Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour performances in Paris have generated a lot of attention, because she’s Taylor Swift, but also because these are her first post-The Tortured Poets Department shows and she’s made several production and set changes to accommodate yet another era to the concert. Her fourth show is getting some extra attention because Travis Kelce showed up, and since TNT has been relatively quiet this season, it feels like a happy Sunday throwback to season one last fall when we were getting new episodes every weekend.
Taylor sang “So High School”, a new track that is presumably about Travis. He knew all the words…
…and she blew him a kiss.
One of her outfits was also the colours of his team and it was the 87th show, and 87 is his number, so the performance was very Travis-coded.
This is good entertainment, I still love this show. At the same time, this show may not have started out as fan service at the beginning but it is very, very fan service right now. Taylor knows better than anyone how popular she and Travis have been, what a story they have been and continue to be. The approval rating on this particular relationship is the highest out of all her relationships and it came out of the relationship that received the lowest approval rating: Matty Healy. It was exactly a year ago that Taylor experienced some of the biggest pushback she’s ever received from her fans when she was dating him. From there the pendulum swung in exactly the opposite direction, dramatically, as she has seen just how invested her fans, and the rest of us who love gossip, have been in them together.
So it almost feels like these little moments on stage, this very public performance of their relationship, is like when a show and its writers are on the message boards paying attention to what the fans are hoping to see in the next episode. Fan service. In short bursts it can be enjoyable. Long term, where a show is concerned, it doesn’t necessarily work. Fan service and fan fiction aren’t too far apart.
But enough about TNT because they’re actually not my main character with all this footage coming out of Taylor’s latest concert. My main character is… Bradley Cooper. Kathleen made me watch so many of these videos when she was bombing our chat, and now I’m forcing it on you.
Bradley was there with Gigi Hadid. So there’s Gigi, beside Travis, dancing and singing and along and …BCoop is sending me…
The man is ever so tentatively letting his fanboy out. He’s a little tentative, self-conscious, but he wants to be part of it, he wants to give into the flow, let the energy take over…
But maybe the ghost of Leonardo DiCaprio at Coachella is haunting him?
This isn’t the same, though. This is not choreography (LOLOLOL FOREVER LEO), this is just a man trying to find his groove. It’s cringe but also kinda cute? I’m not mad at it. I can’t stop laughing but I’m not mad at it.
