Forgetting Taylor Swift

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2024-10-18 18:30:03

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Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, Benjamin Yen-Yi Fong, Verso Books, pp. 272, $24.95

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.