Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” Single “Anti-Hero” is A Lot Deeper Than You Realize

There are two facts in life — 1. Taylor Swift never misses and 2. “Anti-Hero” is the perfect single for “Midnights.” And while the “sexy baby” lyric is already on everyone’s for you page, there’s a lot more to the lyrics than you would realize at first glance. A couple of themes are pretty obvious, like how she vilifies herself throughout the song, while there are more subtle topics that she touches on in her single. 

First of all, the title is about how she sees herself as an anti-hero because she antagonizes and criticizes everything about herself, as seen in the lyrics. By definition, an anti-hero is a main character in a story who may lack conventional heroic qualities and attributes, which fits the bill as she talks about the qualities she lacks and her negative traits throughout the song. 

She kind of self-deprecates because she repeats, “I’m the problem, it’s me” throughout all of her choruses. “Everyone at tea time agrees” shows that she’s paranoid about her reputation and personality, which makes sense with her feud with Kanye West. She’s insecure about how she’s perceived and everything about her.  

The most obvious form of self-deprecating here is when she refers to herself as a “covert narcissist,” someone who displays symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder but in more subtle ways, which she “disguise[s] as altruism like some kind of congressman.” That is quite the deserved roast of congressmen, but more importantly, it highlights that she doesn’t feel as though her kindness comes from a genuine place as much as it does her ego. This is very anti-hero like, as narcissism is definitely not a positive attribute. 

We obviously can’t skip the lyric that everyone’s talking about, “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby.” Some just chalked it up to bad lyrics (a very rare phenomenon for Taylor Swift), while some interpreted it as pedophilia. Any Swiftie knows that there are NO coincidences in Taylor Swift songs, and this is the case here. It’s actually a reference to a line in 30 Rock, where the protagonist, played by Tina Fey, tells her colleague to “drop the sexy baby act.” Taylor Swift is 32 and turning 33 in December, which makes the ‘baby’ part make more sense — she works in an industry that emphasizes youth and equates it with beauty, so naturally, she might feel more insecure about it, which is part of what this song is about. 

The next lines are, “And I’m a monster on the hill. Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city,” which some people on TikTok speculate are about her height, which makes sense because she’s 5’11” and being tall is an insecurity that many women deal with. In her music video, one of her ‘versions’ is a giant who intimidates a dinner party and is later seen marching towards the other two versions of her on a concrete road.

There’s been some discourse surrounding the music video because of a scene where she steps on a scale that says “fat,” which could be seen as fatphobic, but it’s unlikely since she’s opened up about her eating disorder in the documentary, “Miss Americana.” During an interview with Variety, she opened up, saying, “I didn’t know if I was going to feel comfortable with talking about body image and talking about the stuff I’ve gone through in terms of how unhealthy that’s been for me — my relationship with food and all that over the years.” This is one of the less subtle themes of the single.

Though a lot of the themes are related to body image issues, some show her other insecurities. She’s been dating Joe Alwyn for six years, and for the most part, it seems healthier than a lot of her past relationships (ahem “All Too Well”). “I wake up screaming from dreaming one day I’ll watch as you’re leaving and life will lose all its meaning” seems to be about the relationship she’s currently in since he’s been in her life so long that it would be a drastic change if he left. This also reads as pretty codependent and almost self-loathing, given the context of this song. 

This almost seems like a self-deprecation anthem, but at least it’s self-aware. The song starts out with “when my depression works the graveyard shift” and then explains how she spirals about the people she’s ghosted.

It’s obvious that she put her heart and soul into this song because it has so many layers! Many have commented that this song has been especially relatable because, Jesus fucking Christ, she literally just put the female experience into a singular synth-pop bop. 

Also, it’s the best song on Midnights.