I’ve been wanting to write about my experience temping for the Taylor Swift concert at Lucas Oil Stadium since the moment I arrived. It’s Monday, after 3 days of walking the perimeter and collapsing lines in the world’s worst shoes. It’s a little after 5 PM, and I can honestly say for all of the thoughts I wanted to explore about class, privilege, and the specific conversations and interactions I had, the loudest thought right now is still, “I’m tired.”
My first job was in a movie theater. This role brought me back there. Crowd control is the same, as well as the clothing requirements. The, extremely soft until a cop shows up, power to move people around. The ones I worked with ranged from groups of, what appeared to be high-school, but maybe college, athletes to people with the kind of standing aggression and swagger of growing up in lower-income neighborhoods. There’s the grungy white guy with dreads, varieties of neck tattoos, and snap-to-attitude when a moment highlights the nature of their underclass status.
The first day, it was chaos. You enter the stadium area via escalators at the end of a large hallway and convention center. Another long hallway connects to a staging room where just beyond you either enter the grounds, or go up into the main lobbies. There were over a hundred people milling about, either temping through different agencies, or part of the previously mentioned athletic groups. There were regulars who were scouted and picked out of the crowd to join teams with supervisors who liked them. One younger gentleman got called out by the fattest and looked-most-in-charge guy who aggressively said, “You got white shoes man, those ain’t gonna work!” He was subsequently still hired on for the day.
The Insta-work app portrays the role as being from 2:30 PM until 2:00 AM. You’re expected to show up early so you can clock in on time. I learned our particular temp agency was the lowest status step-child. This means everyone in that room got checked in, their credentials, shirt, and walked to their positions before we were allowed to. This meant if I got there at 1:45 the first day, I stood in place until almost 3, or just after, each day, before I was officially clocked in. These kinds of things are the first cuts in death by a thousand.
The “attitude” of the space stuck out to me. I’ve been decently white-collar for the last few years. There’s an, often enough disingenuous, light touch and politeness that I’ve come to take for granted in those spaces. I noticed my “pleases” and “thank yous” and “yes ma’am or sirs” existed in isolation and felt mildly “wrong.” When I smiled and softly said to teary-eyed scammed hangers-on that they needed to leave from meandering about the gate, behind me was my supervisor, literally yelling, “Get up, keep moving, get off the premises!” Often, they were moving and readily compliant, and still met with his approach. The generalized complacent exhaustion of people consigned to their roles in life blanketed every moment.
Leaving aside the quasi-self-imposed pain of the wrong shoes. the job is extremely easy. You’re either standing scanning in tickets, or saying the same handful of things over and over about where something is located. At first, no one told me where anything was located, so I misdirected people as to where the floor seats entry was, along with a large portion of the other staff. Before we ever got started, we were expected to just literally stand around and hang out, in total for about 2 hours before we had any kind of task to carry out, lending itself to the story of why they wouldn’t bother to clock us in on time.
Now, I’ve heard as much as anyone about Taylor Swift and her concerts. Beyond perhaps a larger portion of people willing to dress up, in general it felt very normal. I got some bracelets. The people were mostly in good spirits. But, there is a dark side underbelly that weaves its way through the sea of synchronized claps and “There’s a lot going on right now” T-shirts.
Dozens of people got scammed. The stories all involved tickets that were sold twice, obtained fraudulently, or bought from “Stubhub, or, not Stubhub, but facebook Stubhub,” which, of course, isn’t a thing. I heard the bemoaning of lost dollar amounts from $2,000 to $9,000. Girls pretending to flirt with me. People offered cash for my jacket. A couple wanted to get loud and fight and “see the policy” that said they had to move from lingering outside. One girl broke down, fell to the ground, and had a seizure when it was clear they were scammed and not getting in.
Incidentally, as I was walking to my first shift, one of the loading pages for When We Were Young festival said I was in. Two years ago, I had 7 browsers open that took 2 hours or more for one to allow me onto the page to buy a ticket. I planned to do the same thing this year before I took the shifts. So, because obviously, right as I’m about to go in, I have to navigate what is often a stressful, time-sensitive, and buggy-as-fuck process from my phone. I fail 3 times to pay for the tickets, and think I’m fucked until they announce day 2. I manage to still select the 4th tier, more exploitatively priced, tickets, and throw them on layaway. The show isn’t until October of next year.
Taylor might almost be more popular than every band that will be at that festival combined, if only because they all get 2 days, she got 3 just in one city. These people are such big fans and willing to be desperately crying and wandering the premises that they haven’t looked for a ticket or discovered the fraud until now? The nature of Ticketmaster and reselling hasn’t made it’s way into the broader culture knowledge bin yet?
I think it’s incredibly important to set the stage of both I, and every Taylor Swift concert-goer’s environment. We’re, extremely, decadent and privileged. I’m working a temp job, but I still feel well within my rights and capacity to spend a few hundred dollars on a trip, and capable of paying off debt. These people paid $1500 minimum for each ticket to fill up a football stadium. The ones who looked for and found tickets up to 2 or 3 hours into the show, paid anywhere from $2000 to $6000 for a half hour or hour from the worst spot on the floor or random nosebleed. Does anyone have that much sympathy for anyone willing or capable of throwing that kind of money around like that? They certainly don’t project it towards me and my debt or indulgences.
I can only speculate what it’s like to live a life like that. I’d be drawing on my experience of yelling, “You can go to any line, even if you have a bag, disregard the sign” directly into someone’s face, and they, after having locked eyes and nodded along respond without hesitation, “But what if I have a bag?”
I feel like you must have that, I want to use the word “impossible,” lack of self-awareness and attention in order to operate at the level that doesn’t think twice about spending thousands for a ticket, that you never tried to get well in advance, hundreds more on merch, alcohol, and maybe a limo ride to the stadium, and when presented with clear loud instruction…what? What is it you’re doing besides responding like a barking dog with no grasp as to what’s happening around you? But the sign! BUT THE SIIIIIIGN!
Many people laughed and responded quicker when I eventually discovered saying, “The sign is a lie!”
It only took until the end of the first day for the people in charge to recognize what I bring to any role I take. I was assured I would work the next two days regardless of my “technically” “paid backup” status. A supervisor picked me out of the crowd on day 3. The importance of what I take for granted as “the basics” get highlighted in those environments. Are you basically decent in your disposition? Did you follow the, albeit woefully incomplete and slightly changing or contradictory instructions as you were given them? Could you be trusted to not look painfully bored and distracted even when there wasn’t that much to do?
Taylor concerts are long. As someone who’s been to 170-something in the last 3 years, I had a lot of them to compare the crowds to as they were leaving or leaving early. This quasi-religious event mostly seemed to exhaust people. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have fun, but it does mean I felt myself feeling suspicious about the motives and headspace of the many fans. Broadly, you wouldn’t necessarily think someone who’s way too into a band or artist is particularly mentally well. But Taylor has a culture built around her that reminded me of The Dead. It’s gross to dance barefoot in unidentified moisture, and makes me uncomfortable when everyone around you carries on like it’s cool or normal.
There’s a lot of normalized pathological behavior and attitudes that come with wealth or just too much money for you as an individual to know how to utilize it effectively. That’s baked in to the “joke” written on the T-shirts about how much dad had to spend for tickets. I started saying that you’re either living in a way too comfortable place, or way too darker than we wish to imagine place in being part of that crowd.
I say this as someone who has spent, at his peak, $1800 for 4 days of “Owner’s Club” at Rockville last year. Back then with my job, that was about 1 paycheck, and I don’t have kids or more than $5000 a year in must-pay bills, so I understand how enough people can arrive at a place where the high cost still makes a certain kind of sense in their life. It’s harder to understand if you have rent, a mortgage, or “keep up with the Jones’s” kind of life. I’ve never had a crazy-high end paying job, so I’m sure there’s plenty wiping their ass with thousands I could barely imagine.
You just kinda realize that it’s not about her? These people didn’t look or sound any happier or “better” than the people I’ve been around at $15 shows. It’s generic to say that people want to belong to something, and even trying to frame it in terms of “people” doesn’t distinguish seizure-girl from out-of-touch mom from 20-something daddy’s-girl who clearly doesn’t appreciate where the money was coming from. If the tickets were 1/3rd of the price, and that money went to paying everyone on the grounds double, and people who were fans who could never afford one currently were as prevalent as hedge-fund children, like, wouldn’t “the world” be better off? Why do we have to swallow Ticketmaster monopolies, subsidized and greedy sports-stadium practices, exploitative temp agencies, and the general aggressive resentment yet ambivalence that comes with knowing, deep in your soul, and with practical penalties, you don’t belong in the bowl.
I envisioned poor kids sneaking in and peering through cracks at a coliseum while I was there. You never see, at least in movies, someone coming over and throwing the kids off the wall. Today’s kids might be a touch more dangerous, but I think there’s something to the notion of music and an alleged community built around it doing as much as it can to foster and expand. I know in Seattle she set up a whole system so people could watch from the parking lot who didn’t have tickets. I know she gave her whole crew major bonuses. How do we get more of that from everyone everywhere who has the power and money? If we’ll never be able to matter-of-fact expect them, when will we get around to compelling?
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