Taking the throne inevitably means bumping off the old queen, and Charli XCX was more than willing to hip-check Taylor Swift in a feature crowning her as the future of pop stars. XCX unfavorably painted Swift's audience as a bunch of children in a cover story interview with Pitchfork.
XCX was asked about her time on tour with Swift, and the indiesphere's beloved pop singer didn't hold back her feelings about tagging along with Taylor. "I'm really grateful that [Taylor] asked me on that tour," she said. "But as an artist, it kind of felt like I was getting up on stage and waving to 5-year-olds."
Swift's fans aren't known for being a forgiving bunch and they instantly circled the wagons at the first sign of Charli's attack. They didn't appreciate the characterization and came with all the "Who are you again?" energy you might expect from the footsoldiers of a fan army for one of the biggest artists on the planet.
While that is to be expected, what might shock people is all of the fans who are willing to give Charli the benefit of the doubt. Plenty of Twitter users took Charli's words in good faith and interpreted them as the singer explaining the difference between performing for Taylor Swift's audience and performing for her own.
Like Swift, Charli XCX is in album rollout mode for her upcoming Charli. And she's mostly over the idea of opening for anyone, which the full piece spelled out. "I’ve done so much of it, and it really cemented my status as this underdog character, which I like now,” she said. “But I need to just own my own fucking shit finally.”
Charli eventually took to Twitter to clarify her comments regarding Swift's fans.
"In the printed version of this much wider conversation my answers about this tour were boiled down into one kind of weird sentence – leading up to that tour I’d been playing a tonne of 18+ club shows and so to be on stage in front of all ages was new to me and made me approach my performances with a whole new kind of energy – more so I talked about how it was brilliant opening for Taylor, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity I was given and how much fun it was to perform for a new audience," she wrote.
Read the full feature here.
