"Sexy baby" - Taylor & Taboo

Why Taylor Swift's complaint shouldn't be dismissed as 'just a weird lyric'.

My two year old son recently announced to the room “Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me” and laughed. To the untrained (or ungenerous) ear, I’m raising him with a perverse emphasis on original sin. The truth is far worse… I’ve been playing Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero on loop… partly in an effort to understand the lyric “sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby” (and partly just out of respect).

The received wisdom is that the lyric is a reference to 30 Rock’s ‘Abby’ whom Tina Fey’s character desperately tries to persuade to drop the ‘sexy baby act’. But Taylor & Tina are commenting on the same thing…

By virtue of having much cooler and better connected friends than myself, in my late teens I found myself semi-regularly hanging out with a young Hollywood actress my own age.
It was far easier than any of us expected to be about as normal around her as any of us boys’ school boys were around girls… which meant it was far more of a shock to the system when members of the national press started a prurient countdown to her eighteenth birthday. While we were enjoying our youth, hers was being enjoyed by others. When her eighteenth finally arrived, paparazzi were lying on the ground trying to get pictures up her skirt, attempting to capture the moment of sexualised youth, quickly now - not so late that it’s absorbed by womanhood, but no sooner than allowed (the pictures would have been illegal 24hrs previously).

She was hardly the only one: