The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, is now out into the world. With a splashy (and occasionally confusing) marketing campaign, and the return of 1989 producers Max Martin and Shellback, fans had hoped that these new songs would become a new sort of pop bible.
Time will only tell if that is the case, in part because each track on The Life of a Showgirl has a lot to unpack. Swift experiments with new genres and types of sound, presents some glorious double-entendres, and even literally folds a piece of her worldwide Eras Tour into the album. (As someone who attended the tour’s closing night, I am never going to shut up about that.)
But one similarity to 1989 did jump out on my (and a lot of people’s) first listen of The Life of a Showgirl: one song certainly seems to be a diss track. Just like “Bad Blood” seemed to allude to Swift’s feud at the time with Katy Perry, Showgirl‘s “Actually Romantic” is being interpreted to be about the recent back and forth between her and Charli XCX.
It’s arguably pretty easy to draw that conclusion from the song’s opening lyrics: “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 / but it’s actually sweet.” As it goes along, Swift takes an incredibly tongue-in-cheek approach to the whole ordeal, saying the unnamed person’s obsession with her almost comes across like flirting.
It’s honestly wild…
So, how did we get here? The story begins in 2018, when Charli was one of the opening acts on Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour, even joining her onstage to perform “Shake It Off” in the tour’s official movie. Once the tour wrapped, Charli had some choice words to describe the experience, telling Pitchfork that, “as an artist, it kind of felt like I was getting up onstage and waving to five-year-olds.” She later apologized for these comments, saying that they were taken out of context, as she was comparing the experience to playing 18+ venues.
The 2024 release of Charli’s album Brat took things to another level, as fans quickly speculated that her track “Sympathy Is a Knife” was alluding to Swift. While the song is largely focused on Charli’s personal insecurities, it does include the lyrics “don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick,” which many took as a reference to both women being in the orbit of The 1975. Charli is now married to the band’s drummer, George Daniel, and Swift was romantically linked to frontman Matty Healy in the summer of 2023, an experience that appears to have inspired a lot of her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department.
As innocuous as most of the lyrics to “Sympathy Is a Knife” were, they still kickstarted a cycle of discourse between both fandoms. In addition to just the usual back and forth on social media, fans at Charli’s shows would go viral for holding signs joking about bullying Swifties or chanting for Swift’s death, the latter of which Charli outright condemned.
There’s also the 2024 New York Magazine profile of Charli, which seemed to simultaneously squash any beef and ignite it even further. Swift is quoted in the article with some pretty strong praise for Charli, saying in part that, “her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade. I love to see hard work like that pay off.”
But the magazine’s photoshoot seemed to send a different message, with photos of Charli posed next to a giant bloodied hand adorned with friendship bracelets (which have become synonymous with Swift and the Eras Tour). Some viewed the art direction to be in poor taste, especially because the photos were released a few weeks after several girls were stabbed to death at a Swift-themed event in the UK.
Is it over now?
In the ensuing months, outside of the occasional stan wars that can never seem to go away, both fandoms seemed to have moved on from the idea of Charli and Swift having beef. After all, Swift seemed to be having the time of her life dancing along to Charli’s set at the 2025 Grammys. This made the release of “Actually Romantic” all the more shocking, especially given the tone of Swift’s lyrics. Swift can even be seen holding an apple in the Spotify canvas for the song, which could be interpreted as an allusion to one of Charli’s other songs on Brat.
Granted, “Actually Romantic” is still incredibly fresh in all of our minds. And there is no actual concrete confirmation from Swift that the song is even about Charli: it could very well be a dramatized or embellished account of multiple things in her life, as has been the case for a lot of her songs. But either way, as the entire text of Showgirl arguably proves: we might not know the full story.
Showgirl navigates the push and pull between public and private life in a way that is both heightened and incredibly personal. “Actually Romantic” isn’t even the only song that seems topical, as many are interpreting “Cancelled!!” as Swift’s defense of her friendship with Blake Lively amid the Justin Baldoni scandal, after months of online chatter insisting that the two had fallen out. Whether or not “Actually Romantic” is 100% about Charli, it’s clear that Swift needed to get something off of her chest, far beyond whatever is said in headlines and tweets.
(featured image: Andreas Rentz/TAS24/Getty)
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