Why Is Charli XCX Being Pitted Against Taylor?
There's a weary case of déjà vu occurring on the internet. One corner is populated with Von Dutch caps, lime green iconography and Lost Mary vapes. The other with beaded friendship bracelets, pink feathers and glittery cowboy hats. The message is that you're either having a Brat Girl Summer or you're in your Eras Tour era, but you must not be present in both camps.
Social media appears desperate to stoke pseudo-rivalries between Taylor Swift and Charli XCX who, on a very granular level, are sonically very different musicians. Their aesthetics are different, their fanbases are different and their friendship groups are different (Charli is dating George Daniel, the bandmate of Swift's ex, Matty Healy). But so desperate is the world to polarise and pillory women in the public eye that the only means by which they can be successful is at the detriment of another.
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After weeks of people in the throws of their respective Brat Girl Summers chanting 'Taylor Swift is dead' in the audience of her gigs, Charli was forced to issue a plea to her fans via her Instagram. 'Can the people who do this please stop,' the '365' singer recently wrote. 'Online or at my shows. It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community.'
It's a tale as old as time. Kate Middleton was framed by the British press as the arch nemesis of Meghan Markle; there were countless reports when she was married to Kanye West, her own husband's long-time collaborator, that Beyoncé 'disliked' Kim Kardashian. When two women wield power, they must be deemed to be competing to maintain it, because the patriarchy has framed female power as something that exists only in a finite supply. Rather than the traditional male-dominated tabloid press tearing the tapestry of sisterhood apart though, it's now citizen journalists on social media.
The patriarchy – and our increasingly polarised society in which we exist in echo chambers where our own values, thoughts and beliefs are mirrored back to us via the content we consume – wants fans to believe that there is a scarcity of opportunities for women. In our black-or-white, right-or-wrong world, where nuance is merely a word rather than an actionable gradation of a situation, there is only space to like one female musician, but not both.
You can only ascribe the title of 'fan' to somebody if they have shown that they will excuse the fact that we are multi-faceted. That we can be having a Brat Girl Summer while also wearing our beaded friendship bracelets and cooing over Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift's inevitable sojourn around Europe. We can dance to Charli XCX's DJ set in the fields of Worthy Farm while also nurturing a respect for a woman who has broken records time and time again as well as overcoming misogyny and adversity while her star ascended to the stratospheric heights it now maintains. Because the worst and saddest part of all of this is just how much misogyny people have metabolised in order to be attempting to pit one woman against one another in the first place. Both are stars, both deserve to shine.
The irony of the simmering tension is that on the recent press tour for her album, Brat, Charli explained that she penned many of the album's lyrics about her relationship with women in the music industry. 'We’ve got past the point of the media always pitting women against one another,' she fortuitously told The Guardian in June 2024, in reference to her track 'Girl, So Confusing'. 'Relationships between women are super-complex and multi-layered. You can like someone and dislike them at the same time; you can feel jealous of somebody but they can still be your friend.' It may well pay for Charli's fans to heed the words of their patron saint.
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