Can Taylor Swift Transform our Public Square?

Photo credit: OGULCAN AKSOY

“Can we listen to 1989 please? Taylor just released it!” says my 11-year-old stepdaughter as we drive to the bus stop. Before I can point out that it’s only 7:20 in the morning and that maybe a little quiet time would be nice, my three-year-old chimes in. “Yeah, yeah, Taylor Swift!” Who can say no to such a united front?

My stepdaughter would cringe to read this, and no doubt a swarm of Swifties would disintegrate my words in a matter of seconds, but here’s my truth: I don’t love Taylor Swift’s music. I also don’t love chocolate. Both things put me at odds with a gigantic swath of the world’s population, including my stepdaughter, who, ever the optimist, believes she can convert me into a chocolate-eating Swiftie.

You don’t have to be a fan of the music, though, to be a fan of the person.

Mounds of content have been written about Taylor Swift’s outsized impact on the music industry, the economy, our culture. But what about her impact on the public square, that invisible place where ideas, values and mindsets clang together to produce new and surprising harmonies? What about the impact on America’s social capital, that tangled mass of networks that we participate in and the pro-social tendencies to do things for each other that arise from these networks?

The idea of the public square is an old one, dating back to ancient Greece in the form of the agora, or gathering place, in the center of the city. Centuries ago, Athenians came together in the agora near the Acropolis to trade goods, meet friends, watch performances and listen to philosophers and politicians debate each other. It was, at its most basic, the physical manifestation of a democratic society that bases its legitimacy on the participation of the people.

Photo Credit: duncan1890

Not far from that ancient agora in Athens, Vaclav Havel, in his 1993 acceptance speech for the Onassis Prize for Man and Mankind, said “the only way to save our world, as I see it, lies in a democracy that recalls its ancient Greek roots: democracy based on an integral human personality personally answering for the fate of the community.” As a dissident playwright who went on to become president of the Czech Republic, he was talking about democracy not just as a political system but a way of life that depends on all of us taking responsibility for its survival.

Havel’s friend and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who for two decades chaired the National Democratic Institute (a democracy promotion organization I worked for after college), described democracy as a discussion. “But real discussion is possible only if people trust each other,” she wrote in her 2018 book Fascism: A Warning.

But we don’t, on the whole, trust each other. According to the Pew Research Center, we believe that most people most of the time just look out for themselves. We also don’t trust the basic organs of democracy to live up to their promise, and we consider people with different political views as not just wrong but immoral.

If rock-bottom, or close to it, is our new baseline of public and interpersonal trust, then how do we expect to take on the big challenges of our time? How do we deliberate, compromise and piece together solutions to those challenges?

Part of the problem, the scholar Yuval Levin has pointed out, is the increasing fragmentation of society that has led to more choice but less social cohesion and national unity. Gone are the days when we all tuned into the same nightly news broadcasts. Gone are the days of shared cultural touchstones like “I Love Lucy.” Gone are the days of anthem rock that packed us into huge stadiums together as columnist David Brooks lamented on the fragmentation of music. “There are many bands that can fill 5,000-seat theaters, but there are almost no new groups with the broad following or longevity of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen or U2,” he wrote back in 2007. Or as music journalist Touré put it: “There are niche joys everywhere, but nothing I can obsess over alongside a million others.”

Enter Taylor Swift. With her blockbuster Eras Tour, Swift regularly packs stadiums of 70,000 people. While these numbers fall short of the 1.5 million people who showed up to hear the Rolling Stones perform at Rio’s Copacabana Beach in 2006 or the mind-boggling 3.5 million that Rod Stewart amassed on that same beach 12 years earlier, Swift’s fan base is extraordinary in the aggregate: 53 percent of Americans say they are fans of her music.

Time, in announcing Taylor Swift as their 2023 person of the year, described her as “the last monoculture left in our stratified world.” But it’s not just Taylor Swift who is singing to sold-out stadium audiences. Ed Sheeran surpassed Swift’s record at New York’s MetLife stadium this past June and Metallica, two months later, set the all-time attendance record at Los Angeles’s So Fi stadium. And Beyonce, in her Renaissance World Tour, pumped $4.5 billion into the US economy.

Call it a post-Covid bump or a Swift bump, but 2023 has become the year of the live concert. As Variety reported in October, the number of people who say they plan to attend a concert over the next 12 months is 38 percent higher than the previous year and 41 percent higher than in 2019. And large venues, especially football stadiums, are reaping the benefits. At Ohio Stadium in Columbus this past August, Billy Joel, Stevie Nicks, Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe and Morgan Wallen all played over a one-week span—the “first time in the 101-year history of the ‘Shoe’ that this many shows have been hosted back-to-back-to-back,” said Dave Redelberger, head of communications for Columbus Arena Sports & Entertainment.

So, what happens when legions of fans come together for a transformative experience at a Taylor Swift or Beyonce concert? Can the classic one-note melody of a Swift song sweep us up into shared feelings of unity? Can these ephemeral moments of social cohesion last beyond the encore? A growing body of research in the neuropsychology of music suggests they can.

Neuroscientist David Greenberg demonstrates in his TEDx talk that when we sing together, the “bonding hormone” oxytocin is released, making us feel closer to one other. This need for closeness, for togetherness, is a survival mechanism deeply embedded in our neurobiology. When human societies were small, bonding mechanisms such as mating and play proved sufficient to achieve group cohesion. But as societies grew, argues Patrick Savage in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, musicality evolved in humans to enable social bonding across larger groups of people and for longer periods of time.

But can all this togetherness we feel after listening to live music translate into greater civic engagement? Donald Polzella, Professor Emeritus at the University of Dayton, explored this question in a 2014 study of over 6,000 US households that took part in the Current Population Survey. He found, after controlling for confounders like age, race, sex, income and education, that individuals who had attended a traditional music concert (classical, jazz or opera) over the previous twelve months, were more likely to vote, donate to charitable causes, volunteer and attend community meetings. When he extended his analysis two years later to include non-traditional music performances, he found a similar correlation with pro-social behavior.

“I’m a psychologist, but my first love was music,” he told me. “Things that move people en masse—that’s the secret. I have this pollyannish belief that the more you bring people together through art, the more our barriers break down.”

Writing about the Eras Tour in The New Yorker, music journalist Amanda Petrusich said, “In recent years, community, one of our most elemental human pleasures, has been decimated by covid, politics, technology, capitalism. These days, people will take it where they can get it.”

Maybe Vaclav Havel was on to something when he gave that speech in Athens over three decades ago. Maybe when he said that “the great challenge of the present era is to seek out forms of democracy that suit the present times,” he meant we have to continue evolving our public square to ensure its relevance to a society that itself is ever evolving. We have to continue looking for ways to trust each other again.

And, sure, if that means playing chaperone at a Taylor Swift concert, sign me up.