Margaret Kelly | Staff Writer
In a rush to get back to the film, I push my way through the bathroom door in a Warwick movie theater. Inside, a little girl dressed in overwhelming amounts of sparkles greets me. Bouncing on the balls of her feet, she asks “Are you seeing Taylor Swift?” I laugh, “Not tonight, but do you think I should? How is the movie?” Immediately, her face lights up with a huge smile, “Yes! Taylor Swift is the best! She’s so cool!” I promise that I’ll go see the film, and she smiles, moving on to interrogate the next person to walk through the bathroom door.
These days, it seems like Taylor Swift is everywhere. In fact, if you take a look at the front page of the Mosaic website, you’ll probably see her name at least a couple times. There’s a good reason why. In recent months, Taylor Swift has become one of most talked about people in the world. From the music industry to the NFL, Swift’s name has reached far from her start as a 14-year old girl from Pennsylvania who scored a record deal as a country singer-songwriter. Now, over a dozen albums later, Swift is easily one of the most popular and well-known music artists of the 21st century. Perhaps her most impressive feat, however, is her ability to reinvent herself with new generations. The same hit songs that blared over my Hello Kitty radio when I was 10 years old are being streamed by young kids today. And the most impressive example of this wide diversity in her outreach is The Eras Tour.
Swift announced her newest tour, the first in several years, in autumn of 2022. Immediately, there was an eruption in the media. Only a few weeks after the initial announcement, new show dates were being added in response to overwhelming demand. The actual sale of tickets for the tour sparked a controversial debate over the practices of Ticketmaster, with the case eventually reaching the Supreme Court. The Eras Tour has helped Swift reach places only some of the greatest artists in history have gone. It is the highest-grossing tour ever done by a woman, and made her the first ever billionaire with music as their main source of income. I had the pleasure of attending a show this past summer, and it was one of my favorite nights of my life. To be able to see an artist who I grew up with perform live, whose music has surrounded me ever since childhood, was an incredible experience. “Fearless,” was the first ever album that I downloaded onto my iPod as a kid, and I was listening to that same album live, surrounded by thousands of other people who probably had similar stories.
The newest installment of the Eras Tour is part of a fairly unexplored area in technology and music: concert films. The Eras Tour made its cinematic debut on October 13, 2023, in theaters across the country. It’s not the first tour to do so, in fact, artists from Madonna to Miley Cyrus have had their live performances fitted to form into a movie theater viewing. This form of enjoying concerts has revolutionized these artists’ audiences. Little kids often aren’t ready to be in a concert crowd. They’re loud and overwhelming for kids and other people with sensitivities to extreme audio and visual action. The Eras Tour was so loud I could barely hear myself think, so I can’t imagine how a child would react to it. However, seeing the concert in a theater form can help solve a lot of these problems. Now, a much wider array of people can enjoy The Eras Tour in a calmer, but equally exciting, setting.
Taylor Swift has taught me a lot throughout my life. She has helped people all throughout the world, especially girls, learn how to navigate today’s world as a woman. Mainly because she did it with us. She makes mistakes, but is open about them. Being in The Eras Tour audience felt like the culmination of years of making mistakes, learning from them, and playing “Love Story” all the way through. And thanks to concert films, that little glittery girl in the movie theater bathroom can experience it, too.
