{"id":61413,"date":"2025-10-08T14:33:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T14:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/61413\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T14:33:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T14:33:07","slug":"was-actually-romantic-charli-xcx-drama-necessary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/61413\/","title":{"rendered":"Was ‘Actually Romantic,’ Charli XCX Drama Necessary?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tGoing into Taylor Swift\u2019s The Life of a Showgirl<\/a>, part of the thrill was that it seemed like we were going to get Reputation-style anthems. She\u2019d reunited with Max Martin<\/a> for the first time since that excellent 2017 LP \u2014 and the showgirl themes opened up plenty of possibilities. Thematically, a revenge-fueled song or two would make sense on a project centered on performance and public scrutiny \u2014 a \u201cshowgirl\u201d is, after all, always on display. But did Swift need to punch down to fulfill the concept?<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the album\u2019s most talked-about songs is \u201cActually Romantic,\u201d a clapback many people believe is about Charli XCX<\/a>. Swift opens the track with an incisive line: \u201cI heard you call me \u2018Boring Barbie\u2019 when the coke\u2019s got you brave.\u201d Many immediately assumed it was aimed at Charli \u2014 a swing at Brat\u2019s drug references, played for shock value to underscore how Charli (or really, the \u201ccool girls\u201d she represents) might see Swift. The \u201ccoke\u201d line goes after an image Charli owns up to and, frankly, celebrates. It sets up the tension between them (the polished pop star and the chaotic party girl), but it lands more \u201cholier-than-thou\u201d than it does clever.<\/p>\n

\n\tSwift has said the song is about someone who had a \u201cone-sided, adversarial relationship with\u201d her. But how adversarial did things seem with Charli? Let\u2019s go back to Brat.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn \u201cSympathy Is a Knife,\u201d Charli\u2019s mind spirals as she thinks about a peer who is so untouchable that she feels like she will never compare. \u201cI\u2019m embarrassed to have it, but need the sympathy\/ \u2018Cause I couldn\u2019t even be her if I tried,\u201d she sings. In many ways, the song plays less like a diss and more as Charli confronting her own insecurity and the fear she\u2019ll never reach that top echelon of pop stardom because they\u2019re \u201cso opposite\u201d from the Swift-like figure in the song. What makes it land is that it\u2019s a vulnerable self-portrait drawn from comparing herself to a woman who, for years, has embodied pop perfection.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSympathy\u201d doesn\u2019t exactly antagonize Swift, though. Charli does admit she doesn\u2019t \u201cwanna see her backstage at my boyfriend\u2019s show\u201d and sings about how she hopes Swift and Matty Healy break up (they eventually did) \u2014 but she follows it with a lyric that encapsulates the entire point of the song: \u201cI couldn\u2019t even be her if I tried.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCharli put it succinctly in an interview with Vulture<\/a>: \u201cThat 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\u2026 Sometimes I\u2019d look onstage and be like,\u2019 Oh my God \u2026 I\u2019m never going to play these rooms, ever.\u2019 That made me feel jealous,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Charli also shared that part of the song was rooted in her self-perception early in her career, when she \u201cdesperately wanted to be blonde\u201d like Britney Spears but couldn\u2019t escape Spears being, as she put it, \u201cthe opposite of who I was.\u201d That explanation further drove in \u201cSympathy Is a Knife\u201d as a song that touches on how her racialized identity as an Indian-British woman in the industry affected her self-image. Rather than a jab at Swift, Charli is attempting to face her own insecurities.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWith any celebrity friendship or feud, there\u2019s always more than meets the eye. As listeners, no one has the full context of Swift and Charli\u2019s dynamic. What we do know: Charli opened for Taylor on the Reputation tour in 2018, they both dated members of the 1975 at around the same time, and their paths have likely crossed more often than people realize. So if Swift really does live \u201crent-free\u201d in Charli\u2019s head, as she suggests in \u201cActually Romantic,\u201d that\u2019s something we may never fully get to understand. But as listeners, hearing \u201cActually Romantic\u201d as such a pointed response to \u201cSympathy\u201d just felt unnecessary.<\/p>\n

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\n\tThere\u2019s, admittedly, some fun in pop-star rivalries. But \u201cActually Romantic\u201d lacks a sense of fun and mystery. Swift casts herself as misunderstood, which is hard to believe, given just how celebrated she\u2019s been in recent years as she\u2019s become a cultural icon.\u00a0 The song, instead, reads as a reflection of Swift\u2019s desire to be universally liked. It takes a sing-songy, almost teasing tone, as if she\u2019s trying to brush off Charli with a smirk: \u201cYou think I\u2019m tacky, baby\/Stop talking dirty to me,\u201d she sings, aiming for playful but landing more defensive. Swift wants to sound unbothered, even though every lyric suggests the opposite. \u201cLike a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse, that\u2019s how much it hurts,\u201d in particular, feels like a cheap, belittling shot. And then there\u2019s the line, \u201cI mind my business, God\u2019s my witness that I don\u2019t provoke it \/ It\u2019s kind of making me wet,\u201d which hints that, deep down, Swift might enjoy Charli\u2019s perception that she\u2019s unreachable, reinforcing the very dynamic Charli laid out on \u201cSympathy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\tAfter all, Swift is the same artist who once sang, \u201cI\u2019m a mirrorball \/ I can change everything about me to fit in,\u201d admitting her instinct to adapt to criticism just to be loved. The stronger move would\u2019ve been to frame the track around the pressures of being the woman on top, and the weight of other women measuring themselves against her. There\u2019s also the compelling approach of Charli\u2019s \u201cwork it out on the remix\u201d when she brought Lorde on \u201cGirl, So Confusing.\u201d The pair of musicians chose to be honest about their feelings about each other, transforming comparison into camaraderie, rather than misguided conflict. \u201cGirl, So Confusing\u201d became one of the most refreshing, celebrated music moments of the year, and Swift could\u2019ve taken a page from that playbook instead of crashing out for the sake of a sassy song.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Charli told The Guardian<\/a> while promoting Brat, it\u2019s an \u201cunrealistic expectation of women\u201d for everyone to get along. \u201cRelationships between women are super-complex and multi-layered. You can like someone and dislike them at the same time,\u201d she said. It\u2019s not bad advice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Going into Taylor Swift\u2019s The Life of a Showgirl, part of the thrill was that it seemed like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61414,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,8232,146,85,46,15422],"class_list":["post-61413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-charli-xcx","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-taylor-swfit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}