Forgetting Taylor Swift

People have been forgetting Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. You spend thousands of dollars on the most important night of your life, and as the days tick down you get more and more excited—only two months until I see Taylor Swift! Only fifty-nine days! Only fifty-eight!—until the magical day itself. You get dressed up in imitation of one of her outfits. You wear a friendship bracelet, because there’s a Taylor Swift song called “You’re On Your Own, Kid” where she mentions friendship bracelets. You write the number thirteen on your hand, because Taylor Swift sometimes writes the number thirteen on her hand. You’re so full of excitement it feels like your heart might burst. And then, suddenly, it’s night, and you’re streaming out of the venue with hundreds of thousands of other fans, and you have no memory of what just happened. You know, intellectually, that you were there for more than four hours as the world’s biggest pop star performed her entire back catalog for you, and you sang along to every song. But you don’t remember it. You can’t conjure the images, or the feelings. You don’t feel anything at all.

This is real. The Eras Tour is, by any measure, the biggest cultural event in human history, bigger than the Moon landing, bigger than the domestication of wheat. When it’s done, it will have featured more than one hundred fifty shows on every continent on the planet. Wherever Taylor Swift goes, the local economy booms. The Southeast Asian leg of her tour caused a diplomatic rift between the Philippines and Singapore. In 2023, the Eras Tour contributed nearly five billion dollars to world G.D.P., equivalent to the entire annual economic output of Barbados or Sierra Leone. But almost as soon as the first concert in Glendale, Arizona, was over, people started reporting something weird happening to their memories. You can read their accounts online. “I know I had so much fun and was singing along to everything,” one fan says, “but I don’t remember it! I remember before and after the concert, but nothing during.” Another: “Id waited half a year for this moment and now that it’s over my brain seems to be trying to convince me I wasn’t there?!” Another: “I know I was there but it feels like a dream.” Vanishing, dissolving into the wind, as soon as you wake up. Psychologists have suggested it’s because the brain is so overwhelmed with the intensity of the experience that it can’t accurately record it; apparently people often forget the first dance at their wedding too. You can believe this if you like.

Lately it’s started to worry me, all the forgetting. I’ve already forgotten the vast majority of my life. There are months, entire years, in which I can pick out maybe one or two hazy incidents. The rest is just blank: I woke up; some time later I fell asleep again. Someone else lived those days. Fairly often, I’ll go to bed with the absolute certainty that nothing in the previous twenty-four hours will be remembered. I went to the supermarket, I went for a drink, I pissed about on my phone; I might as well not have bothered. I spend a lot of time reading books, but I won’t remember those either. Two years ago, I read the one hundred stories of Boccaccio’s Decameron over a few weeks in the summer. I vaguely remember the wife-swapping one, the one where the man pretends to be mute so he can have sex with an entire nunnery, and the really pornographic one about putting the devil back in Hell. Three out of a hundred. Every two weeks, I receive a copy of the London Review of Books, read it, and then instantly forget everything it contained. What’s the point? When I was a child, my dad would ask us on every family holiday: do you think you’ll remember this? What he meant was, is it worth it? The expense, the hassle, flights, hotels, dragging three bickering sons down to Spain or Italy for a week in the summer—and when that week’s up and we’re back in rainy London, have we really gained anything at all? In fact, I do remember: I remember him asking the question. But I couldn’t tell you where we were, or anything we’d done for the remainder of the week.

Anyway, the idea for this piece was that when the Eras Tour came to Europe, I would buy one of the insanely expensive resale tickets and go to see Taylor Swift live, and afterwards I would write about the experience and the general inescapability of Taylor Swift, her status as the defining figure of the twenty-first century, and what this all means about the state of mass culture and who we are today. Fine. Her first European dates were in Paris. Great, my editor said, go to Paris. It’s only two hours from London by train: may as well make a weekend of it. So I did. I went to the catacombs and the Panthéon and to Père Lachaise, and I walked by the Seine, and I tried to order in French in the restaurants, but when the waiters replied in French I pulled involuntary panicked faces until they started speaking English instead, and then finally I got an R.E.R. train out to La Défense, the big sterile financial district in Nanterre just west of the city, to see Taylor Swift. There were thousands of people there marching in a great silent plod, like a train of refugees, towards the La Défense Arena, where she would sing her songs for us. They confiscated my water bottle at the security gates. It was only once I was through and about to walk into the arena itself that I realized the obvious problem with this assignment. I had been asked to experience and then discuss the Memory Vortex, a science-fiction monster that, once seen, immediately deletes itself from your brain.

Five hours later, it was night, and I was walking out of the arena with two hundred thousand Taylor Swift fans, all muttering to each other in strangely calm and quiet voices. I had not had a good time. My feet ached. My back ached. My ears rang. My mouth was dry. I was an utter wreck. But I remembered.

Part of this was down to my dad’s technique. I’d spent the past five hours very acutely aware that the present moment is thinner than cobwebs and exists for only a breath, and when it’s over you have nothing but shifting and tenuous memories. So whenever something happened, some big musical moment or an impressive spurt of pyrotechnics, I’d think: will I remember this? I spent the whole concert turning that thought over and over like a pebble in my mouth. Will I remember this? What about this? But it wasn’t just me reminding myself to remember. The other reason I remembered is that Taylor kept doing the exact same thing.

Right at the beginning of the concert, after she’d only played a few songs, she told me to remember. “I wrote these songs about my life,” she said, “and maybe that’s how you think about them, but after tonight I hope you’ll think about us, and the memories we’ve made in Paris tonight.” And then, right at the end, she returned to the same theme. “We’ve had the most unforgettable time in Paris,” she said. “Thank you for one of the most magical, memorable experiences.” She performs the exact same show four times a week. Each week there’s a different arena in a different country, and all those arenas are exactly the same. I don’t think that night was particularly magical or unforgettable for her. She was giving us our orders. She was trying to give those orders in a way that made it sound like she and I were somehow friends, but it was still a command. Remember me, she was saying. Enthrone me in your memory. This is the most important night of your life, because you got to see me. But just under the surface, I felt something sad in there. Don’t let me vanish, she was saying. Let me live a little longer inside your mind. Don’t let me fade.

But she is; she’s fading. Seeing Taylor Swift live with two hundred thousand of her most dedicated fans was not the experience I’d thought it would be. I thought I’d have to endure several hours of being battered about the face by the total cultural hegemony of a pop star at the absolute peak of her fame. I’d hate it, obviously, all this bland depthless pop music, but sometimes hating things is fun. What I actually saw was something much more interesting: a pop star exactly five minutes after the absolute peak of her fame. I had caught her at precisely the moment when her empire started to contract.

Between her last show in Singapore and her first show in Paris, Taylor Swift had released a new album, The Tortured Poets Department. That album was supposed to be a kind of victory lap. At the end of 2023, Taylor Swift had been omnipresent and unimpeachable; she was Time’s person of the year, and had also—as far as I can tell—somehow become the first woman to single-handedly win the Super Bowl. It was widely taken for granted that she would be the deciding vote in the U.S. presidential election. It was essentially forbidden to dislike Taylor Swift’s music: if you did, you were obviously some kind of sexist. And the album did well. The Tortured Poets Society broke Spotify’s record for the most album streams in a single day: three hundred and eighty million. Still, somehow, that wasn’t enough. Something had broken. The world at large looked at her offering—and shrugged. Everything’s still there, the arenas, the huge crowds, but noontime is passed and the shadows are just starting, almost imperceptibly, to lengthen. There’s something bittersweet in the air in every huge, record-breaking concert now. All of them carry a tiny presentiment of a day that’s not here yet but is surely coming, when the entire world forgets about Taylor Swift.

For now, though, the concerts really are still huge. I don’t go to a lot of arena events; I found the vastness of the place dizzying. Gawping in there like a medieval peasant suddenly beamed into the chrome belly of a starship. I had the cheapest class of ticket available, standing room only at the back of the pit, which meant that everything towered above me in a slightly threatening heap of aluminum and steel. (The face value of my ticket was ninety-five euros; The Lamp managed to get it for nearly ten times that on the resale market.) A kind of agoraphobia of fame. There are people in the world who like my writing; some of them have even stopped me on the street to say so. It can get to your head, that kind of thing. Maybe if I gave a talk at my local bookshop enough of them would come that I wouldn’t be totally embarrassed. I’m not sure I could fill the La Défense Arena. Taylor Swift, meanwhile, fills every single one of these places in every major city in the world.

The lights were still on in the arena. An enormous screen behind the stage showed the Eras Tour logo. I was early, but so was everyone else. When I’d told people that I was going to see Taylor Swift live, for work, they’d joked that it would be me and two hundred thousand teenage girls. They didn’t get it at all. No, I’d replied, it’ll be me and two hundred thousand women exactly my age. They might have been teenagers when they started listening to Taylor Swift, but they never stopped. A lot of them still read Harry Potter and watch Disney cartoons. My generation stopped growing up when they released the iPhone; we just got older, our bodies started to fray. And here they were: a small city’s population of women exactly my age.

A lot of them were dressed in Shein versions of what even I could recognize as some of Taylor Swift’s iconic outfits. The point isn’t to like Taylor or her music; the point is, in some sense, to be her. On the outer fringes of the crowd were a few women who’d come solo, sitting on the floor, ostentatiously reading. Farther in, the crowd got rapidly denser. I tried edging my way in to see what was going on, and discovered that there was some kind of structure within the mass of thirty-year-old women: threading its way through the crowd was a kind of frozen conga line, a seam of people all facing the same way, which was away from the stage and the enormous screen. I stood near it for a while in the hope that its nature would reveal itself, and when it didn’t I tried asking. “Excusez-moi,” I said to the nearest thirty-year-old woman. “Est-ce une . . .” I didn’t know how to say queue in French. But it didn’t matter; neither did she. “This is for the bathroom,” she explained, slowly, as if talking to a small child or foreigner. So it was. The line squiggled its way through the entire crowd to a little opening along the wall, which was, in fact, marked TOILETTES FEMMES. In fact, the line was the crowd; most of what I’d confused for an audience was just people trying to use the toilets.

Her name was June and she’d come here from San Francisco. This was her third time seeing Taylor Swift and her first time in Paris. I tried asking her what she made of Paris, but she was mostly interested in talking about the rumored changes to the setlist for the European tour. She was wearing a T-shirt that said TAYLOR SWIFT FOR PRESIDENT. Was that a serious proposal or a sort of joke? “Literally,” she said, “literally, Taylor for everything.” I still wasn’t sure how sincere she was being, but this made me curious. What was it about Taylor Swift that she loved so much? What made her want to see the same show three times on two continents? Was it the music? The lyrics? Her stage presence? Her persona? June looked at me like an astrophysicist who’d just been asked if the earth is round or flat or what. “Wait,” she said, “why are you even here?”

There was another enormous queue for the men’s toilets. This one was also made up of thirty-year-old women. They’d commandeered all the cubicles, and the line stretched right past the urinals where the few scattered men bashfully pissed. Some boyfriends were present; a few cheerful middle-aged dads wearing shirts that said IT’S ME, HI, I’M THE DAD, IT’S ME. A few gays too, but not nearly as many gays as the world’s biggest female pop star ought to attract. She can wear all the sparkly outfits she wants; Taylor Swift is simply not a queer icon. Some hard seam of joylessness underneath it all. But I did meet two boyfriends just outside the entrance. They’d come from New York, and when I asked their names they gave me their Instagram handles instead, which seemed to matter to them much more. They stood out in the crowd, partially because they were men but mostly because they had elaborately dressed themselves up as a burger and a carton of fries. They told me this was based on a set of matching outfits Taylor Swift and Katy Perry had worn in a music video from 2019. Which one got to be Taylor? “He does,” said @clintandrieofficial (2,229 followers), putting one arm around @lanceoca (78.9k). “But only because it’s his birthday.”

I turned out not to be the only unaccompanied straight male in the audience. Alex was not a very conventional Swiftie: a big fat bearded guy, schlubbily dressed and wandering around with a faint odor of armpits and cigarette smoke. He looked like he might have been there to tighten the bolts on the steel struts holding up the huge screen, or maybe slather them with some kind of industrial grease. Like June, he believed Taylor Swift should run for president; unlike June, he was incredibly serious about this. “In maybe ten years I would love to see her go into politics,” he said. “I genuinely, genuinely would love that. She’s the only one who can unify America. Look—she’s progressive, she believes in women’s rights, but she’s also white, she even started as a country star. I just came here from California. You don’t know what it’s like over there. The country’s so divided, everyone has so much hatred for each other. I really worry they’ll start killing each other soon. It’s apocalyptic in America. Only Taylor can bring them together.” Alex believed that Taylor Swift was the most significant literary figure of our time. “In fifty years,” he said, “all her lyrics will be taught in literature classes in college.” He’d been a fan of hers for well over a decade, but he’d started really getting into her music after dabbling in the online culture of obsessive Swifties who pore over her lyrics to untangle the complex web of allusions and coded references they believe is hidden inside. “Her words, her genius, everything springs out of there,” he said. “It’s like having the Q text.” He was referring to a hypothesized collection of Jesus’s sayings, now lost, that’s believed to have been the source material for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

I asked Alex what other music he liked, aside from Taylor Swift. He looked almost embarrassed. Wavered for a moment, as if he’d been asked to reveal a guilty secret. “Rammstein,” he said.

I was interrupted by a sudden hush. The lights went dark. The logo on the enormous stage was replaced with a clock, ticking down to midnight. A slow scream built up from every corner of this vast place, until it sounded like I was being blasted by ten thousand jet engines in Hell. When it reached midnight, the clock started to float and dissolve into some C.G.I. imagery, different Taylor Swifts from different eras in different-colored boxes. At this point, the little plastic boxes on everyone’s wristbands started to glow white, so the arena was like a field of stars, or a forest full of dancing fireflies, if stars or fireflies happened to scream with the voice of a human woman. Ripples of white moving through the stands. My own wristband seemed to be broken. It wasn’t glowing. Maybe it had detected that I wasn’t a real fan. As the graphics swirled on-screen, dancers wearing what looked like big diaphanous parachutes started drifting around the stage. They bobbed and floated around for a while, and then, suddenly, she was there, the inevitable future president of the United States, the most famous person in the world. The screaming rose to such a pitch that it felt like my bones might suddenly liquefy. In the flesh, in a sparkly red bodysuit: Taylor had arrived.

The first thing you need to know about Taylor Swift is that she’s a distance predator. She evolved to chase down gazelles on the Serengeti, to run after them for hours until they collapse from sheer exhaustion, at which point Taylor Swift snaps their necks between her jaws and settles down to feed. You can see it in her long, rangy limbs, with which she lopes efficiently up and down the stage. It’s in her forward-pointing eyes. Her sculpted pantherine face. When she smiles you can see the canines gleaming in her mouth, and her eyes squint like a raptor’s. This creature chews down raw meat with her back teeth.

The other thing you need to know about Taylor Swift is that she’s about half an inch tall.

At least, that’s how she looked from my vantage point all the way at the back of the crowd. I have six feet and four inches on me, so I could see clear across the enormous mass of people to the stage. There, lit up in the darkness, was the tiny human figure of tiny Taylor Swift. She looked like the spinning ballerina in a music box. It felt insane that so many hundreds of thousands of people should be packed in here to stare in rapture at something so small. I tried crouching down a little, so I could see what the show would be like for someone less gangly than myself. Instantly, the tiny doll disappeared beneath a thicket of heads. None of these people, I realized, were actually looking at Taylor Swift. They were paying eye-watering sums of money to watch the live video feed of her on the enormous screen behind the stage. Which you could do at home, for free.

I decided to attempt an expedition into the center of the crowd. I wanted to get as close as possible to the actual human at the heart of this thing. I angled myself in sideways between a group of women exactly my age who were all streaming themselves live on Instagram singing along to the music, all watching themselves on their screens, and once I’d made it through them I just kept on pressing. Layer by layer, muttering my excusez-mois that nobody could actually hear as I shouldered my way in. It felt like swimming through ballistic gel. Eventually I noticed that I was casting a shadow, a big gap in the crowd directly behind me. Hundreds of people edging to the side as I blundered around blocking their view. I might have made it maybe twenty meters in from the edge of the crowd when I started meeting serious resistance. People did not want to let me sidle past them. They did not want this obnoxiously tall man between them and Taylor. Eventually, as I was trying to negotiate my way through a particularly dense clot of people, the largest, roundest, pinkest woman I’ve ever seen in my life turned around and bellowed the word “NO!!!” in my face with such wounded vehemence, like the last cry of a dying rhino, that I turned around and fled in shame, back through my shadow all the way to the edge of the crowd.

I don’t know exactly where she’d come here from, but I can guess. All the people I’ve mentioned here have one very significant thing in common. I really wasn’t going out of my way to talk to or be bellowed at by Americans; it just so happened that as far as I could tell, absolutely every single one of the two hundred thousand people in attendance had come over from the Land of the Free. Some of them didn’t even need to speak; it was all there in the look. Square-shaped bodies, square-shaped heads, packed out to the corners with corn syrup. People who could only have come from the square-shaped states. There’s a theory gaining ground among the French far right: a Great Replacement is underway; the indigenous population of Europe is slowly being replaced by waves of newcomers from the rest of the world. The Great Replacement is real, but it’s not Arabs or Africans. It’s Americans coming to Paris to see Taylor Swift.

To be fair, Paris has always been for Americans. Everyone else lets them have it, which is why this is the only major city in Europe not constantly pillaged by crowds of lathered-up lobster-red Brits. When British people go to France, we go to the Riviera, or Normandy, or the Loire, or the Dordogne. Unless it’s completely unavoidable, we stay well clear of Paris. We know the place: it’s expensive and it smells like a urinal, the people there all hate us, and unlike at home the museums aren’t even free. We know that Paris has some of the worst restaurants in Europe: crawling, joyless places where you’ll pay thirty euros for a stew of intestinal parasites, microwaved in a bag and served alongside three Édith Piaf songs on a constant loop. We were not fooled by Amélie. We have no illusions about the French. A popular British pastime is getting the ferry to Calais to load up on cheap booze; the hypermarket there features a seedy café called “Flunch” and an even seedier boutique called “Ding Fring.” These are not a serious people. If you really push us, we’ll admit that there’s some good stuff in Paris, hidden away, but you need to be a real insider to find it in the general sea of Eiffel-Tower-keychain crap, and, frankly, who has the time?

Americans visit a different Paris. They built this city as a dream and a negative of their own society. America is a fuzzy petri dish of a country, suburbs speckling across the plains, all of it grown on agar. Paris is the glittering image of everything America is not. America is ugly; Paris is beautiful. America is practical; Paris is sensuous. America is shallow; Paris is sophisticated. In America, what matters is money; in Paris, what matters is style. America had barely even founded its new utopian republic, derived from the austere principles of liberty and reason, before Ben Franklin crossed the Atlantic to settle in feudal, monarchical Paris. Every generation has its Americans who run from the bright brutal openness of their home country and retreat into the richer fetid murk of Paris. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Richard Wright. At first it was just the rich, people like Henry James’s Lambert Strether, who got to jump on a steamer to Paris and become “more acute in manners, more sinister in morals,” but the First World War accidentally turned the American in Paris into a mass phenomenon. Every hay-chewing Iowa farmboy or son of a Mississippi sharecropper was sent marching through the City of Lights. What they saw there—desegregation and décolletage, a life turned towards the sumptuous—was, obviously, a fantasy: most of the actual French population of the city lived in industrial slums, more Émile Zola than Henry James. But the Americans that settled here made it real.

Josephine Baker was born in the Social Evil Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. A place for the two medical side effects of prostitution: venereal disease and human life. She grew up in a cold, dirty room. The paint peeled off the walls. There was no plumbing. Her mother drank and screamed and beat her. Her grandmother had been a slave on a tobacco plantation. She told Josephine stories about how her owner had made a pregnant woman lie face-down on the ground, with a hole dug for her belly, and then lashed her. Josephine slept with her three sisters on a single mattress, twitching with fleas. The girls made money scampering around the produce markets, picking up vegetables that had fallen on the floor and selling them. When she was nineteen years old, she took a boat to Paris and tried her luck as an exotic dancer, and then look what happened. I went to the Panthéon to pay my respects to her cenotaph. It felt like a strange place for her, this chilly, austere crypt, its white stone, its hush. No music, no warm flesh; there’s no dancing for the dead. But this was the tribute of the French Republic to one of its national heroes. She was recognized for her civil rights advocacy and her bravery working with the Resistance during the war, but the fact remains that Paris is a city where if you’re sexy enough, if you’re truly world-historically sexy, they’ll put up a tomb for you next to Rousseau and Voltaire and Jean-Paul Marat and the Comte de Mirabeau.

It’s hard to say exactly when the change happened. If you read Susan Sontag’s critical essays from the 1970s, you’ll soon notice that her job is basically to explain to educated Americans what’s going on in Paris. She’s here to keep you up to date on Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard: all this fascinating art churning out of France. In the 1980s and 1990s, the only ideas worth repeating on American campuses belonged to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Now? Americans aren’t under any obligation to care about what’s going on in Europe, because there’s nothing going on in Europe. The type of American who used to make a point of reading André Gide now just congratulates himself for watching prestige T.V.

The whole of Europe is declining, but I don’t think anywhere has fallen quite as badly as France. This place used to be where they manufactured the nowness of the now; today, all its attempts at relevance are desperate, cringing, pathetic. Paris, c’est hyper-cool, non? Nous avons beaucoup du rap. Tu aimes le parkour? Tu aimes les hamburgers? France remains cool insofar as it’s capable of adopting the forms of American pop culture. When that runs dry, it just trades off some fantasy of its past. My hotel in Paris was on the lower slopes of Montmartre, mostly because my train got in late and it was within walking distance of the Gare du Nord. When I stepped outside in the morning, though, I found that every other car on the street was an old Citroën 2CV, puttering around with a tour guide in the front and two grinning Americans in the back. There were Americans in all the cafés, saying things like “Doesn’t Paris have such an indefinable je ne sais quoi?” The worst spectacle was outside Shakespeare and Company, the venerable English-language bookshop on the Left Bank, where there was a line stretching out the door and almost to the river. A line of American women all exactly the same age as me, patiently waiting their turn to browse through the same books they could get at their local Barnes & Noble.

These Americans hadn’t come to Paris to go to Shakespeare and Company, though, or to sit in cafés. They hadn’t even come to Paris because of Paris; they’d come to Paris to see Taylor Swift. They were all wearing friendship bracelets; several had written the number thirteen on their hands. The city itself and everything in it were only an added bonus; the main attraction was a pop singer from Berks County, Pennsylvania. Maybe the most unsensual, unsophisticated, un-Parisian American this city has ever received. And the reason they were seeing her here rather than in America was simple. As @clintandrieofficial and @lanceoca told me, tickets for the Eras Tour in New York would have set them back four grand each. But the dollar is strong and the euro is weak, and since 2010 Europe has stagnated while America keeps getting richer, tickets for the Paris show, plus flights and accommodation, ended up costing them two grand. This city has finally found something new it can trade on: its poverty.

I thought about Jim Morrison. I’d been to see his grave at Père Lachaise that morning. It’s small, tucked away in a little thicket of the dead, but surrounded by even more of the living. Édith Piaf has a few small tributes, Chopin has some flowers; Jim Morrison’s grave is like a refuse heap. It’s become a tradition to stick a wad of chewing gum on one of the trees next to his headstone; the tree is now practically coated in slime. Heaps of tat piled over his corpse. Here lies an American. I listened to The Doors on the train to La Défense. California, misery, menace, sex. All the children are insane; I’ll never look into your eyes again. Once, when American pop stars came to Paris, they came here to die.

I don’t think Taylor Swift was planning to die in Paris, this waning, sunset city whose most interesting inhabitants are all already entombed. It was just another piece of set-dressing in her worldwide festival of herself. But that’s what was happening. Somehow, just as her star started to dim, she ended up here.

My girlfriend had been nervous about death in Paris, and not the slow, sad, poetic kind. Just before I left, she made me promise that I wouldn’t get Bataclan’d. To be honest, the thought had crossed my mind too. Horrible things have happened in this city to people who just wanted to go out and see some live music. Was I willing to die for my trenchant observations about Taylor Swift? The French authorities had clearly had the same thought, because all along the approach to the arena there had been little clumps of military police scowling with enormous automatic rifles hanging from their shoulders. The gendarmerie had deployed creepy A.I.-powered surveillance cameras in a wide radius around the arena. My movements were being watched; if the computer decided my movements seemed suspicious it would alert the armed men, and they would do whatever violence was necessary to secure the Taylor Swift Eras Tour. And despite my political qualms, all of this had made me feel a lot more safe. But after an hour or so of the performance, I found myself actively wishing for someone to show up with an explosives belt.

This wasn’t because the show was bad, exactly. Her music might be bizarrely bland, tuneless, lifeless, harmonious and sweet-sounding but always basically limp—but as a performer, Taylor Swift is extraordinary. I suppose it’s the plains predator in her. All I did during her concert was stand around for several hours, and by the end it felt like my body was falling apart. In that same period, she performed forty-six songs with all their accompanying dances, running up and down the stage maybe two hundred times, and going through sixteen nearly seamless costume changes. By the end, her face was as flawless and unflustered as it had been at the beginning. There were, admittedly, a few strands of hair sweatily plastered to her forehead. But that was it. The really amazing thing, though, was how minutely choreographed every second of the performance was. Every line in every song had some particular motion associated with it: sticking up one hand, or twirling her hair, or throwing back her head so we could see the lizard-like gulp down her very slightly shiny neck. Later, I checked the routines I’d seen against the 2023 concert film of the Eras Tour. They were exactly the same: every glance, every twitch. Maybe if you filmed her whole performance again you could line up the periods between each time she blinks.

All that perfection started to feel very, very unnerving. It was like an itch. I needed something unplanned to happen, anything to disrupt this robotic, precision-engineered evening on rails. Eventually, the tuneless warbling started washing over me and the fantasy took over. The crowd screaming in panic, everyone tearing out clumps of each other’s hair as they stampede for the exits, as the attackers gleefully spray them with bursts of Kalashnikov fire. Obviously I’m hit. I’m a big target. But as I collapse to the floor, as the terrorist approaches to finish me off with a single round between the eyes, my head lolls and I can see the stage. The tiny form of Taylor Swift is still up there, singing into a dead mic, hitting every step in her choreography, flawless, mechanical, grinning as the backup dancers lie slumped and leaking all around her.

I did get my wish, sort of. There’s one song called “Delicate”; during live shows, audiences have taken to chanting “one, two, three, let’s go bitch” in the brief pause before Taylor starts singing. When she sang it this time, one of the women exactly my age chanted “one, two, three, let’s go bitch” exactly four bars before she was supposed to. She seemed so happy as she was yelling it, so thrilled to be in this moment, among everyone, and so utterly mortified when she realized she’d come in too early and she was all by herself. From her face, you’d think she’d just accidentally trampled on a kitten. I wanted to hug her. I was so incredibly grateful. One single moment that hadn’t been scripted in advance.

The Eras Tour is weird. There’s currently a show in London called ABBA Voyage, where you can go to see holograms of the members of ABBA as they appeared in 1979, performing pre-recorded versions of all their classic hits. The Eras Tour is basically the same thing. The gimmick is that Taylor does a run-through of her entire career, and to complete the illusion she dresses up as herself, as she looked ten or fifteen years ago. Here she is as a country-music ingénue. Here she is as a mid-2000s hipster. She sings songs she wrote when she was a teenager. She doesn’t reinterpret them; she doesn’t approach them with any of the bittersweetness or irony of a thirty-something woman looking back on the brighter, stronger, starker world of youth. She just sings them again. Thanks to a dispute with her former record label, she’s currently re-recording and re-releasing her entire back catalog. You can listen to split-audio comparisons of the original tracks and the new versions on YouTube. They’re exactly the same. Taylor Swift is a Taylor Swift tribute act.

It’s all hollow. There’s nothing actually there. Taylor Swift is supposed to be so popular because her music expresses a universal experience, or at least universal among white Millennial-or-younger women in developed countries. The caricature of Taylor Swift is that all her songs are about exes and breakups, and from what I heard in Paris that caricature is pretty much accurate. She talks a lot about being alone in an apartment, drinking wine on a sofa covered in cat hair. Her music is about bitterness and heartbreak, feeling vengeful, feeling unjustly victimized by the consequences of your own actions, wallowing in your own pettiness and self-delusions and regret. This isn’t a bad thing! There’s this totemic figure hovering around in our culture, the crazy ex-girlfriend, and if art is how we give structure to life maybe it’s good to have someone out there who can give that figure an articulate voice. Unfortunately, Taylor Swift is simply not that voice.

I heard her songs. They did seem familiar. They did speak to something I recognized. Specifically, I recognized the same lifeless clichéd therapy-speak that’s swirling around everywhere. The woman is a walking Instagram infographic. She says things like “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism like some kind of congressman,” or “I cut off my nose just to spite my face, then I hate my reflection for years and years,” or “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day,” or “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, strategy sets the scene for the tale.” If people are finding any emotional resonance in this stuff, it’s because they’ve already been trained to think about themselves and their inner lives in the same clinical, bloodless register of traumas and disorders. I felt bad for the girls I’d seen sitting on the floor and reading books, because girls who sit on the floor before a concert reading books are my people, and they deserved better than this pap. They could have had Adrianne Lenker or PJ Harvey or Patti Smith or Björk. At the very least they could have had Lana del Rey. There’s a whole world out there for girls who go to concerts and sit on the floor and read, and all of it is much deeper and richer than Taylor Swift.

But emotional resonance is not really what people are looking for here. For the serious fans, her songs are more like crossword puzzles: the point is to untangle them, extract the hidden meanings inside every line, and use all these clues to work out exactly which one of her ex-boyfriends she’s shit-talking here. This is the game Alex had been getting into. Recently, the New Yorker gave over a few column inches to Sinéad O’Sullivan—formerly of Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness—to explain how it works. O’Sullivan picks up on a line from Taylor Swift’s recent song “imgonnagetyouback,” in which she says that she hasn’t yet decided “whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your bike.” These sound, she admits, like bad lyrics. “Even the most novice editor should have pushed Swift toward the more obvious rhyme: ‘whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your life.’” But in fact, the fans have decided that this is a reference to “Fallingforyou,” a song by the 1975, in which the lead singer, Matty Healy—who is supposed to have dated Taylor Swift for a few weeks in 2023—mentions having a bike. O’Sullivan continues: the lack of spaces in the song’s title is a reference to her earlier hit “Blank Space,” and in the video for that song she smashes up a car. Meanwhile, if you write the song’s title in a circle, the letters k and im are right next to each other, which looks like a jab at Kim Kardashian, another of Taylor Swift’s enemies. An endlessly looping circle is an ouroboros, the ouroboros is a snake; Kim Kardashian once disparagingly called Taylor a snake. See how the pieces fit together? It’s impossible, O’Sullivan concludes, to judge Taylor Swift’s work according to the standards of ordinary art; what she’s doing is so much more. Everything that seems clunky or cliché is actually part of a “fan universe, filled with complex, in-sequence narratives that have been contextualized through multiple perspectives.”

Look: I am all in favor of bizarre schizoid overinterpretation. One of my favorite people is a man who calls himself Number 1 Victim of Crime and believes that the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was actually the result of a nuclear bomb detonated by the United States to kill Muslims in revenge for 9/11. His evidence consists of a series of codes hidden in ordinary words—for instance, he’s revealed that when you reverse the word tsunami you get imanust, which stands for I’M AMerica’s NUclear Scientist Triggered, while confess means Christians Ocean Nuked For Eleventh September Secretly. It’s weird, though, that the Number 1 Victim of Crime will never get any mainstream platform for his beliefs, while if you believe in what is essentially QAnon for girls, you can get it the New Yorker. Not to be outdone, this year New York Times published a five-thousand-word essay from a “gaylor”—a person who believes that Taylor Swift is actually gay, and has been dropping coded hints to this effect in her lyrics. “Sometimes she suggests a female muse through unfulfilled rhyme schemes, as she does in ‘The Very First Night,’ when she sings ‘didn’t read the note on the Polaroid picture / they don’t know how much I miss you’ (‘her,’ instead of that pesky little ‘you,’ would rhyme).” Another of her songs ends with the line “you are what you love.” She also released a single called “ME!” On April 26, which is, as everyone knows, Lesbian Visibility Day. Open and shut case.

That Times article produced a fair amount of controversy, but actually I think the gaylors are onto something. I know why these people keep dissecting Taylor’s music for its secret meanings: they do it because the actual material isn’t enough. It doesn’t satisfy. They want some actual substance and meaning, so they dig deeper and deeper trying to find it. And eventually the gaylors hit on an important truth. They’ve measured Taylor’s songs against her very public love life and concluded that this whole charade is fake. All the outwardly heterosexual themes in her music are paint-by-numbers boilerplate. She’s not actually dating any of these men; they just do photoshoots together. Narrative building through brand synergy; no warm bodies involved. They’re absolutely right! Their only mistake is assuming that if the hetero Taylor is fake, then the real Taylor must be gay. As if there’s any such thing as the real Taylor Swift. As if her being gay could somehow make her music good again.

This intense obsession isn’t the same as actually enjoying something. It’s all sterile; it’s the empty carapace that remains when the actual enjoyment has rotted away.

Towards the end of her show, Taylor performed the bit everyone had been waiting for: her new material. We were the first people in the world who’d get to see how she performed The Tortured Poets Department. A lot of people in the arena had seen the tour before, but this was an entirely new era. Which songs would she pick? What would the dances be like? The staging? The effects? Three hours in and the thirty-year-old women were as antic as they’d been at the start. Screaming, belting out the lyrics to songs that had been released less than a month ago. There was nothing to suggest this era was meaningfully different from any of the others—and for what it’s worth, I didn’t find the music on The Tortured Poets Department to be any better or worse than any of her other attempts. But the music critics disagreed.

Around the world, people were listening to it, staring into space for a few seconds, and coming blearily to the realization that Taylor Swift’s music simply isn’t very good. Pitchfork, which has gone from being a smug hipster rag to the citadel of poptimism, dutifully doling out rave reviews to whatever’s in the charts, gave it a very cautious 6.6. It wasn’t going anywhere. It didn’t sound fresh. And besides, it’s very hard to make a case for lyrics like “You fall asleep like a tattooed golden retriever,” or “We would pick a decade we wished we could live in instead of this, I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists.” When she insisted in one song that “you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me,” a lot of people were no longer willing to indulge the fantasy that this person—the world’s default pop singer, the audio equivalent of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, or sliced white bread—was actually some kind of Batman villain. You were not raised in an asylum! Your father is a Merrill Lynch asset manager, and when you got your first record deal he bought a three-percent stake in the label. She might have made a lot of money on it, but the album was a disaster, and the Paris show was her and her fans all trying to put on a brave face, trying to ignore the fact that it had suddenly become possible to imagine a post–Taylor Swift future.

Almost everything that ever happens is forgotten. It recently occurred to me that I know almost nothing about my paternal grandfather, who died when I was four years old. Just a name, a few photos. I don’t even have a name for his father. I’m at the end of a very long chain, and without any one of these people I would not have existed. Everything I have depends on them, but they’re nothing to me. The great forgetting comes for all of us, sooner or later. Famous people are not exempt. Even a fanatical Taylor Swift level of fame doesn’t always last very long.

In 1922, the year Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s Waste Land were published, the bestselling book in both Britain and America was If Winter Comes by A.S.M. Hutchinson. According to his obituary, “its story was of the trials and tribulations of a decent man, Mark Sabre, who survived the obloquy of taking an unmarried mother into his home as an act of kindness.” The book was a phenomenon. Everyone was talking about If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson. In churches across America, preachers tried to liven up their sermons with trendy references to If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson. If you weren’t talking about If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson, nobody really cared what you had to say. Today, it’s no longer in print. In 1966, the year the Beatles released Revolver, the Beach Boys gave us Pet Sounds, and the Rolling Stones broke through with Aftermath, the biggest-selling LP was Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. That album mostly consisted of mariachi-inflected instrumental covers of popular songs from the 1940s and 1950s. Its success might have had something to do with the cover art, which showed a woman wearing nothing but a large pile of whipped cream, but it was popular enough that Herb Alpert had to turn his Tijuana Brass—which was really just a rotating cast of session musicians—into an actual touring band. They sold out everywhere they went. He ended up writing a Bond theme. I’m told some people do still remember Herb Alpert. I’m sure Herb Alpert does. He still lives in Los Angeles, watching the sun go down over the Pacific, remembering how fierce the world used to be when it was noon.

In the catacombs under Paris, the walls are made of skulls and shinbones, stacked over each other like bricks. One of those identical staring skulls once belonged to Maximilien Robespierre. For a few months, he was the strong hand of liberty. He dragged all of history in his wake; he distributed life and death at will. “Is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud?” It must have felt so much like infinite life, to sit in some wood-paneled office and be the thunderbolt, be its destiny. Nobody knows which of the thousands of identical skulls is his.

I think we’re used to thinking of forgetting as an emptiness of something: there was something here, an image in the mind, and now it’s gone. But there’s another view, one sketched out by Sigmund Freud in his Project for a Scientific Psychology in 1895. Freud is trying to develop an account of the actual physical mechanism of memory in the brain: he suggests that sense-impressions flow through the brain as a kind of neural energy, and within the brain there are two types of neurone, those that are permeable to this energy and those that offer some kind of resistance. When the energy encounters a resistant neurone, it has to wrench it open to force a pathway through it, and once this pathway is cracked open it becomes a semi-permanent change in the brain: a memory. In other words, every memory is literally just empty space, a void, a wound. In the same way that cold is just the absence of heat, memory is just the brief absence of forgetting.

The end of the evening, when it came, was muted. Taylor performed a song called “Mastermind,” which was maybe the most tuneless thing I’d heard all night, and the arena was suddenly full of glitter, drifting through the air like an all-consuming swarm of flies, and then the lights were up, Taylor Swift was gone, and we all filed out again. A weird hush. Nobody was in rhapsodies over what they’d just experienced. Nobody sobbed or wept. All the screaming energy they’d had in the arena seemed to have evaporated on contact with the open air. Mere muttering. They were talking about the setlist, the clues she’d left them, the little spergy minutiae. “Well I knew there had to be a costume change coming up,” one middle-aged woman was saying to her adult daughters, “because she’d just done T.T.P.D., so, heh, obviously.” She was very proud of herself for having worked this out. “Did you notice,” another woman asked her friends, “that the first time she played the guitar she played with her right hand, and all the other times she played with her left hand?” This had to mean something. I thought about the prophecies of ruined cities in the Bible. Nineveh and Babylon, empty of human life, inhabited only by birds: “The cormorant and the bittern shall lodge in the lintels; their voice shall be at the windows; desolation shall be at the threshold.” Ruined granaries where a few sparrows still peck for the last wedged-in flecks of grain. Most of the people around me walked in silence. Ahead of us, in the distance, the Arc de Triomphe gleamed in the darkness of the city like a pulled molar. I wondered how many of these people were suddenly realizing that they couldn’t actually remember anything that had just happened. How the blaring brightness of fame and the oblivion that’s coming turned out to be exactly the same thing.