The Taylor Swift 'Showgirl' Song I Dreaded Most Wound Up Being Her Best

"Oh, Taylor, no," I whispered when Taylor Swift dropped the track listing for The Life of a Showgirl. The titles alone were rife with symbolism and promise—"Opalite," a man-made gem; "The Fate of Ophelia," a reference to a woman driven to madness by rejection; and so on—but one title stopped me in my tracks.

"Cancelled!"

I worried, as I shared in PureWow's Slack channel about the album, that it'd be another rehashing of her feud with Kanye West. As a writer and chronic overthinker, I know how tapping into a well of pain can inspire new perspectives—but it can also trap you in a downward spiral, ruminating on the past. I've been caught in that trap; I wanted more for her and for her fans.

Well, send me back to second grade to relearn a tried-and-true lesson: You can't judge a song by its title.

This has nothing to do with Kanye; it's an anthem for stand-by-your-friends, been-through-it empathy. And it's positively dripping in snark, because in this case, the medicine goes down easier chased with whiskey than sugar (or treacly earnestness).

Early speculation is that the song is a defense of Blake Lively, who fell under intense scrutiny during her It Ends With Us press tour and following her sexual harassment case against Justin Baldoni. I can absolutely see the comparisons.

"Did you make a joke only a man could? Were you just too smug for your own good?" she posits.

But it's the third question that's so searingly self-aware it highlights Swift's songwriting at its best: "Or bring a tiny violin to a knife fight?"

It isn't just a nod to the old "bring a knife to a gunfight" phrase; it's an amendment to her 2017 "Call It What You Want" lyrics. That song was Swift licking her wounds, still reeling after her own cancellation. In it, she declares, "my castle crumbled overnight / I brought a knife to a gunfight."

With this change, eight years later, she's acknowledging the criticism she received around that time and is taking ownership of that era of her life. She was throwing a pity party for herself, busting out a tiny violin, which only brought more outrage her way.

Part of the fun, though, is another Swift tool—allowing herself to play the villain. Here, she adopts a "Blank Space"-like attitude (fitting, considering her Showgirl producers, Max Martin and Shellback, also produced that 1989 hit). She mentions that she likes "her whiskey sour" and "poison thorny flowers," before adding "Can't you see my infamy loves company?"

She notes that these moments leave you forever changed—in good and bad ways. "Now they've broken you like they've broken me / But a shattered glass is a lot more sharp," then reiterates, "and now you know exactly who your friends are."

The song combines the edge of Reputation with the lyrical wordplay of Red, and in doing so, she reveals how the "cancelled" era of her life strengthened a core value: loyalty.

From "Actually Romantic" to "Eldest Daughter," she touches on feelings of betrayal, but the invisible string connecting it all is knowing who you can count on through it all (yourself included). "Cancelled!" crystallizes that sentiment in a way that makes you want to shout the lyrics in your car, full blast, letting you linger in the delicious pain of the moment for just a bit before you're ready to, ahem, "Shake it Off."