While you were fixated on the redwoods and magic wands of Taylor Swift’s ode to fiancé Travis Kelce’s wang on “Wood,” I was thinking about a different Life of a Showgirl track. Specifically, this line in “Actually Romantic”: “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave.” Hearing Swift mention the drug, even as a way to (probably) diss Charli XCX, felt transgressive.
Charli herself talks about coke in her music, though it’s coded: The “365” refrain “bumpin’ that” could be about a house beat, a bump of blow or both; “Shall we do a little key? Should we have a little line?” is slightly less subtle. Similarly, the video for Addison Rae’s “High Fashion” (get it?) is a powder-dusted fever dream; on “The Dinner,” Role Model sings, “I know it’s time to go when there’s cocaine on the nose”; and who could forget the “cocaine, side boob” of Harry Styles’ “Keep Driving”?
Maybe now that weed is legal in so many states it’s no longer subversive and the ante had to be upped. Or maybe I’m experiencing the Baader-Meinhof frequency illusion, the psychological phenomenon of noticing something more once you’re aware of it. To my Gen X ears, musicians calling out coke so fearlessly feels a bit like saying “Beetlejuice” three times — it’s something we’re supposed to just say no to.
“You’re not imagining it,” futurist Chloe Combi tells Us about the trend. “We are emerging from close to a decade that shaped Gen Z when it was much younger with the whole message of clean living and sobriety and wellness influencers,” she says. “Gen Z were exhibiting almost oppositional teenage behavior to previous generations: They weren’t drinking, they weren’t smoking and they weren’t doing recreational drugs. The statistics back that up.” Now things are changing.
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In her newsletter The (Generation) A–Z, Combi explores the habits of young people: “There’s been quite a lot of inertia for the last few years for lots of different reasons [like] the pandemic and people being zombified by their phones.” She says Gen Z, who are currently aged around 13 or 15 to 28, wants to claw back the fun they missed; Gen A, ages 15 and younger, want to make sure they don’t miss it in the first place. Add to that the rise of rage in response to global inequities and injustice, and “what’s the reaction to that historically?” Combi asks. “You party. You get wasted.”
Gen Z trends expert and Highly Flammable newsletter author Rachel Richardson sees the pattern too. “We live in an economy entirely fueled by attention, and how better to get attention? It relates to the broader cultural shift of being honest to the point of cutting yourself open and admitting to illegality.” In fact, she says, “the commodification of diaries is a trend,” whether in songwriting or on Substack.
And that doesn’t just go for drugs. (See also Lily Allen’s lyrics about butt plugs in a Duane Reade bag and Kendrick Lamar’s Drake takedown, says Richardson.) The thought process is, “I’m going to dig into my trauma, my deepest darkest feelings, my unpopular opinion to get a reaction,” says Richardson. And to that end, plenty of artists paint an unglamorous portrait of drugs, like Lola Young, who sings about her battle with addiction, and Reneé Rapp, whose “Snow Angel” is a recounting of being drugged and assaulted.
Also, it’s worth adding: As listeners, we assume that the narrators of songs equal the songwriters themselves, but there’s really no way to know it unless they tell us explicitly. They could be crafting a fictional universe the same way a novelist does. We think we know Taylor Swift inside and out because her songs are so personal and resonant, but the truth is, we don’t know nearly as much about her as we think we do. That goes for all artists who sing in the first person or tend to stick to particular themes. We’re doing as much storytelling to ourselves as they are to us.
Sex, drugs and rock & roll have of course always gone together, at least lyrically. “I don’t know how new it is necessarily, it more just depends on the pop star,” Billboard deputy editor Andrew Unterberger tells Us. “Maybe it would’ve been shocking if Paula Abdul or New Kids on the Block sang about coke in the late ’80s, but not so much Prince — who did sing “What you putting in your nose?” on “Pop Life” — or Madonna, who later made an extended Molly joke at Ultra festival.”
In fact, it’d be hard to find a decade of music that didn’t lyrically address cocaine. Allen’s “Everyone’s At It” off her 2008 album It’s Not Me, It’s You, literally asks the question, “When will we tire of putting s*** up our noses?” Halsey‘s 2017 track “Bad at Love” laments losing a lover to the drug: “Got a girl with California eyes and I thought that she could really be the one this time. But I never got the chance to make her mine because she fell in love with little thin white lines.”
Adds Unterberger, “Maybe it’s a little surprising when Taylor specifically does it because we’ve known her since she was a teenager and she did seem to have understandable interest in keeping a “clean” image at least in her early career. But she’s also a 35-year-old now, one who’s been a celebrity for more than half her life and is now engaged to be married; I think she realizes it would feel inauthentic if she limited herself lyrically to strictly PG-rated material. And for what it’s worth, it’s not like she’s singing about doing cocaine herself in “Actually Romantic” — which would maybe be more controversial — but just sorta laughing at an unnamed rival for doing so.”
Also? Swift is not only 35 but also the biggest musician on the planet. It may be more a “me” thing than a “her” thing that I find it shocking she knows what coke is.
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To the trend watchers and forecasters, it’s all of a piece. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” says Combi. “The drug patterns follow the psychological patterns… We’re definitely seeing an emergence of a more aggressive drug culture that kind of mirrors the psychology of the generation.” In fact, she says, “I think we’re in for quite a hard-partying decade.”
