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JOANNA WEISS

What Taylor Swift says — and what she doesn’t

Taylor Swift held concerts over the weekend at Gillette Stadium.Matthew J. Lee/Globe staff

Standing on a catwalk on Saturday night, towering high above Gillette Stadium, Taylor Swift was on top of the world — and talking about her mistakes.

Not any specific mistakes, mind you, though she’d made one a few days earlier: an ill-advised tweet to rapper Nicki Minaj, over the MTV video music awards, that took a temporary sheen off the nation’s biggest pop star. (It’s a long story, but basically Minaj said MTV was biased, Swift took offense, and Minaj fans accused Swift of hijacking someone else’s news.)

But that was over. Swift took a PR hit and managed to turn it into an uplifting message for 60,000 screaming fans: if you do something wrong, “be kind to yourself.” And count on your best girlfriends, including Taylor Swift, to always be there for you.

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It’s amazing, really, the way Swift can create two impressions at once, the role model on the towering screen and the endearingly-flawed bestie sitting right beside you. The genius of her public image is the way she’s embraced social media — the direct communication with fans and the land mines that go with it — so that her smart moves and missteps fold back into a single persona. Her mistakes inoculate her. They’re part of her appeal: she’s young and a little impulsive, just like her fans, but she’s learning all the time.

Swift is on top of the music industry at the moment because of the resonance of that message. An adult can step back and appreciate the business savvy of her machine: the way she stood up to Apple over streaming-service payments, and then renegotiated her own restrictive contract with news photographers. But most of this is lost on 11-year-old girls — at least, the ones who chattered with me in the back of a minivan as we headed to Gillette on Saturday.

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Suburban girls on the cusp of middle school are still the heart of Swift’s fanbase, and what they like is that Swift seems real, and also safe. Amid a sea of prefab pop, they told me, her songs don’t sound Auto-Tuned. She has a big hand in the songwriting.

And she didn’t, as one girl put it, go “crazy” like so many pop stars do when they turn 20. Yes, Swift embraces the Disney Princess body image that Minaj was calling out. But despite the short shorts and crop tops, the all-male backup dancers, there’s something decidedly chaste about her act. She sings about the emotions of relationships, but not the physicality, and there’s a huge market for that; Minaj might be a more inventive artist, but her work isn’t made for tweens. (And don’t get me started about the Britney Spears concert I covered long ago, where 6-year-olds begged for shirts that said “I’m a Slave 4 U.”)

What’s fascinating is how Swift chooses to play her laser-focus into girlhood: what she says, at this point, and what she doesn’t. Her act hints at the dark side of girlfriend dynamics; she sings “Bad Blood,” about a female friendship gone sour, with visceral satisfaction. But overtly, her message is both aspirational (watch these videos of my famous girlfriends!) and inspirational (“I think that you deserve to be committed to!” she announced to the entire stadium).

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It’s all part of that savvy image machine; a grown-up can cynically scrape away the artifice, but there’s still no better message for a middle schooler than “Shake It Off.” And while her songs aren’t about some larger social struggle, that doesn’t make the emotions she evokes any less real. On Saturday, when she sang “Fifteen,” her years-old, heartfelt song about first love, a group of girls behind me belted along with raw feeling. It was hard not to be moved.

But given Swift’s power to reach young girls, there’s also an opportunity lost, or maybe just waiting for Swift to embrace. On Twitter, Minaj asked Swift to speak out against industry bias. Swift has been silent. That’s the safe thing to do. But I wished she had used her platform, high above Gillette, to throw just a nugget of thought out there to the crowd — to give the girls who love her, and listen to her, and forgive her, something deeper to talk about on the minivan ride home.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @JoannaWeiss.

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