Tag: the kid laroi

Although many have questioned if Taylor Swift has any taste left after releasing The Life of a Showgirl, she did at least have the good sense to mention to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show that the song she keeps listening to lately is Tate McRae’s “Tit For Tat.” Indeed, it’s the kind of single that Swift might have written at the height of anger during one of her own breakups. Alas, Swift has gotten on the engagement and marriage track, which leaves McRae as the current jilted lover of choice for coming up with post-breakup diss tracks. And the person she’s likely dissing is The Kid Laroi, who she dated for a little over a year—which translates to practically a decade in “young, hot celebrity” dating time.

And certainly long enough to impact The Kid Laroi to the point where he might serve as the G-Eazy to McRae’s Halsey in terms of writing a song with some shade thrown at her. Except, in that case, Halsey was the one to preempt G-Eazy with her hit, “Without Me” (after which he came up with some “disses” of his own that paled in comparison—namely, his feature on “WORK Pt. 4”). McRae, instead, developed the Ryan Tedder and Grant-produced “Tit For Tat” soon after the release of The Kid Laroi’s “A Cold Play.” A single that, although it might come across as “sweet” (e.g., “Around my house, I still got up all of our pictures, baby/‘Cause I still love you, that’s how I feel at my core/Flew different states to come see you in between tour/I gave you everything I had and even more”), is extremely toxic in terms of painting McRae into the villain. This done as The Kid Laroi self-victimizes with such passive aggressive lyrics as, “It’ll always be easy to blamе you/But it’s my fault for thinking I could/Fix you, fix you, fix you, fix you.”

In many ways, it echoes the sentiments of his other breakup anthem, “Without You” (which became even more well-known when Miley Cyrus jumped on a revamped version of it in 2021), during which he “laments” that he “can’t make a wife out of a ho.” And, incidentally, Laroi did join McRae onstage during the Madison Square Garden date of her Think Later World Tour to sing this track with her. How…foreshadowing.

Not just because it retroactively sounds as though “Without You” could have been written for her, but because, evidently, McRae now qualifies as “ho” material for him as he spends most of “A Cold Play” accusing her of being the one at fault for their breakup. This also apparent when he mentions, “You said to me, baby, you was all in/I think we just probably should’ve stayed friends/I think that we probably could’ve saved tears (and saved years).” McRae, in response to being painted as the monster who caused things to fall apart, sets the record a bit straighter from the outset of “Tit For Tat,” tellingly titled as such to show The Kid Laroi that, as Cardi B puts it on “Outside,” “Let’s go wrong for wrong, let’s go lick for lick/If I can handle that, let me see you handle this/Do you how you do me, bet you we won’t speak again.”

Opening with a cheerleader-y kind of chant (think: the sound of Toni Basil on “Mickey”), McRae sets the stage for recounting The Kid Laroi’s own crimes with, “Thought I might love you again, I’ll see how I feel/Now that you’re acting like that, boy, I never will/Last night, she answered my call, it sealed the deal.” The self-assured, even cocky sound of that leads into McRae casually musing, “Right now, I’m not even about you.” However, it clearly seems that it isn’t just “right now,” but forever that McRae isn’t going to be “about” The Kid Laroi. Especially not after he foolishly chose to gas her up with “A Cold Play,” which she addresses him doing directly in the “Tit For Tat” chorus, “Let’s go song for song, let’s go back to back/Let’s go tit for tat, boy, you asked for that/That’s the best you got, where’s the good one at?/I was never as far away as you thought.”

McRae even goes “so far” as to acknowledge that specific “fix you” lyric (itself a meta nod to the band Coldplay) by jibing, “Fix your fuckin’ self, kiss my ass for that.” Along with reminding those on the outside looking in that what Laroi attempted to do with “A Cold Play,” complete with its cloying video that shows the singer in tears (with a close-up, no less), is “changing up the narrative to write” without revealing the deeper complexities of the story. Trying to make it black and white, with McRae firmly in the “bitch” category. Fortunately, McRae isn’t one for taking such a false depiction while lying down.

And surely, these frank, unvarnished expressions of hers must have The Kid Laroi blanching or blushing with shame and embarrassment. The sting of being publicly humiliated (just as he tried to do to her, by the way). Hence, McRae’s additional dig, “That looks like it really hurts/That bruise on your ego/I know that it makes it worse/It had to be me though.” Because, if not McRae, then who else would have been the one to put him in his place? Probably not whoever she caught answering his phone (this in itself echoing the part of the “Say My Name” tale that recounts, “It’s hard to believe that you are at home by yourself/When I just heard the voice, heard the voice of someone else”).

With “Tit For Tat” slated to appear on the deluxe edition of So Close to What, it’s not only a welcome addition to an album that’s further placed McRae amongst the ranks of some of pop’s current crop of heavy hitters, but also cementing of the overarching theme of that record—which is that McRae will not suffer fools. Though, for a moment there, she was willing to, particularly if another song from So Close to What, “I Know Love” featuring The Kid Laroi, was something to go by. Obviously, it no longer is.