Taylor Swift knows who her friends are — the ones with matching scars.
In the song “Cancelled!,” off her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, Swift takes on cancel culture, specifically through the lens of misogyny, while also offering a safe space for her female pals, especially those who stuck by her when she was dealing with her own cancellation (see: Reputation).
The dark, campy track, which starts with some angry guitar riffs for good measure, addresses this from the get-go. “You thought that it would be ok, at first / The situation could be saved, of course / But they’d already picked out your grave and hearse / Beware the wrath of masked crusaders,” she warns. So yes, Swifties disappointed that her vault track “Slut!” was too tame to earn its exclamation point can rejoice — “Cancelled!” is a banger worthy of the punctuation.
Throughout the song, Swift checks off the various ways one might be exiled, but they’re noticeably all things that only a woman would be banished for: “Did you girl-boss too close to the sun?” goes one line. “Did you make a joke only a man could?” goes another. “Were you just too smug for your own good?” she asks. And our personal favorite: “‘Tone-deaf and hot, let’s f—in’ off her.'”
While Swift writes from the perspective of someone talking to her lady friends, all of that criticism is stuff she herself has grappled with as a public figure, which she previously sang about in her Lover track “The Man.”
And though Swifties and Swift haters alike will look for direct references to famous squad members who’ve been chased by the internet mob — like Blake Lively, who has been embroiled in a very public legal battle with her It Ends With Us director and costar Justin Baldoni — they won’t find any here. For Lively, it should be noted that Swift has said she wrote this album’s songs during the European leg of her Eras Tour, so likely between May and August of 2024, but the Lively-Baldoni drama began in earnest in December 2024.
While Swift doesn’t name names or get into specifics on “Cancelled!” — misogyny is a universal experience! — she delivers plenty of color with her biting witticisms, declaring loudly and hilariously that whatever these women did or didn’t do doesn’t matter to her: “Good thing I like my friends cancelled / I like ’em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal.” She also implies she’s not one to cast aspersions. “They stood by me / Before my exoneration / They believed I was innocent / So I’m not here for judgement, no.”
Mert Alas & Marcus Piggot
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But she does suggest, with a wink, that if all us ladies are going to be dismissed and discarded anyways, we might as well link arms and own it. “Can’t you see my infamy loves company?” she sings in “Cancelled!,” adding, “Now they’ve broken you like they’ve broken me / But a shattered glass / Is a lot more sharp / And now you know exactly who your friends are / You know who we are / We’re the ones with matching scars.”
