Live music is back, and it's not the same.
No matter what your relationship to Taylor Swift — whether you're a fan, the parent of a fan, a Swiftie or a complete refusenik — you have likely heard something about the tickets. People want them. People have them. People want to know if you have them. People are spending hours online trying, and failing, to procure them. The tickets! How do we get them? People are shocked at how expensive they are, and also how impossible to acquire. The Senate is stepping in! |
The tickets are, of course, for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, which is on track to become one of the highest-grossing tours ever. As the name implies, the tour has a theme: a musical journey through the eras of Swift's careers. It also has moments that are built to be moments: surprise songs, unexpected guest stars. It's a phenomenon that both helps remind people, after the pandemic interlude, of how great live concerts can be and illustrates just how big and extravagant — and culturally central — live concerts are becoming. |
Think back to the best concert, in any musical genre, that you ever attended: I'm sure everyone reading this has a resilient, treasured memory. (I have a few spread out over the decades, bookended by Public Enemy and Roomful of Teeth.) Now think of this summer as that memory, but supercharged: The stakes are higher, the wait is longer, the acts are bigger, and the shows are more extravagant and transcendent than we've experienced in a long time, maybe ever. |
The concerts (and the grosses) are getting the headlines but what's really remarkable, as Elamin Abdelmahmoud writes in a guest essay today, is us, the audience: how the waves of emotion that people are feeling (and filming and posting about) show just how much we needed the spectacle of live music to come roaring back. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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