![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/869947253dce9992a766a53140915723db-blake-taylor.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Just two canceled women getting dinner.
\n Photo: Gotham\/GC Images\n <\/p>\n
If you can get past the Disney-villain quality of \u201cCANCELLED!,\u201d the track is one of the strangest on The Life of a Showgirl<\/a>, and one of three tracks where \u201cevil\u201d Taylor Swift comes out to play (alongside \u201cFather Figure\u201d and \u201cActually Romantic\u201d). The song is about Swift welcoming a canceled friend to her \u201cunderworld\u201d (imagine Hot Topic lighting), where she likes her friends \u201ccloaked in Gucci and scandal.\u201d Scandal isn\u2019t necessarily cancellation, though it\u2019s almost certain that Swift doesn\u2019t know the difference. For her, being canceled is when people hate her album; in reality, it\u2019s when someone says a slur on a podcast. When Swift says she likes her friends canceled, it\u2019s hard to take literally: In the years since Reputation<\/a>, she\u2019s been one of the most scandal-averse public figures. That\u2019s never been more clear than in the fallout of her friendship with Blake Lively over the past year.<\/p>\n As a quick recap<\/a>: Swift lent one of her songs to Justin Baldoni\u2019s adaptation of Colleen Hoover\u2019s novel It Ends With Us, starring her pal Lively. During the months the film was in theaters, rumors circled about Lively\u2019s bad behavior, only for 2024 to conclude with Lively filing a lawsuit against Baldoni for harassment, alleging that he used crisis PR to attack her in the media as retribution for their dynamic on set. Baldoni countersued, claiming that Lively wrestled the movie away from him \u2014 sharing, in one part, a story about Lively weaponizing her friendship with Swift against him<\/a>, referring to Swift as one of her \u201cdragons\u201d (\u00e0 la Game of Thrones). While I think it could be low-key flattering to be called a dragon \u2014 they were cute on the show! \u2014 Swift has spent the last several months distancing herself from Lively and the case in general. While she might like her friends canceled, she definitely does not want to be roped into their drama<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving had my own experiences with past judgment and being at the center of many dramatic, scandalous moments in my career where people were all weighing in at once, it makes me move through the world a little bit differently. When other people go through it, you find yourself thinking about how they\u2019re probably gonna get smarter because of this. I don\u2019t naturally cast people aside just because other people decide they don\u2019t like them. I make my own decisions about people based on how they treat me within my life and their actions,\u201d Swift explained<\/a> about the song\u2019s origin. Lively is the most obvious example of a close person in Swift\u2019s life and who one could argue tried to \u201cgirlboss too close to the sun,\u201d but the timing feels fuzzy all considered. If The Life of a Showgirl was recorded during the Europe leg of the Eras Tour, this would have been early days for the Baldoni-Lively dispute, and long before anyone knew anything about the Swift of it all. Perhaps \u201cCANCELLED!\u201d is a defense of Lively: Swift doesn\u2019t care that this is happening. She thinks it\u2019s stupid; that\u2019s her friend and she\u2019s sticking by her. Or maybe it\u2019s something in between. Swift\u2019s explanation of the song suggests she doesn\u2019t cast people aside if other people don\u2019t like them \u2014 an internet mob coming for Lively doesn\u2019t faze her \u2014 but for their actions. So it\u2019s also possible that Swift is annoyed with Lively\u2019s actions while also finding the public outcry and media circus a bit absurd.<\/p>\n When she spoke to Time for her \u201cPerson of the Year\u201d interview<\/a> in 2023, she said that the success of the Eras Tour<\/a> was born out of \u201ctwo horrendous things\u201d happening to her, one of which was \u201cgetting canceled within an inch of [her] life and sanity.\u201d When Swift talks about her own cancellation, she means the fallout of Reputation, her ongoing beef with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, and all that transpired that made her want to run away to England with Joe Alwyn and stay out of the spotlight. \u201cCANCELLED!\u201d is self-referential in that way, but maybe it\u2019s also about how she didn\u2019t care that her fans were mad about Matty Healy being racist on The Adam Friedland Show<\/a> or about whatever is going on with Brittany Mahomes and Donald Trump<\/a>. Maybe it\u2019s about how she doesn\u2019t care that the NFL is a bad organization that cares more about profit than its players. But we know that\u00a0any time Swift tries to argue she doesn\u2019t really care about something, it always becomes clear she cares a lot<\/a>. Even if she doesn\u2019t mind when her friends are canceled, she\u2019d certainly rather they not be. \u201cIf you can\u2019t be good, be better at it,\u201d she warns in the bridge. Swift survived her time in the underworld, but that doesn\u2019t mean she\u2019s going to help anyone dig themselves out of their grave.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just two canceled women getting dinner. Photo: Gotham\/GC Images If you can get past the Disney-villain quality of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":276120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[45511,34237,83550,19003,142791,171,142793,19386,975,50,4006,3571,83222,3572,84328,67,132,68,142792],"class_list":{"0":"post-276119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-blake-lively","9":"tag-brittany-mahomes","10":"tag-cancel-culture","11":"tag-cancellations","12":"tag-disney-music","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-excluded-from-the-narrative","15":"tag-matty-healy","16":"tag-music","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-pop-music","19":"tag-taylor-swift","20":"tag-the-life-of-a-showgirl","21":"tag-travis-kelce","22":"tag-ts12","23":"tag-united-states","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-villain-anthem"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115313671332641920","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}