Taylor Swift in Milan: a great (and long) live videoclip
A giant screen and a walkway that becomes a pool to dive into.
A moss-covered piano, trees and a hut on the stage of San Siro, transformed into a forest. Cotton clouds, fireworks and lots of glitter: these are just some of the parts that bring Taylor Swift’s show to life. 45 songs and the ambition to tell all 18 years of a career in 200 minutes. A show that becomes a gigantic video clip, in which each song is an episode of a story told by the spectacular union of performances, images, choreography and the participation of the audience, as much a protagonist as the singer. Taylor Swift is not the first to stage a total show of this kind – seeing the .Eras Tour Madonna, U2 and Coldplay shows come to mind. But the scale of the show seen in Milan, those are unprecedented.
Music, after the Taylorsplaning
It’s 7.57pm when the countdown clock on the giant screen on the San Siro stage reaches zero: finally the music arrives, after weeks of Taylorsplainingwhere everyone tried to explain a phenomenon that is everywhere: on the news, in newspapers, in politics, in sports. A universal star in an increasingly fragmented era of music – one that manages to get even those who normally don’t care about music talking about music.
It’s hard not to have already seen that clock and the entrance on a screen: the dance troupe with giant fans, from which Taylor Swift emerges. It’s the beginning of the concert film that went to theaters and on platforms, it’s one of the most shared videos on social media. But seeing it in person, in a full stadium, with the audience’s reaction is a whole other story.
The stage is a single giant screen, located on the short side of the stadium near the curve: it extends into a walkway that takes up the entire pitch. The layout is unusual for San Siro, and makes the pits on the side look half-empty, even though the concert has been sold out for months and outside the stadium you hear stories of people who bought tickets that were actually fake.
On the side of the screen is the band, while in the center of the catwalk is a platform that rises, and that’s where Taylor Swift begins: the roar is deafening. But the show within the show is the audience, which brings the concert back to its essence, the communion between the artist and her fans. You realize it already at the second song, at “Cruel summer” – with that bridge that went viral on TikTok: which live is a gigantic collective ritual, with her preparing it with an “Are you ready”, before starting a walk on stage that shows her stage presence, her charisma.
Tale of the Ages: A Song Binge-Listening
It’s not just a concert-video clip, it’s the total story of a singer, built like a TV series in binge watching and in binge-listening: each season is the eras that build the structure of the show, the episodes are the individual songs.
It starts with the “Lover” season (2019) – which ends with a house catching fire – and moves on to the country era-seasons, “Fearless”, “Red” and “Speak Now”.
The band comes out of the shadows on the side of the stage and accompanies Taylor Swift, who holds a glitter guitar, on the catwalk. The smartwatch warns me several times that the audience exceeds 100 decibels: “Love story” is one of the most sung, and even the 10 minutes of “All too well” (from “Red”) are all underlined by the choirs. The “Speak now” era lasts one song, “Enchanted” plus a long introduction: the stage that is once again tinged with pastel colors and Taylor Swift abandons the glitter for a long and fairy-tale dress. The audience of Swiftie raises a sign “We are enchanted to meet you after 13 years”, a reference to the only Italian concert (2011 in a not even full Assago Forum).
The “Reputation” era, that of the angry Taylor, is told by a snake that appears on stage: dark tones, both in the colors and in the music, more electronic and dark, and by cracks that appear on the floor of the stage, which is in turn a screen.
A stark contrast with the following era, that of the singer-songwriter “Folklore” and “Evermore”: the snake on the screen dissolves into a forest, trees and a hut appear on stage. It is the singer-songwriter phase, the one in which Taylor Swift gained an “indie” credibility that she lacked by collaborating with the National and Bon Iver, minimal songs that are difficult to bring to a stadium: they do not work as well as on record. We return to pop and brighter colors with the “1989” era (and if possible, the choirs are even stronger on “Blank space”, “Shake it off” and “Bad blood”) and then turn to black and white for “Tortured poets department” (with the “Fortnite” video recreated on stage). The surprise songs are the improvised part of the show, or almost: two medleys, one on guitar (“the 1” and “Wonderland”) and one on piano (“I Almost Do” and The Moment I Knew”) – complete with a song interrupted by a cough because yes, the music is live, she plays and it has to be seen, even when she makes mistakes, with all due respect to Dave Grohl.
It closes with the era of “Midnight”, darker and more nocturnal indeed, for a concert that began with full light and that only got dark late in the evening – at that point the bracelets that light up the stands also started to work, with a choreography made famous and loved by Coldplay. Only that, when leaving, the bracelets are kept as a souvenir and are not recycled.
A great pop concert
Coming out of San Siro, there are parents waiting and also fans who have come to listen from outside: they seem to be having fun anyway. For the non-fans, however, theEras Tour it’s a spectacular concert but too long: it’s built around songs-songs, that you find yourself singing even if you know each other, and it’s full of ideas, but too many. There would be artists who could build an entire career on just one of these ideas, but Taylor Swift wants to put them all together, in a single evening – and this creates ups and downs, even with such a well-crafted narrative structure of the concert.
Taylor Swift plays with the audience, shows amazement at the reactions, plays her characters with ease: “So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/To make them love me and make it seem effortless”, she sings in “Mastermind”, one of the last songs in the setlist. The scheme is successful and theEras Tour It remains a one-of-a-kind show, for the way it brings together the different souls of pop music: the songs, the spectacle of images, the artist in symbiosis with the fans.
You come away a little dazed by so much stuff, wondering what the biggest and certainly most ambitious star in music at the moment will be able to do after a tour like this.
