Review: "Sympathy is a Knife" by Charli XCX
Review: "Sympathy is a Knife" by Charli XCX
artistic ambition and the charli xcx taylor swift cold war
“Sympathy is a knife” is the third song on Charli XCX’s new album BRAT. In the song, she talks about an unnamed girl who “taps her insecurities”, and in the second half of the song she reveals the girl to be Taylor Swift:
Don’t want to see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show
Fingers crossed behind my back I hope they break up quick
Charli XCX is engaged to George Daniel of The 1975, and Taylor Swift briefly dated Matty Healy of The 1975, so Taylor Swift would have been backstage at Charli’s boyfriend’s show. I guess only the first line is needed to reveal that it’s Taylor Swift; the second line is dramatic irony gloating. The listener knows something that Charli the speaker of the song doesn’t, Taylor Swift and Matty Healy did break up quickly, so Charli’s fingers crossed behind her back worked.
Taylor Swift made an entire album about her quick breakup with Matty Healy, the thing Charli wished for, called The Tortured Poets Department. It’s hard to find just one quote from the album that encapsulates Taylor Swift’s thoughts on the relationship because almost every song on the album is about Matty. I like the part on the song “Down Bad” when she says “for a moment I felt cosmic love”. The album frames the end of the relationship as Matty Healy abruptly leaving her after their brief cosmic foretold moment together, which gave Taylor Swift all of these strong feelings that she then channeled into the art.
The Tortured Poets Department is a messy album. The best part is how confessional and raw it is about the Matty Healy relationship, and the two relationships Taylor had before and after. But the individual songs are kind of boring. They’re often long, and they don’t go anywhere. Charli XCX’s BRAT is considerably more artistically successful; the songs are more fun, more culturally relevant, and more universal. Even in the confessional aspect where Tortured Poet’s Department succeeds, BRAT does better. But one of the interesting confessions she makes is on “Sympathy is a knife”, where she says she’s really jealous of Taylor Swift.
Charli XCX has had a strange career trajectory. She started as a radio-friendly pop star when she was 20 years old, in the 2012 pre-Spotify era, making songs like “I Love It” and “Boom Clap” and appearing on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.” Then, in 2016, she started collaborating with the music label PC Music and the producer SOPHIE, sharpening her sound towards what is sometimes called “hyperpop”. She had a scrapped album XCX World from this time period, as well as a few singles like “Vroom Vroom” and “Boys”. “Boys” would later do very well as a TikTok sound and “Vroom Vroom” is now a cult favorite, but at the time they were controversial songs. At the time, hyperpop was framed as radical avant-garde pop and this was seen as a big departure into the unknown for Charli.
In December 2017, Charli XCX released her first full album after this stylistic shift, called Pop 2. To promote the album, she opened for Taylor Swift on her Reputation stadium tour. Charli’s setlist was very restrained and not at all in her new style. She performed “Fancy” and “Boom Clap” and “I Love It” to the crowd who knew her radio hits from a few years ago, while trying to squeeze a couple of her newer songs. Later, she said in an interview with Pitchfork that opening for Taylor Swift was like “waving to five-year-olds”:
After Pop 2, she made two more albums in a similar style, Charli (2019) and How I’m Feeling Right Now (2020). In 2022, she made an intentional effort to make her music less abrasive hyperpop and more corporate in her album Crash, but I think that album turned out pretty boring. In 2024, she sort of synthesized that idea of trying to be more corporate while still retaining her unique PC Music influenced style, with BRAT. BRAT in its brief opening weeks has been Charli’s most successful album, and did it by returning to the sound of her prior three albums. It’s successful among a different crowd than Taylor Swift’s audience, successful among people in spiritual Bushwick and people on the internet, but there’s a lot of those people now.
You don’t need to read “Sympathy is a knife” as about Taylor Swift; you can read it as just about jealousy. Most of the lyrics of the song are about feeling uncontrollable paranoid shame related to another person you feel is more successful than you, with some critical distance acknowledging that the paranoid shame is a bad thing:
I don't wanna share the space
I don't wanna force a smile
This one girl taps my insecurities
Don't know if it's real or if I'm spiraling
Why I wanna buy a gun?
Why I wanna shoot myself?
Volatilе at war with my dialogue
I'd say that there was a God if thеy could stop this
Wild voice tearing me apart
I'm so apprehensive now
The song works without any biographical readings. But I think confessional music made by celebrities invites listeners to read their biographies into it. Here I think there’s a second level related to the biographical reading, where Charli takes pride in her paranoid jealousy. The paranoid jealousy is also meant to come across as a very pure and honest feeling. A real artist jealous of the success of someone who isn’t quite as real. At the start of the chorus Charli says:
'Cause I couldn't even be her if I tried
I'm opposite, I'm on the other side
Yes she’s admiring and jealous of Taylor Swift, but she’s also taking pride in the fact that she’s in a different world from Taylor Swift. She couldn’t have Taylor Swift’s success, because it comes from Taylor Swift’s desire for mass appeal, and she’s not built that way. Charli says on the song “Spring Breakers” from BRAT’s extended edition that she’s “always going to lose to people playing safer” which is a more clear version of this thinking.
This might seem like a stretch from the text of this individual song, but it’s how Charli performs it live. Before performing “Sympathy is a Knife” in LA, Charli said “I just feel like artistry shines through, you know what I mean?”
Charli goes on to say that she knows her music isn’t for everyone, but she’s happy to see BRAT is being received well, and she’s grateful for the fans who’ve been here for a long time before that. And then she jokingly says “oh look at the next song, it’s Sympathy is a knife, that’s interesting”. And again, I think that’s because she’s taking pride in the jealous emotions, because it means her artistry was pure.
BRAT has been successful, but Charli was successful before, specifically because of her commitment to the hyperpop moment. Charli XCX has always been the most commercial face of a real artistic push in music. When kids make music in their bedrooms now, the most common genre they work in is hyperpop, and when the biggest artists look to sharpen their sound, they turn towards the production styles of hyperpop. Charli’s influence is known, she has a community of other artists around her who get what she’s doing, and she’s always been respected by people who understand the art. I guess it’s valid for Charli to be jealous of Taylor Swift’s unfathomably large audience, it shows that Charli wants to make art people care about, but Charli has been wildly successful by all standards, even before BRAT.
On the other side of the sympathyknife, yes, Taylor Swift is the most cared about artist on earth. But with that most cared about artist status, Taylor Swift has used her platform to dump a sprawling album about how she’s sad her brief boyfriend left her. She has millions of people who care about her, but her life seems pretty isolating. Unlike Charli, she’s not part of a major artistic moment. She’s riding the remnants of the 2010s radio monoculture into the 2020s algo culture as the peak most listened to artist, but her music isn’t super fresh and brave. In order to keep up her status as most-cared-about-artist she’s on her second summer of grueling four-hour football stadium shows in front of 50,000 people, which she does three straight days every weekend. If I had to choose to live a life like Taylor Swift’s or Charli XCX’s, I’d choose Charli XCX, and it wouldn’t be super hard.
Maybe the fact that I choose Charli’s life is the point of the second layer of taking pride in the jealousy, and “Sympathy is a knife” is functioning as intended. But I guess what I’m left with is feeling bad for Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift has artistic ambitions too. Her commitment to her football stadiums full of people who care about all the art she’s made over her long career is so admirable. Yes, Taylor Swift isn’t making music that people in Bushwick will gush over, but she’s making art people care about. Lots of young girls across America feel less lonely because of Taylor Swift’s art, and though it’s not as exciting as what Charli XCX makes, it’s still important. Maybe Taylor Swift is the true jealous lonely artist.
This is great! The satisfying dualism (shame/pride) of Charli's jealousy here is a tension that makes this song work really well. Ty for foregrounding that here because, honestly, I was caught up in the dishiness of it.
On the note of shame/pride being linked thru others' sympathy, though, I wonder if your sympathy to Taylor's current position, isolated for years on the Ticketmaster/Billboard mountaintop, would be irritating *to Taylor!* That's what I think the song is about: be careful with your sympathy because it's a fuckin' knife! It turns shame to pride and pride to shame and back again.
Maybe that's why Charli's aligning herself with the mean girls and more generally pushing against the niceness imperative: being fake nice is genuinely more emotionally damaging than being an honest hater, in Charli's telling. And now my midwestern ass is in a bind because being fake nice is my favorite way to be an honest hater
Mr. Healing,
I believe you've missed an important element of this feud.
Later on the album, the song "Girl, So Confusing" is widely understood to be a sympathetic portrait of Lorde, who it also portrays as being kind of a bitch. The premise is that Lorde isn't a very good friend, but that this is understandable because it's hard to be a pop star. This is well documented.
But what is less commented on is that following the great Lorde-Antonoff-Taylor split of the 2010s and some poorly choreographed interviews, Lorde found herself expelled from Taylor's clique.
For Charli to write about how she's willing to stick with the trouble with Lorde is a clear attack on Taylor's fake-friend posturing—Taylor is thin-skinned and judgemental, Charli believes in being sympathetic even to people's faults.
One could even read Von Dutch as an anti-Taylor broadside in this light, although there isn't as much textual evidence.
And there's some evidence this feud has been anticipated by Taylor—what's this widely mocked line if not an adolescent attempt at channelling Charli's style?
> You know how to ball, I know Aristotle
> Brand new, full-throttle (yeah)
> Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto
Overall, I anticipate that this is a sufficiently large broadside that things escalate substantially, with Taylor taking the bait. It truly is the year of the hater.