Taylor Swift just released her new album Life of A Showgirl and people are absolutely convinced one of the songs, Actually Romantic, is a Charli XCX diss track – but why do they have beef?!
In the song, Taylor sings about someone being “brave” while taking cocaine, and says they “wrote a song saying it makes you sick to see my face”. People think this is a response to Charli’s song Sympathy Is A Knife, while others are confused about why Taylor would write a diss track about Charli altogether.
If you have no idea what’s going on, or just need a little recap, here’s the longstanding beef between Taylor Swift and Charli XCX, explained from start to finish.
The Taylor Swift and Charli XCX beef started back in 2018
It all started in 2018 when Charli was one of the opening acts for Taylor on her Reputation tour. Afterwards, she made an awkward comment in an interview with Pitchfork, saying: “As an artist, it kind of felt like I was getting up onstage and waving to five-year-olds.” As expected, this got loads of backlash from Swifties, and she later apologised.
“Leading up to that tour, I’d been playing a ton of 18+ club shows, and so to be on stage in front of all ages was new to me and made me approach my performances with a whole new kind of energy,” she tweeted.
“As I say in the article and have said many times before, I am extremely grateful to Taylor for inviting me to open for her. She’s one of the biggest artists of my generation, and the Reputation tour was one of the biggest tours in history. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity I was given and how much fun it was to perform to a new audience!”
just to clarify
pic.twitter.com/KpNQQx9SK0
— Charli (@charli_xcx) August 6, 2019
Charli then made this weird comment on Taylor’s tweet
Things then went quiet between them until 2024, when Charli piped up on one of Taylor’s tweets. She tweeted some lyrics from her song Florida!!!, “what a crash, what a rush,” and Charli replied saying: “Everyone’s hype for the sweat tour!” She was advertising her own tour with Troye Sivan on Taylor’s post, which rubbed people up the wrong way.
everyone’s hype for the sweat tour! https://t.co/7wVPXM0ciX
— Charli (@charli_xcx) April 24, 2024
People think Charli’s song Sympathy Is a Knife is about Taylor
Two months later, Charli released her huge album Brat, and people are convinced its third track Sympathy Is a Knife is about Taylor with the lyrics: “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show/ Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.”
People think this is a reference to Taylor’s relationship with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy. The pair briefly dated in 2023, and Charli is married to his bandmate George Daniel. After breaking up with Taylor, Matty started dating model Gabriette who is one of Charli’s close friends, which made Swifties even more annoyed at the “I hope they break up” lyric.
However, Charli actually denied that the song is about Taylor in an interview with Vulture, saying: “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.”
“Sometimes I’d look onstage and be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to play these rooms, ever. That made me feel jealous’. I told Matty that. And George. They were both like, ‘Shut up. What are you talking about?’”
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And that brings us to now, the Taylor Swift ‘diss track’
Now, people think Taylor’s Actually Romantic is a diss track towards Charli because of some the lyrics appear to be about the Apple singer, including mention of the drug “coke” which Charli mentions in loads of her songs. The lyrics also link perfectly to Sympathy Is a Knife and the whole Matty Healy theory.
“I heard you call me ‘boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave/ High-fived my ex and then you 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,” the song opens. “But it’s actually sweet/ All the time you’ve spent on me/ It’s honestly wild/ All the effort you’ve put in/ It’s actually romantic/ I really got to hand it to you/ No man has ever loved me like you do.”
Speaking about the song to Amazon Music, Taylor described it as being about “realising 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 didn’t make any mention of Charli, and neither of them have responded to the diss track drama yet. I’ll be surprised if they do.
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Featured image by: David Fisher/Shutterstock and CharliXCX/Instagram
