In 2009, when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech to say Beyoncé should have won the award for best female video, perhaps he planted an idea with prime-time programmers. Thanksgiving night brought successive specials by Ms. Swift, at 8 p.m. on NBC, and Beyoncé, at 9:30 on ABC. Both featured billowing golden hair, live performances and pop image-polishing: Ms. Swift as careful as could be, Beyoncé confident enough to loosen up.
Ms. Swift’s “Speak Now” followed the 20-year-old country-turned-pop singer as she promoted her new album of the same name at the end of October, with mini-concerts and media appearances in New York and Los Angeles. She played for fans on a New York City rooftop, with the Empire State Building behind her, and in Hollywood, with a streetside concert announced via Twitter an hour before showtime (but clearly planned extensively before that). Yes, it was a prime-time special about a marketing blitz, with a happy commercial ending: “Speak Now” sold 1,046,718 copies the week it was released. (It was the first one-week million-seller since Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” in 2008.)
Beyoncé’s “I Am…World Tour” placed her before much larger audiences, documenting her choreographed razzle-dazzle as she played arenas and stadiums in 2009-2010, from New Jersey to Beijing, belting pop-R&B hits like “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” “Crazy in Love” and her remake of “At Last.” (The full DVD version is due for release Nov. 30.) Between the set pieces onstage, there were glimpses of Beyoncé unstyled, or perhaps less styled: brushing her teeth, wearing a sweatsuit and eating chips from a bag, tobogganing along the Great Wall of China, explaining that she gets blisters from dancing in high heels.
Both specials trotted out the pop-star staples. There were squealing fans and testimonials from the singers about how lucky they feel and about how music connects the world. Ms. Swift hinted, with her perpetual ohmigosh expression, at how much would be packed into her week; during the cross-country flight to Los Angeles, she brought along fans who interviewed her throughout, which can’t have been easy on her voice but supplied even more promotional video. Beyoncé, now 29, was more blunt, worrying on camera that she had booked too many successive shows without rest. “I don’t have anyone that’s concerned about my body and my well-being,” she said.
Ms. Swift’s appeal, as one televised fan put it, is that “she’s so real,” even in her glittery dresses and just-so hair and makeup. Her songs are shrewdly generalized first-person narratives of romances, breakups, insecurities and vengeance; her music touches down in old-fashioned country, like the banjo-driven “Mean,” but also seeks the pop territory of power ballads and, in “The Story of Us,” new wave rock that had Ms. Swift pogoing onstage. Performing her songs for small crowds, she was already using the gestures she’ll bring to arenas; offstage, she stayed on message.
Ms. Swift’s special featured her comments, usually mid-song, to clarify lyrics that are — with her pop gift — already perfectly clear. “This is me swallowing my pride/standing in front of you saying I’m sorry,” she sang in “Back to December.” Did she need to explain that it was an apology?
Beyoncé didn’t explain: She performed. With costumes that made her a comic-book heroine, a cyborg, a club hottie and a white-clad vision of purity, she worked her big stages with hip-pumping moves and a soul diva’s voice, from creamy to raspy. The documentary quietly flaunted her consistency as a trouper in montages that segued multiple shows — supertitled in small type — with Beyoncé in the same outfit making the same moves, while the fans’ nationalities changed around her.
Yet for all her superhuman pep she also came across as warmer than Ms. Swift. She grinned knowingly after belting a phrase into the bleachers, and she drew listeners into her own pop generalities: sending a guy packing in “Irreplaceable,” wishing he’d return in “Broken-Hearted Girl.” Ms. Swift gave brief hugs to some shy fans; Beyoncé shook dozens of hands while singing, shared her microphone, even crowd-surfed. With another decade or so of experience, Ms. Swift may learn to make the pop grind look like so much fun, as well as so much work.
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