<\/p>\n
There are two types of people in this world: those who will spend the weekend furiously replaying The Life of a Showgirl<\/em>, and those who will dismiss Taylor Swift\u2019s 12th studio album as just the latest set of songs from \u201cBoring Barbie\u201d.<\/p>\n Yes, I\u2019m talking about \u201cActually Romantic\u201d, the feverishly discussed seventh track that fans have already decided is about Charli xcx. It\u2019s easy to see why. First there\u2019s the fact that the seventh track on Brat<\/em> is \u201cEverything is Romantic\u201d \u2013\u00a0Swift famously has a penchant for numerical synchronicity \u2013 and second\u2026 well, have you listened to the lyrics? \u201cHigh-fived my ex and then said you\u2019re glad he ghosted me \/ Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face,\u201d Swift sings, adding: \u201cI heard you call me \u2018Boring Barbie\u2019 when the coke\u2019s got you brave.\u201d<\/p>\n You don\u2019t have to be a Swiftian scholar to interpret this as a direct riposte to Charli\u2019s song, \u201cSympathy is a Knife\u201d, on which the Brat<\/em> singer appears to allude to feeling uncomfortable around Swift when she was dating the 1975\u2019s Matty Healy. Charli\u2019s now husband George Daniel is the band\u2019s drummer.<\/p>\n Some have argued that the fond tone of \u201cAlmost Romantic\u201d, which positions its subject as such an obsessed rival it turns Swift on (\u201cit\u2019s kind of making me wet\u201d), is a sign Taylor has taken the high road. Others argue there is no rift at all, pointing to Charli\u2019s comments in New York Magazine<\/em> last year: \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 and how I don\u2019t want to be in those situations physically when I feel self-doubt,\u201d she said of \u201cSympathy is a Knife\u201d.<\/p>\n Personally, I think whether or not there\u2019s a real rift between these two women is irrelevant. What\u2019s more interesting is that \u201cAlmost Romantic\u201d follows an already well-trodden path for Swift, one that tells us more about her than it does any other artist who may have inspired it. Sure, she might have a hard time letting things go (Brat<\/em> was released more than a year ago), but it seems to me that her fixation is not so much on individual women as it is on internalised misogyny as a whole. It\u2019s a consistent theme.<\/p>\n Take her alleged, almost decade-long feud with Kim Kardashian, whom Swift appeared to reference in The Tortured Poets Department<\/em> bonus track, \u201cthanK you aIMee\u201d \u2013 see what she did there? \u2013 after having already dedicated several songs on her 2017 revenge album, Reputation<\/em> to the rift. Then, also on TTPD<\/em>, there was \u201cClara Bow\u201d, which many insist is about Olivia Rodrigo, who some people believe is also the subject of new song \u201cFather Figure\u201d. Before that, there was \u201cBad Blood\u201d, which is widely believed to be about Katy Perry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are two types of people in this world: those who will spend the weekend furiously replaying The Life of a Showgirl, and those who will dismiss Taylor Swift\u2019s 12th studio album as just the latest set of songs from \u201cBoring Barbie\u201d. Yes, I\u2019m talking about \u201cActually Romantic\u201d, the feverishly discussed seventh track that fans<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[1876,1248,839,1688,606,1877],"class_list":{"0":"post-5144","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-lifestyle","8":"tag-evolved","9":"tag-hung","10":"tag-rivals","11":"tag-swift","12":"tag-taylor","13":"tag-whys"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}