In 2010, Taylor Swift wrote the jaunty diss track “Mean,” about, strangely enough, Bob Lefsetz, a longtime music industry pundit who had viciously panned her performance at the 2010 Grammy Awards. For his part, Lefsetz initially hemmed and hawed over the narrative, but eventually came to embrace it. “Mean” does not stand amongst the best songs on Speak Now, but, as the music YouTuber Todd in the Shadows once pointed out, it is profoundly revealing about Swift’s psyche: “Someday, I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me.”
Flash forward to 2016. Swift was locked in a feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West over the lyrics to “Famous,” from West’s album The Life of Pablo. She was on the verge of claiming the moral high ground when Kardashian dropped her ace in the hole: video footage of Swift seeming to approve—and even laugh over—the lyric “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.” Swift went on to release “Look What You Made Me Do” as the first single from 2017’s Reputation. The whole affair felt tawdry and camp without being whatsoever fun, but at least she was punching sideways.
It’s 2025 now, Taylor Swift is the biggest pop star on the planet—Time’s Person of the Year big, repeatedly breaking her own sales records with every new release big—and she (allegedly, seemingly) can’t stop thinking about Charli XCX. “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” she sings on “Actually Romantic,” one of the lowlights off her new album, The Life of a Showgirl. For those somehow mercifully out of the loop, Charli XCX just married the 1975’s George Daniel, bandmate of Swift’s recent ex Matty Healy; on the Brat cut “Sympathy is a knife,” she grappled with being thrust into the orbit of a female pop star several times her stature. “Actually Romantic” is just, well, mean. And worse, it’s dumb: “Like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse, that’s how much it hurts.” No working it out on the remix to be had here.
I’m also filling out my Jack Antonoff apology card as we speak, now that Max Martin and Shellback—ostensibly the great pop minds of the century—have aided and abetted in a song that sounds like the Kidz Bop version of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” The Life of a Showgirl as a whole, and “Actually Romantic” most of all, invite damning questions: Was this some tossed-off screed recorded one late night in the midst of the Eras Tour, in which case, why should I care? Or did Swift sweat over each one of these lines, and this is still what we ended up with? It’s telling that The Life of a Showgirl’s most sensual line—“Feels like you’re flirting with me…It’s kind of making me wet”—appears here, and not on any of the songs addressed to Kelce. One of the main cogs in the Swiftian songwriting machine is spite, and it’s getting pretty rusty.
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