Just two canceled women getting dinner.
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If you can get past the Disney-villain quality of “CANCELLED!,” the track is one of the strangest on The Life of a Showgirl, and one of three tracks where “evil” Taylor Swift comes out to play (alongside “Father Figure” and “Actually Romantic”). The song is about Swift welcoming a canceled friend to her “underworld” (imagine Hot Topic lighting), where she likes her friends “cloaked in Gucci and scandal.” Scandal isn’t necessarily cancellation, though it’s almost certain that Swift doesn’t know the difference. For her, being canceled is when people hate her album; in reality, it’s when someone says a slur on a podcast. When Swift says she likes her friends canceled, it’s hard to take literally: In the years since Reputation, she’s been one of the most scandal-averse public figures. That’s never been more clear than in the fallout of her friendship with Blake Lively over the past year.
As a quick recap: Swift lent one of her songs to Justin Baldoni’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel It Ends With Us, starring her pal Lively. During the months the film was in theaters, rumors circled about Lively’s bad behavior, only for 2024 to conclude with Lively filing a lawsuit against Baldoni for harassment, alleging that he used crisis PR to attack her in the media as retribution for their dynamic on set. Baldoni countersued, claiming that Lively wrestled the movie away from him — sharing, in one part, a story about Lively weaponizing her friendship with Swift against him, referring to Swift as one of her “dragons” (à la Game of Thrones). While I think it could be low-key flattering to be called a dragon — they were cute on the show! — Swift has spent the last several months distancing herself from Lively and the case in general. While she might like her friends canceled, she definitely does not want to be roped into their drama.
“Having had my own experiences with past judgment and being at the center of many dramatic, scandalous moments in my career where people were all weighing in at once, it makes me move through the world a little bit differently. When other people go through it, you find yourself thinking about how they’re probably gonna get smarter because of this. I don’t naturally cast people aside just because other people decide they don’t like them. I make my own decisions about people based on how they treat me within my life and their actions,” Swift explained about the song’s origin. Lively is the most obvious example of a close person in Swift’s life and who one could argue tried to “girlboss too close to the sun,” but the timing feels fuzzy all considered. If The Life of a Showgirl was recorded during the Europe leg of the Eras Tour, this would have been early days for the Baldoni-Lively dispute, and long before anyone knew anything about the Swift of it all. Perhaps “CANCELLED!” is a defense of Lively: Swift doesn’t care that this is happening. She thinks it’s stupid; that’s her friend and she’s sticking by her. Or maybe it’s something in between. Swift’s explanation of the song suggests she doesn’t cast people aside if other people don’t like them — an internet mob coming for Lively doesn’t faze her — but for their actions. So it’s also possible that Swift is annoyed with Lively’s actions while also finding the public outcry and media circus a bit absurd.
When she spoke to Time for her “Person of the Year” interview in 2023, she said that the success of the Eras Tour was born out of “two horrendous things” happening to her, one of which was “getting canceled within an inch of [her] life and sanity.” When Swift talks about her own cancellation, she means the fallout of Reputation, her ongoing beef with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, and all that transpired that made her want to run away to England with Joe Alwyn and stay out of the spotlight. “CANCELLED!” is self-referential in that way, but maybe it’s also about how she didn’t care that her fans were mad about Matty Healy being racist on The Adam Friedland Show or about whatever is going on with Brittany Mahomes and Donald Trump. Maybe it’s about how she doesn’t care that the NFL is a bad organization that cares more about profit than its players. But we know that any time Swift tries to argue she doesn’t really care about something, it always becomes clear she cares a lot. Even if she doesn’t mind when her friends are canceled, she’d certainly rather they not be. “If you can’t be good, be better at it,” she warns in the bridge. Swift survived her time in the underworld, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to help anyone dig themselves out of their grave.
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