Her Fans, Squealing, Won’t Hold Their Peace

That wasn’t Ms. Swift. She was the girl “rudely barging in on a white-veil occasion,” urging the groom to run away with her instead. As she and her backup singers shared girl-group gestures and strutted from upstage to center stage, down an antebellum-styled staircase with banisters supported by large letter S’s, the groom pulled himself away from the ceremony and started bopping along with Ms. Swift. It was a happy ending for everyone except her rival.
The song went off, as did every number, with clockwork professionalism and thousands of girls’ voices singing along and screaming between the lines. Ms. Swift, 21, is their superstar. Each of her three albums has sold more than three million copies, and she cannily cued huge waves of squeals by declaring them “my favorite sound in the world.” Many fans brought homemade signs with flashing lights, making them more technologically sophisticated than, say, Bruce Springsteen fans.
Mainstream pop could do worse than Ms. Swift, who came out of Nashville but owes less to country music with each album. Her songs are taut, tuneful narratives that present her as a good-hearted young woman who carefully lets down her guard until she’s wronged; then, as she sang in one punk-pop chorus, “There is nothing I do better than revenge.” On “Speak Now” (Big Machine), she wrote all the songs without collaborators and moved her story lines out of high school.
Her new battlegrounds for self-esteem include pop stardom and romances with adults. When one of those adults, “Dear John” — whose last name may be Mayer — leaves her crying, she calls him “sick” and lashes out: “Don’t you think 19’s too young to be played by your dark twisted games?” For that song, she sat alone, with her band discreetly playing along in the shadows, and in the video close-up her face telegraphed every line: wounded, then narrow-eyed and furious, then self-satisfied after a burst of pyrotechnics: “The girl in the dress wrote you a song,” she sang with a defiant look.
Ms. Swift is always ready for her close-up, and she knew to play as directly to the cameras as to the crowd. Most pop arena concerts are video-ready spectacles now, and Ms. Swift was in control of every nuance and every bit of between-song patter, dutifully inserting “Newark, N.J.” into her prepared thank-yous. (She also paid homage to the state with a mini-medley: the choruses from Mr. Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” and Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.”)
Through the set, as she ran through glamorous costume changes, hit her marks and telegraphed lyrics with finger-pointing gestures, her composure never faltered. Between songs she would sometimes pause, let her eyes sweep smugly across the packed arena, then soften the pride with an equally deliberate smile. She declared herself — and her fans — ”hopeless romantics,” but her cool, systematic ambition was just as clearly on display. That didn’t stop the squeals.