We’re seeing a similar problem brewing right now with Charli XCX and Taylor Swift. Prior to the release of brat, Charli literally put out a disclaimer that her songs about the music industry aren’t meant to be “diss tracks.”
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“They’re really just about how it’s so complicated being an artist, especially a female artist, where you are pitted against your peers and also expected to be best friends with every single person constantly, when if you’re not, you’re deemed a bad feminist,” she said. “That, to me is just like, such an unrealistic expectation.”
She continued, “So yeah, these songs are kind of about how as a woman, as an artist, some days you can feel on top of the world, some days you can feel unbelievably insecure, other days you can feel highly competitive. Sometimes you can feel like literal trash. And it’s really emotional and it’s complicated to deal with, and we’re not supposed to talk about it, but these songs do talk about it. And I’ll probably chastised about it, but whatever, it’s reality.”
Even so, Charli had to call on fans to stop chanting “Death to Taylor” at her shows after fans linked “Sympathy Is a Knife” to the pop star. “It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community,” she said on Instagram on June 23.
And all of this for what? “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011,” Swift recently told New York Magazine for their profile of the British artist. “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.”
Fan culture is currently on a precipice—we need to decide if we’d rather kiki with our favorite artists, enjoying song lyrics and theories respectfully, or risk driving those musicians away. If you keep splashing scalding hot tea back in their faces, they’re eventually going to stop spilling it.
