As Taylor Swift rolled into Los Angeles this week, the frenzy surrounding her record-breaking Eras Tour was already in high gear.
Headlines gushed that she had given $100,000 bonuses to her crew. Politicians asked her to postpone her concerts in solidarity with striking hotel workers. Scalped tickets were going for $3,000 and up. And there were way, way too many friendship bracelets to count.
These days, the center of an otherwise splintered music world can only be Taylor Swift.
The pop superstarâs tour, which is now finishing its initial North American leg with six nights at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, has been a both a business and a cultural juggernaut. Swiftâs catalog of generation-defining hits and canny marketing sense have helped her achieve a level of white-hot demand and media saturation not seen since the 1980s heyday of Michael Jackson and Madonna â a dominance that the entertainment business had largely accepted as impossible to replicate in the fragmented 21st century.
âThe only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania,â said Billy Joel, who attended Swiftâs show in Tampa, Fla., with his wife and young daughters.
Swift has now had more No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 over the course of her career than any other woman, surpassing Barbra Streisand. With the tour lifting Swiftâs entire body of work, she has placed 10 albums on that chart this year and is the first living artist since the trumpeter and bandleader Herb Alpert in 1966 to have four titles in the Top 10 at the same time.
âItâs a pretty amazing feat,â Alpert, 88, said in a phone interview. âWith the way radio is these days, and the way music is distributed, with streaming, I didnât think anyone in this era could do it.â
Out of all the times iâve seen this I never paid this any attention until now. WHERE IN THE WORLD DID THE THE GUY WITH TWO DIFFERENT SOCKS ON GO?? HE JUMPED IN THE AIR AND DISSAPEARED????????
The guy in the black socks knees bend right as the guy with two different socks jumps and disappears⊠I think he picked him up and ran out of the room đ
it is so wild to me the fashions that are called âemoâ today. especially given the fact that probably 80-90% of it is actually scene, not emo. this would have started full on wars 15 years ago
whenever people call this
emo it drives me BANANAS. no! this is not how emos did their hair. this was a scene look!!! some people might have gone from emo to scene depending on their age when new trends happened but theyâre DISTINCT
Gonna start a bingo card of all the famous people Iâve met at this point that have turned out to be awful (and hope that I donât have to keep adding to it lmao).