I absolutely giggled this morning with my morning coffee after reading the line about men working on their lats: “And the HUSBANDs, who I hope, along with everyone else in Section 301, will forgive me my hyperbole, went home and worked on their lats, and Ezra and I went home, too, but I still wear a beaded bracelet a woman gave me that says REPUTATION, and when I look at it I think: How the kingdom lights shined just for me and you.”
This isn’t about us. The same response I gave when I went to accompany my wife and watch Barbie this summer. It was fun and a peek at someone else’s interests. Thanks for sharing the link @KVV.
Man this was a GREAT read. I respect Taylor Swift and like a few of her songs quite a bit but it gives me so much more pleasure knowing what she gives to so many others that is really not something I understand but certainly appreciate. After listening to @Randy talk about his experience at a concert I really regretted not taking my daughter (who is not a Swiftie but likes her music). Feels like a special experience and this article is great on its own. Thanks for sharing @KVV
Beautifully said, thanks for sharing the personal story about your daughter. DFW is my favorite writer and his Federer piece is one of my favorites of all time (maybe 2nd to his luxury cruise write up). He is an interesting comparison here. I know when I say DFW is my favorite writer, people will typically react by either thinking “this guys smug” or “this guy’s a pseudo-intellectual.” I like to think (hope) not, and the truth is his writing always makes me feel something. He made observations and connected dots I would never think to connect, and he did so in an engaging and often funny way. I had the same feelings reading this piece by this author. Really good stuff.
I saw the Dead in 1994 and I went to the Eras tour. I have listened to hundreds of Dead bootlegs and have also watched blurry Instagram livestreams from Swifties. I won’t disagree with the obsessive fandom comparison, but there just can’t be that much variation in how a song sounds from night to night for Taylor given how tightly choreographed the show is. Having the variation of the acoustic set was genius in terms of making each experience bespoke, and some of the between song banter also makes it worth following every night for the true Switfties, but I doubt if there is any material difference in what you would get from a recording of “Ready for It” from Atlanta or from Kansas City.
It’s an interesting comparison, I definitely see it from a fan passion perspective.
I think what makes Deadheads unique is 1) staying power 2) the lack of popularity the band has had in pop culture 3) the relatively small population of fans.
The Grateful Dead had 1 Top 40 song their entire career and Taylor has 119.
While Grateful Dead were at the center of a cultural movement in the late 60s, the band and their fans have mostly been counterculture.
Taylor is modern day pop culture, she’s Elvis, the Beatles, Madonna, Michael Jackson, she’s larger than life. I think you would look at the fan bases of these performers to draw comparison to Taylor’s. That’s not to say they’re perfect comparisons and it’s difficult to compare Taylor to performers that were before social media and the internet, generally.
She has a gravity that sucks everyone in. I’m not the biggest fan but I saw her a few times very early in her career and I remember listening to her too loud at my desk and my work buddy giving me a hard time for listening to Taylor. Well now he’s at the Eras premier in Vegas, all amped up, he was pulled in by her gravity. I think see a little of that on the Refuge too. I’m not really sure I’m articulating it well but I don’t think the Dead had this effect.
I think I agree with some of what you’re saying, but not all. There are no real monoliths in pop culture anymore like the Beatles or Michael Jackson, which I think is something that Taffy’s article hints towards when discussing the fact that Taylor doesn’t need a profile because she already has direct access to her entire fanbase. There are very few casual Taylor Swift fans in the way that there were millions upon millions of casual fans of the pop stars of the past. Taylor Swift is probably one of the closest modern equivalents to the people you mentioned, and I don’t want to debate that, but I think the sheer level of devotion and knowledge that the average Swiftie has is something far deeper than the fanbases of previous world famous musicians.
There is also something countercultural, as Taffy explored in the article, about marketing explicitly and intimately to the lives of girls in the way that Taylor has. She is not marketed as a sex object, she is not marketed as some sort of intellectual folk music hero with inscrutable lyrical genius, her music is approachable to fans of every age while also providing near-infinite fodder for analysis by the legions of obsessives.
I think the Dead absolutely had that gravity, but they just didn’t have the same kind of mainstream exposure. That’s why you’ve got people that followed them around the country and world, and who followed Dead & Co after them. That’s why there’s a whole new generation of fans getting into their music now and why they’re becoming more and more appreciated as time goes on. They’re not around in the social media age to market and present themselves like Taylor, but the grassroots efforts of their fans to pass around tapes and catalog everything they’ve done is not so different from the grassroots efforts of Taylor’s fans to decode the liner notes, record all of the set lists, start blogs, and dive further and further into her world with every new release.
Talking about the similarities of the tour, there has been a huge parking lot culture for the Eras Tour. People who couldn’t get tickets, or had tickets for a different night of the run, coming back to the stadium to be near the communion of fanatics and hear the music emanating from the stadium. That sounds awfully familiar to me.
Touch of Grey was also at the end of their run, only a few years before Jerry died I think. I saw them a bunch but that was the tour they were on with Bob Dylan, also known as the single worst concert I’ve ever been to. Dylan’s voice and bad Oakland Coliseum acoustics were a BAD pairing.
Yes, Touch of Grey was 1982 but not official released until the late 80s, so not long before Jerry died in '95. It’s not my favorite song, definitely had the synthesized 1980s sound to it.
The music video is likely what pushed it into the Top 40. My Dad had it on tape and I used to watch it all the time as a little kid. The skeleton bodies was pretty cutting edge in 1987.
It was first performed in 1982 but was only performed in live shows and wasn’t officially released by the Dead until 1987. Up until that point it only existed on the recordings/tapes of Dead Heads.
