Taylor Swift isn’t afraid to stand toe-to-toe with her detractors, exemplified in her spat with Kim Kardashian, which resulted in the song “thanK you aIMee” off her last album, The Tortured Poets Department. Now, the singer seems to have her sights set on a new target after releasing her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl.
This new album features a song called “Actually Romantic,” which appears to be a diss track aimed at Charli xcx. The title seems to be a reference to the British pop star’s song, “Everything is romantic,” off of her wildly successful album, brat. But ever since Charli’s album came out last year, listeners surmised that her song, “sympathy is a knife,” seemed to be about Swift given the connections they shared through the band, The 1975.
On this new song, there are some lyrics that may point to a possible feud. “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” Swift sings, which feels like a direct reference to the brat singer’s own admission to using drugs on songs like “365.” Swift goes on to say, “High-fived my ex and then said you’re glad he ghosted me, wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face. Some people might be offended, but it’s actually sweet.”
In a track-by-track breakdown of her new album for Amazon Music, Swift said the song is about “realizing that someone else has kind of had a one-sided, adversarial relationship with you that you didn’t know about. And all of a sudden they start doing too much and they start letting you know that actually, you’ve been living in their head rent-free and you had no idea.”
She added, “It’s presenting itself as them sort of resenting you or having a problem with you but you take that and just accept it as love and you accept it as attention and affection, and how flattering that somebody has made you such a big part of their reality when you didn’t even think about this. It’s actually pretty romantic if you really think about it.”
At one point, the two singers both dated members of The 1975, Swift was with frontman Matty Healy while Charli dated (and is now married to) George Daniel. On “sympathy is a knife,” Charli sings, “Don’t know if I’m spiraling / One voice tells me that they laugh / George says I’m just paranoid / Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / Fingers crossed behind my back / I hope they break up real quick.”
Charli hasn’t said anything about the song just yet, but many of her fans are upset with Swift because they felt it was hypocritical to release a diss like this after Swift praised Charli’s songwriting in a profile that New York Magazine wrote on the brat singer last year. “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011. Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade. I love to see hard work like that pay off.”
In case you didn't know: At the height of brat, Charli uploaded a video to TikTok confirming that the only diss track on the album was “Von Dutch” and that the other songs are about how difficult it is to be a female pop star in a music industry that is obsessed with pitting women against each other.
When asked who was the inspiration behind the talked about track, Charli denied the feud rumors and said, “People are gonna think what they want to think. That song is about me and my feelings and my anxiety and the way my brain creates narratives and stories in my head when I feel insecure and how I don’t want to be in those situations physically when I feel self-doubt.”
A source of their tension can also be pointed to an instance that occurred when Charli was achieving mainstream success for the first time last year with the release of brat and Swift fought to maintain it during the roll out of The Tortured Poets Department. After the British pop star released the deluxe version of brat featuring three new songs, “Hello Goodbye,” “Guess,” and “Spring Breakers,” Swift released a UK-exclusive digital release of her album with unreleased live recordings, which seemed to have blocked Charli from reaching number one on the UK charts.
This theory doesn’t hold as much water because brat was still a mega success on its own with or without chart placements and so was Swift's (to no one's surprise) after she embarked on the record-breaking Eras Tour. She clarified in an interview with BBC Radio 1 today that she has no intention of going on tour for a while.
