DISCLAIMER: The last thing the world needs is a white man in his 40s opining about Taylor Swift. For the record, this is just a glorified diary entry.)

Back in college circa 1999, I was lucky enough to see Weird Al Yankovic in concert. I generally remember having a great time, but all these years later, I have only one specific memory of that show: the first ten seconds, when Weird Al himself ran onstage and started singing “Gump,” and in an instant, the goofy celebrity figure who only existed abstractly in my head became an actual three-dimensional human being. I laughed out loud, simply flabbergasted that this guy was real.

I thought about that moment a lot in the weeks leading up to seeing Taylor Swift in Amsterdam with Kiki and the nieces. Taylor’s become such a pop-culture force of nature that it’s functionally impossible not to have an opinion about her.¹ So it seems bizarre that—with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of money—it’s possible to just walk into a place and see her.² When she finally appeared Thursday night, over a year after we bought the tickets, emerging center-stage from enormous petals like a pop-idol flower, my first thought was: Look how small she is!

That’s nothing against Ms. Swift personally (she’s 5’10”). And certainly nothing against her work ethic. The numbers are familiar to any Swiftie, but staggering to the casual observer: a three-and-a-half hour show repeated 151 times on six continents, which adds up to 22 days spent onstage. It’s an economic engine on its own. It’s such a spectacle that the even the backup dancers are famous. 

Taylor herself famously prepped for the tour by running literal marathons on the treadmill while singing her songs at full volume. We were watching an athletic performance as much as a musical one. Somebody once quipped that she looked like two toothpicks holding up a pencil, but these days she’d be the one snapping you in half. As if that weren’t enough, she recorded and released an all-new album in the middle of the damn tour. I’ll say the same thing about the Eras Tour that I’ve said about “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”: You don’t have to like it, but you do have to respect it.

This isn’t really a concert review, but it was a hell of a concert. Taylor’s a goddamn pop-chorus machine gun who isn’t even old enough to be president. “Cruel Summer” has a bridge as perfect as the Golden Gate. “22” is pure concentrated nuclear joie de vivre. “Love Story” has the best key change since “If I Could Turn Back Time.” And so on. Taylor’s polished her dorky-queen act to a perfect sheen and she radiated out to her audience, all 55,000 of us wearing electronic wristbands that made us a physical part of the show. She was clearly very good at her job, and clearly enjoying it. 

If you’re sad about missing out, there’s good news! Everything is everywhere all at once these days, and so the whole 3.5-hour show has already been made into a concert film. (It was the 11th highest-grossing movie in the US in 2023. Taylor’s pop-culture ubiquity defies description.) It’s now on Disney+ and I highly recommend it if you’re interested; it’s a good concert film and honestly improves on the live experience in a lot of ways—the view, the sound quality, most importantly the cost. 

But nobody goes to arena shows for the acoustics. We go there to be there, to drown out the artist themself with our clapping and cheering and singing along. In 1976, Greil Marcus described the applause at an Elvis concert as “thundering with such force that you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.” Suffering is the last thing we were doing, but you get his point. The experience wasn’t hearing Taylor sing songs; it was being at Johan Cruijff Arena³ and singing them with her.  

In that sense Taylor de-focused again, from a 34-year-old woman back to a cultural abstraction. Like most people I love any instance of happy crowds, and it hardly matters why they’re happy. Whether it’s football or church or pop concerts, you’re tapping into some fundamental human psychology that amplifies our collective joy to more than the sum of its parts. Yes, the planet is on fire. Yes, you can and should think Serious Thoughts about Taylor Swift, about the privilege that allows you to be there, about whether there can be such a thing as a good billionaire. But happy crowds are just as important. They’re what I appreciated most on Thursday night. They’re what makes us human. They’re what will get us through this.

1. She even got Fox News to (briefly) care about carbon emissions! Only hers, naturally.
2. I’ve long felt this way about A-list Hollywood celebrities who do plays on Broadway. What, they’re just standing there IN THE ROOM with you?!
3. Cruijff is pronounced “Crouf,” kinda.