By Libby Pierzak-Pee

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid the inevitable happened. The woke police have claimed another victim, this time in the form of Taylor Swift and her decision to change the lyrics to ‘Better Than Revenge’. Now that the dust has settled, and I’ve had time to fully process the shock, I’m still not happy about it.

 

The song is widely considered to be Speak Now’s most controversial song due to the lyrics’ blatant slut-shaming. The fan favourite track combines pettiness with raw emotion as Swift details how a guy she was in love with (Joe Jonas) was stolen from her by another woman (Camilla Belle). The original chorus featured these particularly scathing lyrics: ‘She’s not a saint, and she’s not what you think / She’s an actress, whoa / She’s better known for the things that she does, on the mattress, whoa’.

 

Many argued that because Swift has publicly aligned her brand with feminism in recent years, she should present a more progressive view to the one she originally wrote. Others argued the lyric should be kept as written, with the song representing a time capsule into the life of a heartbroken, angsty teenage girl.

 

On ‘Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version)’, the mattress lyric has been replaced with a somewhat progressive and softer admonition as Swift now sings: ‘He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches, whoa’.

 

This is a rare move for Swift, who has kept her re-recorded albums as close to the originals as possible. Whilst the new lyric is inventive and fits the brief, the less than perfect rhyme feels a little too poetic for a song about revenge.

 

To me, the lyric change is not an empowering feminist statement. Instead, it appears to be an over-correction made pre-emptively in fear of getting cancelled.

 

As a self-confessed pathological people pleaser, this is not the first time Swift has been pressured into changing her work. She removed the ‘spelling is fun!’ lyrics from her 2019 single ‘ME!’ because fans found it cringey. She cut a visual from her 2022 ‘Anti-Hero’ music video after receiving backlash for a scene fans labelled anti-fat. Despite Swift stating that the visual represents her own ‘nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts [playing] out in real time’, and admitting to struggling with an eating disorder, the visual was removed.

 

Taylor has previously responded to criticism surrounding ‘Better Than Revenge’, explaining to The Guardian in 2014, ‘I was 18 when I wrote that. That’s the age you are when you think someone can actually take your boyfriend. Then you grow up and realise no one can take someone from you if they don’t want to leave’.

 

This is just one example of the skewered expectations female artists experience when it comes to the lyrics they write. Double standards within the music industry indicate that women are more likely to be pulled up on their past lyrical faux pas, whereas for male artists, the thought of changing controversial lyrics is less likely to be at the forefront of their minds, much less criticised and scrutinised in such depth. Once again, the onus is on women to correct, rectify, learn and apologise for their lyrical mistakes, even if they were written decades ago.

 

Swift is not the only female artist to change lyrics or stop performing songs that are deemed controversial. Just last year both Beyoncé and Lizzo altered lyrics in their songs ‘Heated’ and ‘Grrrls’, as they were deemed to contain ableist language.

 

Hayley Williams of Paramore announced in 2018 that the band would stop performing their breakout hit ‘Misery Business’ due to its anti-feminist and sexist lyric ‘Once a whore, you're nothing more I'm sorry, that'll never change’. Similarly to Swift, Williams wrote ‘Misery Business’ as a teenager. Speaking about her naivety and narrow-mindedness at writing these particular lyrics at 17, Williams told Track Seven: ‘They literally came from a page in my diary. What I couldn’t have known at the time was that I was feeding into a lie that I’d bought into, just like so many other teenagers – and many adults – before me’.

 

In 2022 the band began performing the song again, with Williams omitting to sing the lyric in question. Despite the criticism, Williams is grateful that the attention brought to the lyrics made her re-evaluate her attitude towards women. ‘It’s made me more compassionate toward other women, who maybe have social anxieties and toward younger girls who are at this very moment learning to cope and to relate and to connect’.

 

The internalised misogyny that permeates ‘Better Than Revenge’ and ‘Misery Business’ is difficult to ignore. But it’s important to remember that both songs were written by two teenage girls at a time where the mainstream feminist discourse was very different. Very few female artists were equipped with the knowledge and societal acceptance to publicly declare themselves feminists. Furthermore, their lyrics simply reflect the messy, reckless attitudes of girlhood, which Swift and Williams have since outgrown.

 

Not only does the lyric change do a disservice to Swift’s teenage self, but the maturity of the new lyric juxtaposes what Speak Now as an album represents. Speak Now is not Taylor Swift’s most mature album nor is it her grand feminist statement. But it was never supposed to be. Entirely self-written between the ages of 18-20, Speak Now was an album filled with songs that were ‘marked by their brutal honesty, unfiltered diaristic confessions and wild wistfulness’.

 

The brilliance of Speak Now lies in the paradox of extremes it presents: the longing to become a mature adult, yet still viewing the world through the eyes of a jilted teenage girl who secretly never wants to grow up.

 

The lyric change also contradicts Swift’s goal of de-valuing her first six studio albums that were sold without her permission. However, due to the ever-worrisome fear of cancel culture, if she hadn’t, it would have inevitably triggered a ‘Taylor Swift is still a misogynist’ hate campaign. The whole point of the re-recording project is for Swift to be able to finally own her work and reclaim creative control, not to create less controversial music in an attempt to avoid getting cancelled.

 

There is something about the immaturity and pettiness of ‘Better Than Revenge’ that deserved to be preserved. Only Taylor Swift could deliver a lyric with the self-congratulatory tone of a teenager who knows deep down that what she is saying is a cheap blow… but she’s going to say it anyway because she’s angry and hurt.

 

Keeping the original lyrics would have allowed Swift to take ownership of her past mistakes. Instead, she chose to use her matured songwriting skills to rewrite the past and quietly erase them. Singing with the beauty of hindsight presented the perfect opportunity for thirty-three-year-old Swift to put the past to bed and comically tell her teenage self to go and stand in the corner and THINK about what she wrote.