Taylor Swift censors ‘anti-feminist’ lyric in her 2010 song Better Than Revenge
After facing criticism for slut-shaming, the pop star has revised a controversial lyric from her 2010 song Better Than Revenge.
Pop star Taylor Swift has revised the lyrics of her 2010 song Better Than Revenge, which received criticism for its perceived misogynistic content.
Today, Swift released Speak Now (Taylor‘s Version), the third instalment of her Taylor’s Version series, consisting of re-recorded versions of her albums predating Lover.
The decision to re-record her previous catalogue was prompted by the sale of her master recordings to Scooter Braun, a music manager who had handled the career of Swift’s music adversary Kanye West during the peak of the artists’ feud, in 2016. Each prior release in the Taylor’s Version series has been faithfully re-recorded note by note with the intention of supplanting the originals and thereby reducing their value — until now.
After facing criticism for slut-shaming in the song Better Than Revenge, an album deep-cut, Swift has censored its lyrics. The original version included the lines, “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.” In Swift’s latest release, the final lines have been changed to, “He was a moth to the flame/She was holding the matches, whoa.”
Ahead of the release of the re-recorded album, Swift wrote on Instagram that “The songs that came from this time in my life were marked by their brutal honesty, unfiltered diaristic confessions and wild wistfulness.”
Speak Now, released in 2010, was Swift‘s first album consisting entirely of songs she wrote herself, penned when she was 18-19 years old. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, she addressed the controversial lyric, stating, “As a teenager, I didn’t understand that saying you’re a feminist is just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities. What it seemed to me, the way it was phrased in culture, society, was that you hate men.”
Swift is not the first pop star to “correct the record” in recent years. Paramore singer Hayley Williams, who is featured on a bonus track on the re-record of Speak Now, announced in 2018 that she would no longer perform her band’s breakout hit Misery Business due to criticism of its anti-feminist lyrics.