In October 2025, Taylor Swift released her 12th album, Life of A Showgirl. Largely a critical and popular flop, the main buzz it generated surrounded the Pixies-interpolating track “Actually Romantic.” As The BBC reports, “Actually Romantic is about an unnamed fellow popstar – and social media has blown up with speculation that it’s a Charli XCX diss track”. Opening with the line “I heard you call me “Boring Barbie” when the coke’s got you brave,” the song narrates Swift’s belief that another woman’s criticisms of her are actually so-called “negs,” which Urban Dictionary defines as “Low-grade insults meant to undermine the self-confidence of a woman so she might be more vulnerable to your advances.” As the song tells it, this other woman is obsessed with criticizing Swift for being basic and “tacky”, and rather than feeling bad about this criticism she finds this obsession “actually romantic.” Listeners believe Swift is referring to Charli’s brat track “Sympathy is a Knife”, which is about how being in the presence of a more successful colleague (“This one girl taps my insecurities…I couldn’t even be her if I tried.”) The reason listeners think “Sympathy” is about Swift is that Charli is now married to the drummer from the indie band The 1975 (the “George” mentioned in “Sympathy”), and in 2023 she crossed paths with Swift when the latter was briefly dating the band’s frontman. “Sympathy,” like brat as a whole, depicts the complicated and ambivalent inner life of the self Charli presents to us on the album. “Romantic” is a nearly three-minute disavowal that Charli’s perceived slight actually hurt Swift; as any astute reader of Freud’s “Negation” essay might infer, this doth-protest-too-much disavowal sounds a lot like an affirmation that these criticisms did indeed sting. If this person’s comments really didn’t matter, why spend a whole album track (and possible copyright infringement lawsuit) on them?

“Actually Romantic” neither overcomes nor resolves damage; instead, it turns the fact of being criticized into a spectacle of personal injury. Though the lyrics attempt to position Swift’s narrator in a position of strength and invulnerability, the music’s interpolation of The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” strongly aligns the song with the contemporary right-wing grievance politics, which frame white and typically masculine identity around victimhood and personal injury.

As I show elsewhere, the anti-affirmative backlash of the 80s and 90s gave rise to a new form of what critical race theorist Cheryl Harris calls “whiteness-as-property,” or the idea that white people experience the benefits white supremacy gives to them as a property interest or form of property ownership. In U.S. law, personal injury – which includes defamation – is a civil property crime where the defendant is accused of infringing on the plaintiff’s right to enjoy property they are entitled to, such as damaged personal property, lost wages, or sullied reputation. Over the 80s and 90s, right wing activists and mainstream media outlets like The New York Times constructed a narrative that affirmative action constituted a personal injury to white men, robbing them of the things like jobs and college admissions to which they had traditionally been entitled. Though white American masculinity has historically been grounded in ideals of strength and dominance, these narratives made victimhood and injury acceptable features of white masculinity, so long as that injury came from white women, feminists, and people of color.

As Lauren Goodlad pointed out in 2003, by the late 90s and early 2000s, that narrative of white masculine victimhood had come to dominate corporate alternative rock radio. Cataloging songs like Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie” alongside DJ banter from stations like Seattle’s THE END, Goodlad presents millennial alt rock radio as a space where “women ambivalently represent both indispensable sexual gratification and emasculating discipline” (Goodlad 143). Presenting women as both annoying scolds and sexual objects, millennial alt rock radio treats women as “politically correct” nags robbing men of their purported entitlement to women and their bodies and frames men as victims of feminism. In so doing, aughts alt rock associates sounds that typically voice left-wing ideas with reactionary politics. As Goodlad notes, Limp Bizkit’s hit “Nookie” “translates a discernibly Rage [Against The Machine]-indebted sound onto a depoliticzed anger at an unfaithful girlfriend” (147). Taking neoliberal privatization into the cultural realm, “Nookie” and its ilk turn modern rock’s lefty politics into right-wing masculine personal injury.

2020s right-wing figures have taken up this association between millennial alt rock and reactionary culture. For example, in a June 2025 post on the microblogging site X (formerly Twitter), right-wing influencer known as @DC_Draino posted the claim that “Gen Z kids are listening to Creed & Nickelback, They’re going to church in record numbers, They’re intolerant of LGBT extremism, They’re supporting Trump in record numbers…And it turns out when the human mind isn’t brainwashed, it drifts towards the Bible and traditional values, And 90s rock.” Although Nickleback’s biggest hit didn’t come out until the 21st century, in @DC_Draino’s mind neoreactionary values like homophobia and authoritarianism are associated with an appreciation for “90s rock”. Similarly, once Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny was announced as the performer for the 2026 Superbowl halftime show, Newsweek reported that “MAGA Calls for Creed to Play Rival Superbowl Show.” Bad Bunny is a Latin American artist who sings and raps mainly in Spanish and is known both for his gender-bending sartorial style and his criticisms of Donald Trump. Right-wing extremists counterpose that to Creed, a 90s alt rock band with Christian roots and possibly the only song to take an explicit stance against affirmative action (1997’s “One”). As Newsweek reports, MAGA influencer Jack Probosec argued that Creed should headline an alternative Superbowl halftime show because they are “The peak of America.” Though Creed – like Nickleback – have long served as icons of the deeply uncool, the contemporary right wing takes them as deserving representatives of white American identity precisely because they are more into grievance than coolness. Right-wing influencers explicitly evoke “90s” alternative rock as representations of them and their values because songs like “Nookie” have reframed the sound of alternative rock around narratives of masculine personal injury.

“Actually Romantic” couches Swift’s address to her interlocutor in these same musical and rhetorical terms. First, like Goodlad’s research subjects, Swift’s lyrics frame her femme interlocutor as both a scold, “like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse,” and an object of sexual desire that “make[s] me wet.” The song’s premise that Swift’s critic is actually romantically in love with her takes up “Nookie’s” reframing of white grievance politics as “depoliticized anger” at a “girlfriend.” In addition to these rhetorical moves, the music in “Actually Romantic” aligns Swift’s song with the alt rock song that was made famous avant-la-lettre by its use in the 1999 film Fight Club. The Pixies 1988 “Where Is My Mind?” soundtracks the film’s closing scene, where Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter stand and watch as the skyscrapers around them implode in acts of terrorism committed by Norton’s character’s antihero alter ego. “Actually Romantic” takes the guitar part pretty directly from “Where Is My Mind?”, and this musical interpolation should also be taken as a reference to the film because “Where Is My Mind?” was a forgotten album track until the film sparked new interest in it. Both Pixies frontman Frank Black and the track’s producer Steve Albini attribute the song’s popularity to its placement in Fight Club, and I have hard data that shows even hardcore modern rock fans didn’t really pay attention to the song until then either. Though “Where Is My Mind?” tops the 2009 version of modern rock station WOXY’s annual 500 best-of countdown, it did not appear on that annual countdown until 2002. Fight Club is so central to the song’s reception that an invocation of “Where Is My Mind?” is an invocation of Fight Club.

…And an invocation of Fight Club is an invocation of the alt-right. Based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, the film is about white masculine identity crisis in late capitalism. It is widely known that, as scholar Jason Andrew Bartashius put it, “the ‘alt-right’ is…known to extensively reference Fight Club”. Most notably, the novel and the film popularized the use of the term “snowflake” as a misogynist slur for people who are supposedly too sensitive to “politically incorrect” ideas. As UrbanDictionary contributor Dynamite75 put it in a 2016 entry, “snowflake” refers to “An insult, used to mean that a person is too easily insulted or is too sensitive to the opinions. Mainly used by Alt-Right Trumpet blowers, who ironically, don’t realize they are the very definition of the insult they love to throw around.” Writing in 2019, Peter C. Baker locates Fight Club’s die-hard fans in the nascent “manosphere” among the pickup artist community and men who “wan[t] to talk about Bitcoin and Jordan Peterson.” Martha-Lotta Körber notes how the film’s antihero-protagonist Tyler Durden has become subject of “intermedial recon-textualizations…within the subcultures of the Manosphere.” The manosphere is a network of male-supremacist online subcultures. As Körber shows, these subcultures use stories where a basic, corporate white guy “awakens” to find a true, inner, more macho self – such as Fight Club and The Matrix – to narrate their inductees’ and members’ conversion from “normie” to “red-pilled” enlightenment regarding the supposed realities of male victimhood. These days, Fight Club is basically a right-wing meme.

Combining music that signals right-wing grievance with lyrics that perform the ambivalent misogyny that has commonly been the vehicle for such grievance, “Actually Romantic” appears to have abandoned the centrist chill of “You Need to Calm Down” in favor of personal injury and alt-right trolling. By citing Fight Club via The Pixies, a band that broke up before the big alt-rock boom of the 90s took off, and framing misogynist grievance as mean girl bickering, “Actually Romantic” softens the edges around common extreme right tropes and gives Swift some plausible deniability about her intended meaning. Unlike Charli, who turns to femme cool as an alternative to neoliberal feminine resilience, Swift turns, at least in the context of this song, to a femmed-up version of manosphere-style neoreaction.

TikTok user @dorcassswg’s “Analysis on Taylor Swift vs. Charli XCX” observes that Swift’s uncool turn to grievance aligns her with other more legible members of the contemporary far right.

Taylor has won the war, statistically. You’re one of the biggest pop stars in the world…but one thing that she’s never been fully able to embody is that cool, edgy, like cool vibe…You kind of see that with Elon Musk as well, people who have everything but their main gripe in life is they’ve never been the cool kid…Charli XCX is just cool.

Swift, like Musk, is effectively the wealthiest person in her industry; it would be difficult to describe her as facing any significant impediment to her success. But despite making more money in the last year than basically any other musician on earth, the performances of safe, legible white cisheterofemininity that’s pretty without being overtly sexual that have led to her longevity and ubiquity as a star can never cool-ly disidentify with basic white femininity because it IS basic white femininity. “Boring Barbie” can’t be cool, so she turns to grievance to generate the buzz (if not the cultural capital) Charli’s cool grants her.

In this respect, Swift leans into what I have elsewhere called “neoreactionary masculine resilience,” where otherwise-privileged men use the performance of personal injury to exhibit the damage necessary to engage in resilience discourse and its form of value-accumulation. In the world of pop music, feminine resilience may now be cringe and old-fashioned, but “Actually Romantic” seems like Swift’s bid to leverage reactionary resilience to create the kind of organic social media engagement that even the most highly-anticipated release of the year couldn’t expect to guarantee on its own. Even though her persona on earlier albums focused on the chill eschewal of resilience, “Actually Romantic” suggests that Swift’s most recent “era” doesn’t reject resilience so much as resilience tied to the performance of hegemonic neoliberal femininity. Whereas her colleagues like Charli, Sabrina, and Chappel seek out new ways to perform femininity, in the context of this song Swift appears to do the traditional “cool” girl move of wrapping traditionally masculine behaviors, likes, and preferences in an outward appearance that conforms to traditional norms of heterosexual feminine attractiveness: she’s blonde, white, and thin on the outside, but on the inside she expresses the resilient personal injury that has come to characterize mainstream white masculinity in the 2020s.