I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave.” As far as openers go, the first line of Taylor Swift’s “Actually Romantic”, already the most contentious track on her new album The Life of a Showgirl, is certainly punchy. If that wasn’t enough, Swift then goes on to rail against this unnamed rival, upbraiding them for having “high-fived my ex” and claiming to be “glad he ghosted me”, before referring to a certain song “saying it makes you sick to see my face”.
In case you’re not so hot on interpreting thinly veiled pop cultural references, it’s pretty likely that Swift is alluding to Charli xcx, her one-time Reputation tour support act. On Charli’s track “Sympathy is a Knife”, featured on her 2024 album brat, the musician sings about how “this one girl taps my insecurities”, and how she doesn’t “wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show”. It’s been widely assumed ever since that that “one girl” was in fact Taylor, who briefly dated The 1975 frontman Matty Healy; Charli, meanwhile, recently married the band’s drummer, George Daniel.
All the little lyrical signs, then, seem to add up, although neither woman has outright named the other as the object of their ire. Last year, Charli said that “people are going to think what they want to think” about “Sympathy…”, but the song is really “about me and my feelings and my anxiety”. Taylor, meanwhile, says her album track is “about realising that someone else has kind of had a one-sided, adversarial relationship with you that you didn’t know about”, then choosing to interpret those sentiments as a form of “attention and affection”.
It’s not the first time that either star has apparently taken aim at another female artist. Swift’s “Bad Blood”, from her 2014 album 1989, was aimed at a “straight up enemy” who allegedly “tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me”; that “enemy” was widely understood to be Katy Perry, although the pair publicly made up a few years later. And another brat track, “Girl, So Confusing”, saw Charli unpick the complexities and paranoia of her frenemy-like relationship with Lorde.
Perhaps it’s telling that, just a few hours after the album’s release, “Actually Romantic” (with its pretty blatant nod to the title of another Charli song, “Everything is Romantic”) is the song that has garnered the most attention by far, standing out in a sea of lyrics devoted to extolling the wonders of Taylor’s fiancé, NFL star Travis Kelce, set to not-so memorable sonics. Taylor in love? Sure, fine, whatever, happy for you. Taylor going nuclear and directing her irritation at one of her pop girl peers? That’s far more intriguing.
Female rivalry is, and always has been, a source of fascination and a fertile subject matter for artists. Of course, calling each other out is not the sole preserve of female musicians (you only have to take a quick glance at the world of rap to see that male performers are just as likely to turn perceived slights into lyrical grenades).
But perhaps there’s something in its slightly taboo nature that makes a female feud – especially ones that have arisen out of a past friendship – hard to look away from. We know that rivalries are meant to be the result of a patriarchy that pits us against one another. We know we’re meant to celebrate each other’s wins and lift each other up, to briefly borrow the language of a millennial pink Instagram infographic. But it is not always as simple as that.
There’s also a not-so-insignificant chance that this diss track is at least in part a calculated move to get people talking about the album
That’s why “Sympathy is a Knife” seemed to strike a nerve with listeners upon brat’s release: it felt genuinely vulnerable, an exploration of a typically bravado-heavy artist’s deepest insecurities. It’s not so much diss track as a sort of self-lacerating therapy transcript. Taylor’s new offering is less muted, more all-guns-blazing (“like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse / That’s how much it hurts” is one particularly savage lyric if this is about Charli – which 5 foot 3 artist, however beautiful, wants to be compared to a yappy miniature dog by a towering glamazon?). But its very existence shows that even the most talked-about artist in the world isn’t immune to the pain of feeling like a former friend has turned against you. Even as she claims to take the moral high ground, you can’t help but think that if she was truly unbothered, this song might have stayed in her Notes app.
Considering how savvy an operator Taylor has proved herself to be over the years, there’s also a not-so-insignificant chance that this diss track is at least in part a calculated move to get people talking about the album, rather than actual evidence of real bad feeling. It worked so well for Charli, after all. Part of the appeal of her previous release, The Tortured Poets Department, lay in the possibility of unpicking exactly which of her past or present love interests might have inspired each lyric. Now, her romantic life is on a much more stable trajectory, so inter-industry rivalries provide more scandalous raw material.
Will Taylor and Charli ever work it out on the remix, just like the latter did with Lorde? It seems unlikely but not impossible. But we might have to wait for Charli’s next album to find out.
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