“Better Than Revenge” Gets a Lyric Change on “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)”

Well, it’s true: there’s a “Better Than Revenge” lyric change on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).

The 2010 song is one of the most controversial of Swift’s career, with lyrics that people have called “slut-shaming” for years. As the song has aged, however, it’s also developed a culty appreciation, the kind of song you scream-sing at karaoke with a winking admission that it’s kind of f*cked up. (See also: Paramore’s “Misery Business.”) Of course the song is petty with some low blows to its subject, but Swift was also writing from the raw emotional minefield of teenagedom.

“I was 18 when I wrote that,” she told The Guardian back in 2014. “That’s the age you are when you think someone can actually take your boyfriend. Then you grow up and realize no one take someone from you if they don’t want to leave.” In 2015, Hayley Williams of Paramore would echo Swift’s 2014 words about her own “anti-feminist” song. “Those words were written when I was 17… Admittedly, from a very narrow-minded perspective,” Williams wrote. “It wasn’t really meant to be this big philosophical statement about anything. It was quite literally a page in my diary about a singular moment i experienced as a high schooler …and that’s the funny part about growing up in a band with any degree of success. people still have my diary. the past and the present. all the good AND bad and embarrassing of it!”

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It turns out growing up, for Swift, can mean rewriting the past. The song as a whole is still more or less in tact; it’s still a sharp-edged callout of a woman who “stole” her boyfriend, with cutting asides about her snooty vintage dresses and pseudo sophistication. But gone is the most oft-criticized line: “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.”

In its place is a softened admonition: “He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches,” Swift sings on “Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version).”

It makes sense that Swift would perhaps not want to re-record a line she now fundamentally disagrees with writing, but something about the “Better Than Revenge” lyric change does feel sad. It feels like losing something more honest, even if it wasn’t perfect, nice, politically correct, or even an accurate read of the situation. “Everyone has a narrative to defend and set straight, a side of the story to tell, though they won’t always have the right words to say in the moment,” Rolling Stone‘s Larisha Paul wrote a few months ago in a well-argued thesis on why Swift shouldn’t change the lyric.

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“The songs that came from this time in my life were marked by their brutal honesty, unfiltered diaristic confessions and wild wistfulness,” Swift wrote on Instagram about Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). Now, perhaps, Swift is so big it’s impossible to be brutally honest, to be unfiltered in the way she once could be. Blame the mobs that go after years-old song subjects on the internet, blame the artist who built a career on heartfelt songwriting and not-so-coded messages, blame the fame machine that blows up performers into larger-than-life role models who aim to please, blame the passage of time that softens us all.