Lord knows what it is, but Taylor Swift has a dark secret. Maybe she has an addiction to milkshakes that she just can’t, um, shake. Perhaps she's unkind to kittens. Who knows? There has to be something, because no one’s that squeaky clean. Not really.
But whatever demons lurk below Swift’s freshly scrubbed surface, I don’t want to know about them, not after watching the country-pop superstar perform the first of her two scheduled concerts at Rogers Arena. She’s just too likeable. Even the “Aw shucks, li’l ol’ me?” look she gave the audience every time it cheered—as if she had never heard the sound of applause before—would seem obnoxiously disingenuous if she weren’t so darn cute.
Swift, unsurprisingly, puts on a strictly G-rated show. That means she doesn’t curse and she doesn’t show a lot of skin, and even her troupe of backup dancers, who first trotted out during “Story of Us”, were outfitted like extras from an Old Navy commercial—if Old Navy were introducing a Happy Days -themed collection.
Needless to say, there were no whips and chains a la Rihanna, and certainly no dancing penises. If it was larger-than-life genitalia you were after, this was not the concert for you. That was, however, precisely what Ke$ha delivered in the same venue the night before. If you’re looking for a study in contrasts, you couldn’t do better than Ke$ha and Swift. Both are female pop stars in their early 20s, but only one of them puts on a performance you can take your daughter to without covering her eyes and ears for half the show.
Instead, Swift brought along a mega-production that had her, along with her dancers and backing band, moving through a constantly changing series of vignettes. These included a wedding at which the singer stole the groom away from his intended bride, and a fairytale forest that later took a turn toward the spooky. (If you know the material, you can probably guess that the songs in questions were “Speak Now”, “Enchanted”, and “Haunted”.)
Oh, and there was also a wooden porch, upon which Swift and members of her band played while clad in Petticoat Junction finery—you know, the kind of things country folk are supposed to wear but really don’t. Lots of gingham. Swift plunked away on a six-string banjo, which, as you can imagine, was totally adorable.
In keeping with her practice of giving a nod to local musical heroes wherever she plays (on this tour, that has so far included covering Eminem at a show in Michigan and Fallout Boy in Illinois), Swift offered us an energetic, unplugged rendition of Bryan Adams’s “Summer of ’69”. Later, she had Tal Bachman come out to perform “She’s So High”. Swift herself has been known to sing that 1999 hit in concert, but she let Bachman take the lead while she joined in on backing vocals. It was kind of awesome, even if some in the audience were too young to remember when “She’s So High” was in heavy rotation on MuchMusic.
Swift’s appeal to her tween- and teen-girl fan base is obvious. Her songs deal with first days of school and last kisses, with unrequited crushes and devastating breakups. Swift’s devotees know that the young singer-songwriter feels their pain. She’s just like them, really, only she has millions of dollars and has had her heart stomped on by Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, and Jake Gyllenhaal rather than some spotty boy driving his dad’s rust-ravaged old Hyundai.
So maybe she’s not exactly the girl next door; she seems as if she could be. Then again, so does Ke$ha, in her own way. But I know which one I’d want babysitting my kids, and it’s not the one who claims to brush her teeth with 80-proof Tennessee whiskey.
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