What Did Charli XCX Say About Fans’ Taylor Swift Chants?

Stans … will they ever listen? Since the release of her album Brat, Charli XCX has shown her commitment to peace in the pop-girl community. Just a few days ago, Charli XCX released a remix of her song “Girl, so confusing” with a feature from Lorde, whom she’d been compared to for years. In response, Marina Diamandis — another artist Charli was often compared to early in her career — tweeted about how healing she found the album, squashing two nonexistent beefs with one powerful hyperpop track.

But then, Taylor Swift released special The Tortured Poets Department digital albums for the U.K. as she began her tour dates there, prompting some fans to accuse her of stealing Charli’s No. 1 spot on the U.K. charts. It’s also been widely suspected that Charli’s song “Sympathy is a Knife” — which concerns feelings of insecurity toward a girl who was “backstage at my boyfriend’s show” — is about Taylor Swift. All this combined apparently prompted some fans at Charli’s Sunday show in São Paulo, Brazil, to chant, “Taylor is dead,” according to a now-deleted TikTok (this one seems to show a similar scene). Charli responded promptly, sharing a screenshot of the TikTok on her IG Stories that same night:

Photo: @charlix_xcx/Instagram

“It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community,” Charli wrote in text overlaying the screenshot. “I will not tolerate it.” She also tried to get ahead of this sort of fan reaction nearly a month ago in a “brat PSA!” TikTok, where she said that the only “kind of” diss track on the album was “Von Dutch” and that “the other tracks in question aren’t diss tracks.” She went on to specifically call out the difficulties associated with being pitted against her peers in the industry:

And yet, it seems some stans still find their girl so confusing. Can we go back to healing pop, please?