Taylor Swift V Charli XCX: Ben Lee Weighs In

Ben Lee knows a thing or two about a good old music feud. Back in the ’90s, Bernard Fanning called him a “precocious little c*nt” after Ben called his third album, Breathing Tornados, “the greatest Australian album of all time”.

Now the music world is being gripped by the supposed feud between Taylor Swift and Charli XCX.

Swift’s new album, The Life Of A Showgirl, includes a song called Actually Romantic, which has been interpreted as a shot at Charli XCX.

Ben Lee has offered an explainer on his Weirder Together podcast, which he shares with his wife, Ione Skye.

“The main lesson that you can learn from this incident is that if you’re gonna take a shot at the queen, you better not miss,” Ben concludes.

But who is the queen? Keep reading, because there’s a twist in this tale.

Ben traces the origins of the feud to Swift and Charli XCX’s dating history – Charli is now married to George Daniel, the drummer in The 1975, while Swift once dated Matty Healy, The 1975’s lead singer.

“So that’s essentially where their worlds intersected.”

Ben explains that Charli wrote a song called Sympathy Is A Knife, “which was an expression of confusion, insecurity, maybe some resentment … Taylor Swift is such a presence, like she’s one of those people at a level that when she walks into a room, she changes the molecular vibration of the room, so Charli wrote a song about that.”

Explaining Actually Romantic, Ben Lee says: “Taylor Swift has on her new album a song which, like, pretty directly targets Charli XCX for being a user of cocaine and for talking shit about her.”

The song starts:

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.

The song goes on to say that Swift believes her detractor is actually obsessed with her: “All the time you’ve spent on me, it’s honestly wild … No man has ever loved me like you do.”

Charli XCX and Taylor Swift’s relationship goes back a decade. The English artist joined Swift on her 1989 World Tour in 2015, as well as supporting her on the 2018 Reputation Stadium tour.

“I’m sure there’s things behind the scenes that we don’t know about,” Ben points out.

“Obviously, everything that goes on between, whether it’s like Lana Del Rey and Ethel Cain, or, you know, in the Australian music industry too, there’s a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes and we’re not privy to all of that.”

Less than a week after the release of the Showgirl album, Ben has made the call on Swift’s diss track:

“It flopped. Basically, everyone made fun of it. People don’t like the record anyway, ’cause it’s a little vapid and it’s gone straight down the middle and whatever … I don’t want to get back into all the Swifties attacking me online [but] it didn’t work, right.”

According to Ben, there’s a key takeaway from all of this – if you’re gonna diss, you better not miss.

“There’s a big lesson about the art of war in this move and in the fallout of it, because you gotta remember the music industry operates a lot like mob-run Chicago or something like that.

“And the main lesson that you can learn from this incident is that if you’re gonna take a shot at the queen, you better not miss.”

“So, Charli is the queen now, you’re saying?” Ione Skye asks.

“Yeah, I think at the end of the day, Charli XCX – and I think Taylor knows this – Charli is a more relevant cultural force. She just is.

“She’s not more successful in terms of numbers, but that’s not what culture really was ever about. It was about influence, it was about being forward-thinking, it was about the way you change culture. And I think Charli has proven to be the foremost pop cultural thinker in pop music at the moment.

“Taylor tried to take her down, and she missed.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Weirder Together (@weirdertogetherofficial)