Charli xcx released her sixth album, Brat, on 7 June 2024. Within seconds of it streaming, fans had deduced that the song Girl, So Confusing was probably about Lorde: all it took was the line “people say we’re alike / They say we’ve got the same hair”, riffing on a 2014 video where Charli and an interviewer did a bit about people confusing the two. In the song, Charli laid bare her anxieties about their relationship and admitted: “Sometimes I think you might hate me.” Exactly two weeks later came the Girl, So Confusing Featuring Lorde remix, brokered by the pair over text and voice note in the days after Brat came out. On Lorde’s verse, she owned up to ghosting on dinner dates with Charli and exposed the self-hate, projection and industry-fuelled sense of pop-girl-on-pop-girl rivalry that had made her shy away from the friendship. Charli’s response to the text containing Lorde’s astonishing verse fairly summed it up: “Fucking hell.”
It established an immaculate playbook – for pop, celebrity meta-narrative, harnessing the speed of online discourse in a way that showed total fluency in how stans talk. That nimbleness is just one reason that the Charli diss song on Taylor Swift’s new album feels like such a terrible relic.
On the Brat song Sympathy Is a Knife, Charli sang about how anxious she felt being around Swift when the latter was briefly dating 1975 frontman Matty Healy in early 2023; Charli was dating (and has since married) the band’s drummer/producer George Daniel. “This one girl taps my insecurities,” she sang. It was obvious that these irrational fears were rooted in Charli’s perceived inferiority and her awe at Swift, amenable and crowdpleasing where Charli is stubborn and prickly: “’Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried,” Charli sang in a frustrated yelp. “I’m opposite, I’m on the other side / I feel all these feelings I can’t control.” It’s not about active disdain for Swift, but the ugh gut-punch of poor self-comparison.
Almost 16 months after Charli released Sympathy Is a Knife, Swift has made it about her. There’s no mistaking who Actually Romantic is aimed at: “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,” she sings. She suggests that Charli has spent undue amounts of time and effort hating her. (Maybe she has been poisoning the well in secret, but if so, no trace has leaked above ground.) “Some people might be offended / But it’s actually sweet, all the time you’ve spent on me,” Swift sings. That reframing is presumably intended to come off as Swift taking the high road, but she still sticks the knife in: “I heard you call me ‘boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” she sings, and likens Charli to “a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse”.
“That’s how much it hurts,” she sings, somewhat unconvincingly given that she’s bothered to write a song about it several pop light years later – and given that in June 2024, in the week Brat set Sympathy Is a Knife loose, it was widely perceived that Swift released six new UK-exclusive deluxe reissues of her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (largely about the short-lived Healy fling), in order to prevent Brat from debuting at No 1 (a move she previously pulled on Billie Eilish in the US). It worked. The potatoes, they are so, so tiny.
Actually Romantic sounds a lot like Pixies’ Where Is My Mind?, a question Swift might ask herself. As Alexis Petridis writes in his two-star review of The Life of a Showgirl, there is no way to interpret Swift, the biggest pop star of all time, attacking another female pop star as anything but punching down. The world has done its best to forget her terrible 2019 single You Need to Calm Down; Swift has also seemingly forgotten its revelation about the pointlessness of fomenting beef with other female artists (in that instance, Katy Perry). The “you’re so obsessed with me!” angle also has tangs of Mean Girls’ Regina George (when Swift learned to drive, she used her fledgling pop-star cash to buy the same model of Lexus as George drives in the film, to spite the girls who picked on her).
This queen-bee spite pales in emotional intelligence next to the self-scouring insight, compassion and awareness of Lorde’s response to Charli. Recent Swift songs such as Mirrorball and The Archer show she’s capable of it when she wants to be; imagine hearing her own inner dialogue about how she compares to a more audacious, zeitgeist-defining peer. Perhaps most damningly, the drawn-out torture of it all makes her look old-school, a stately ship turning slowly next to her speedier, risk-taking peers. Should Charli choose to dignify it with a response, we will not be waiting 16 months to hear it.
As Swift leans into her taunts in one of her fabled middle eights, she reframes Charli’s so-called hate campaign as “talking dirty” and sings – and I am sorry to have to write this – that “it’s kinda making me wet”. (Upsettingly, the moment is more convincing than Wood, the song about her fiance’s dick set to Bruno Mars-lite.) It unwittingly reveals so much of Swift’s current MO: eroticising hate, still getting off on it when her foes are long past participating.
Time was that having an antagonist spurred Swift’s greatest work: from the entirety of Speak Now, written entirely solo to counter those who doubted her authorship, to the gimlet-eyed dances with her media-confected “boy-crazy” persona on 1989, to the panto villain of Reputation who leaned into the worst of what critics said about her. On Folklore, she wrote beautiful, thinly veiled songs about her former label owner Scott Borchetta selling her first six albums to foe Scooter Braun, then wrote several more notably worse ones – including her new album’s Father Figure. Long after most people acknowledged that she really was done dirty by Kim Kardashian and Kanye West and won that war, she still released the Tortured Poets bonus track thanK you aIMee (pointed capitalisation Swift’s own). And while the Showgirl song Wi$h Li$t is all about Swift’s dreams of a quiet suburban life with her fiance, it’s one that contrasts her simple hopes about kids and basketball hoops with conspicuously Kardashian-like venal desires (“a fat ass with a baby face”) to make her point.
Showgirl also raises questions about which figures get a pass. Over the gothic thunder of Cancelled!, Swift welcomes social pariahs into her circle – the friends she likes “cloaked in Gucci and in scandal” – because her own post-1989 backlash taught her what it’s like to be tossed aside for perceived infractions. What may appear compassionate also functions perfectly as a rallying cry for the many scoundrels of our age: any comedian, actor, politician or otherwise who’s been confronted with the consequences of their actions and found community among those who see “wokeness” as a scourge. It’s hard to tell who it’s meant to be about – but it’s also easy to imagine it as an anthem for triumphant bad actors in the Teflon era of Trump 2.0.
The Swift album that Showgirl most resembles thematically is Reputation: both are divided between songs about those who seek to bring her down and ardent love songs about a guy who saved her life. But, as critic BD McClay wrote in a great recent essay, “the meta-story of Reputation was that by trying to take everything away from her, The Haters gave her her great love.” There are no such stakes in The Life of a Showgirl. It comes off the back of the biggest tour of all time, which made Swift the biggest pop star of all time, lifting economies and binding together giddy tweens and “actually she can really write songs!” dads in a link of friendship bracelets that could wrap around the world several hundred times. She is newly engaged to a very famous American football player who has become infinitely more famous for their association, realising her youthful dreams of fairytale romance and total cultural domination. Not only did the Taylor’s Versions re-recordings stratospherically devalue Braun’s investment in her first six albums, she also got those albums back this year.
There are no more foes to vanquish; like a new phase of Marvel movies, you get the sense of her scraping the barrel for conflict to mine, sucking the IP dry, lacking the imagination to explore and analyse tensions beyond rote hero/villain drama. The Life of a Showgirl was billed as going behind the scenes of Swift’s life on the Eras tour. One imagines her backstage, alone with her grindstone and axe, getting that thing really good and sharp.
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