The Showgirl Survives

Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, features a tenth track boldly titled “CANCELLED!” a song Travis Kelce once teased as a total “banger.” The track dives into the exhausting experience of being publicly “cancelled” despite having done nothing wrong, taking aim at the fastmoving, often unfair culture of online shaming.

Swift knows this territory all too well. Her clashes with cancel culture trace back to 2013, when media criticism of her dating life became relentless. After a public feud with Katy Perry and the explosive success of 1989, Swift was painted as calculating and manipulative. Things escalated when Calvin Harris went on a Twitter rant and #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty shot to the top of trending charts, essentially declaring her career “over.” Soon after, Kim Kardashian released edited clips of a phone call between Swift and Kanye West, seemingly proving Swift approved West calling her a “bitch” in his song Famous a claim she had denied. Years later, in 2020, the full call leaked, revealing that Swift hadn’t actually given the permission people thought she had.

Following the intense backlash, Swift stepped away from the spotlight in 2016 and returned with *reputation* a sharp, self-aware reinvention that reestablished her as a force in pop culture. Since then, she has repeatedly revisited those wounds in her music, most strikingly on tracks like “mad woman,” “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and the pointedly titled “thanK you aIMee,”** a clear nod to the fallout with Kardashian.

With “CANCELLED!,” Swift once again turns pain into power, chronicling how easily the digital mob can take down an artist, and how she’s learned to survive it. But perhaps no song captures Swift’s relationship with power and revenge quite like “Vigilante Shit,” the cool, menacing standout from Midnights. Where other tracks process the hurt, this one dispenses with it entirely. There’s no pleading, no explanation, just the quiet, devastating confidence of a woman who has stopped trying to defend herself and started keeping score.

It’s cancel culture’s worst nightmare: someone who absorbed every attempt to destroy her and came out the other side not wounded, but watching. “CANCELLED!” may be the thesis statement, but “Vigilante Shit” is the proof of concept. The moment Swift stopped being a target and became something far more dangerous, unbothered.

Because if there’s one thing Taylor Swift has proven, it’s that the people who tried to cancel her gave her the best material she’s ever had.

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