changes about 10 of each, if my counts are correct. Themes included '40s paparazzi, a masquarade ball, a steampunk musicbox, and, during closing number We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, a circus big top.While some of Swifts aphorisms came off as hokey and scripted like a kindergarten teacher, or a too-excited teen camp counselor her enthusiasm didnt. After the opening salvo of State of Grace and Holy Ground, Swift and her full production team dancers, musicians, drumliners, trained monkeys (OK, Im kidding about that last one) held an extended pose to take in the audiences deafening cheers.Swift stood stone-faced on the tip of the stage for what seemed like minutes then couldnt help herself as a small grin broke into a bigger one, wide and toothy.And it seemed, my scrawled notes read, like she was having fun.

+++

On the music blog for St. Louis alt-weekly Riverfront Times, two music writers debated: Is Taylor Swift saving or destroying America? Jaime Lees argues the former: Be! cause she! is a hard working, song-writing, Grammy-award-winning, powerful young woman, Lees writes, Swift absolutely qualifies as a strong female role model. Yes, she's a totally safe option when it comes to female empowerment, but hey, I'll take it. I have little sisters and I'm stoked whenever there is any girl for them to look up to who is not a total trash whore.Sarah Fenske argues the latter: Sure, she might have felt like an ugly duckling at one brief point in her otherwise sun-kissed life, she writes, but it's time she quit whining and started admitting it: These days, Taylor Swift is America's cheer captain. She's not languishing on the fucking bleachers.The real answers somewhere in between.Fenskes right: These days, Swift tall, skinny, blonde and naturally a pretty beautiful woman is Americas cheer captain, addressing the crowd in a sing-song voice like Tinkerbell, or a much-beloved kindergarten teacher. Shes graduated from sundresses and cowboy boots to red-carpet dresses and designer shoes. Shes an indomitable powerhouse, selling records and concert tickets by the truckload.But Lees is right, too: Swift, despite her myriad romantic entanglements, remains a largely strong and, more importantly, mostly wholesome role model for her teenage audience.Shes so grounded, Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Records and the man largely responsible for Swifts rise to pop stardom, told The New York Times. This isnt a person whos going to wake up half-naked, drunk in a car somewhere in Hollywood.And the crowd reflected Swifts still massive popularity: Women of all ages, shapes and sizes were decked out in homemade Taylor Swift T-shirts, carried handmade Taylor Swift signs displaying love for their idol. They eat out of Taylor Swifts hand, and she knows it.Near the end of We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, which swelled to crescendo before confetti dropped from the ceiling, the giant screens that rose up from the ground at the beginning, bearing the same boldfaced name: TAYLOR. SWIFT.As if it were poss! ible to f! orget who you were seeing.

+++

A few minutes later, a few blocks down Park Street, the small crowd milling outside of Art Bar waiting for the reunited Jebel to take the stage sees a sixteen-wheeler wrapped in marketing materials for Taylor Swifts RED tour made a difficult right turn on to Park Street. Theres a buzz, an almost hushed awe, as it lumbers toward the Colonial Life Arena; a few even comment they wish they could have seen Swift in concert.Around the same time, Syracuse, a perennially popular college basketball powerhouse and No. 4 seed in the NCAA tournaments East Region, was holding off a late charge from California, a No. 12 that upset No. 5 UNLV in the first round. The Orangemen, despite a 12-minute scoring drought, would win, advancing to the Sweet Sixteen.Sometimes the guys who are supposed to win, win.