Nine months is a long time to wait for anything, be it a vacation, baby or concert. More and more, however, buying tickets to a major concert event involves putting down serious cash one year for a show that’ll happen months after the calendar rolls over into a new year. The Taylor Swift supershow over at NRG stadium is no different, with fans jumping into the ticket process now for a show that won’t happen until September.
There’s nothing wrong with having something to look forward to in life. In these crazy times, having a shining light on a distant hill gives us a reason to keep marching forward while reality tries to break our brain. That’s all a fancy way of saying that Taylor Swift is going to make a ton of money this December for services she won’t be providing Houston fans for a while.
But idle thoughts can lead to unrealistic hopes and expectations. Right now, no one outside of Swift and her team know what the upcoming stadium tour is going to look like. We can make assumptions based on past performances, obviously, but there’s nothing super exciting about speculating on how many dancers she might have or what color of lighting she’ll use for different songs.
But there is one thing that I feel confident in promising you, here, months and months and months before she returns to town, even though I have no inside knowledge on Swift or the tour or the machinations of the music industry: Beyonce is not going to be a special surprise guest at a Taylor Swift show.
If you think this is a weird thing to bring up, especially now, so far away from the show actually happened, let me remind you what happened the last time Taylor Swift went on a major tour that featured a stop in Houston. At most every North American show of the 1989 World Tour, there would be a point in the show where Swift would bring out a special guest to perform one of their songs for the crowd. Some markets got really lucky, getting surprise performances from The Weeknd, Mick Jagger and Idina Menzel.
So there was a buzz before the Houston show about who might join Swift in Houston, with one name floating above all: Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter. There was that metaphorical electricity in the air as the show went on, song by song, deeper and deeper into the set, getting closer to the moment when the Queen B would take the stage to work her magic.
Then Wiz Khalifa came out and performed “See You Again.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Wiz Khalifa as a performer. If you’re a sucker for corny rap feel-good anthems, he’s absolutely the dude to call. But he’s not Beyoncé, nor is he in the same league as Beyoncé. He’s barely in the same sport as Beyoncé, and you can tell because if Wiz Twitter was Beyoncé Twitter I would be too scared to type this paragraph.
Now, yes, Taylor Swift was absolutely the reason to many people bought tickets for that show, but at that moment, as fine as his performance of “See You Again” was, it did feel like a little bit of the wind had been sucked out of Minute Maid Park. The show went on, and it was fine, and lots of people spent lots of money on Swift-branded merch.
And I’ll be honest with you, the entire situation was confusing as hell. Here’s the thing about guest performers when you’re as famous as Taylor Swift: unless it’s someone super special, like a member of The Rolling Stones, you never bring out someone more famous than you. The 1989 World Tour was literally built to be a monument to how amazing Taylor Swift is, including video segments were her squad talked about how amazing Taylor Swift is. She was never going to bring out Beyoncé, in Houston no less, because Taylor Swift is a lot of things, but she’s not Beyoncé, and she’s definitely not Beyoncé in Houston.
C’mon people: Beyoncé doesn’t even show up to sing at Lady Gaga shows in Houston, and they at least have a song together. No, a Beyoncé performance at a Taylor Swift show would steal just a little bit too much of the spotlight from the star of the night, and that’s just not how these things work.
Taylor Swift doesn’t need Beyoncé to makes thousands and thousands of dollars from this city. So don’t set yourself up for disappointment. Dream just the right amount.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2017.
