Music bloggers and devoted Swifties alike have been speculating about an impending Taylor Swift lyric for months. On Friday, at the stroke of midnight, Swift rereleased an album she originally put out when she was 19, Speak Now, as part of her labor-intensive project to rerecord her music and make herself the owner. Aside from bonus tracks, most of the songs are near-perfect dupes of the originals; the entire point is that streaming “Taylor’s Version” puts money in Swift’s pocket, not that of a random business guy.
But many predicted that Speak Now’s Track 10, titled “Better Than Revenge,” would contain an alteration. In that song, Swift sings about a girl who has swept away her love interest, calling her “not a saint,” an “actress,” before delivering this blow: “She’s better known for the things that she does/ On the mattress.”
Shaming another woman for having sex—it’s not very “fuck the patriarchy,” is it? Now, as Rolling Stone and Vulture cautioned she might, on the new version of the track she has indeed altered the line. The new one in its place: “He was a moth to the flame/ She was holding the matches.”
I’ll admit: It’s an inventive and poetic line that scans with the original rhythm of the song beautifully. It neatly tosses aside the slut-shaming to shift the focus to the ex. (His intellectual capacity is that of an insect!)
Still … I hate it! I’m a women’s-college-alum, sex-positive certified Swiftie. But I think she should have kept the original mattress line. By changing it, Taylor has slipped back in time, shaken her finger at her 18-year-old self, and weaponized a magical musical eraser against her own work.
Speak Now is not, let’s say, a mature album. In the title song, she snarks about her romantic rival’s “snotty little family all dressed in pastels.” (In this track, Swift is the one stealing a man, and from the altar on his wedding day, no less.) At the climax of “Mean,” a musical response to a particularly scathing review she received, she doesn’t just defend herself against the criticism, but she takes it a step further, addressing the critic directly: “All you are is mean/ And a liar, and pathetic, and alone in life.”
And here’s how “Better Than Revenge” itself starts: “Now go stand in the corner and THINK about what you did.” It’s a pretty funny juxtaposition: She’s talking to someone as though she’s the mom and they are a misbehaving child, but her own tone is much closer to that of a tween. Written on the brink of adulthood, this scorcher of a track is believed to be about a relationship that lasted all of three months. Is there anything more teenage than recalling a short fling’s end with so much entitlement, so much drama, so much devastation?
However, it’s that very paradox—mature adult/jilted teen girl—that makes Speak Now so special. Wanting to prove that her earlier successes weren’t just the product of her co-writers, Swift set out to write the whole album alone. Although she’s improved as a songwriter since (and benefited from collaborations, as any creative does), so many of the now-13-year-old lyrics really do hold up. In Track 5 (essentially the emotional centerpiece of every Taylor Swift album), she glares at a much-older ex-lover and their tumultuous romance with remarkable acuity. She’s wounded, she’s in the same shambles he’s left girls in before, but she’s sharp enough to see a way through it for herself: “I took your matches before fire could catch me/ So don’t look now/ I’m shining like fireworks over your sad, empty town.” On Speak Now, she’s a lyrical genius. But she’s also still young, with so much to learn.
Of course, there are merits to editing the immature sentiment that is the “Better Than Revenge” mattress line: Keeping it would risk newer Swifties’ cheering on lyrics that are a bit misogynistic. Maybe there would even be a cancellation campaign against Swift for preserving the biting, puritanical message. Her fans are known for having a lot to say about the particulars of her work.
But I do think there’s merit in letting the ugly, ungenerous thoughts of a teenager live on, preserved like a disgusting little prehistoric bug in amber. There’s delicious resentment built into that original lyric and its triumphant delivery. You can feel her youthful satisfaction at saying something that she knows is uncouth. And for what it’s worth, I’d say it’s a pretty mild statement, considering the way most middle schoolers would verbally crucify boyfriend stealers at the slumber parties I attended back in 2010.
Swift has made it a bit of a habit to follow public opinion, even when it directly opposes her creative vision: She dropped a homophobic lyric from the 2006 track “Picture to Burn” (though a portion of that stupid line lives on in a hilarious 17-second audio supercut beloved by queer Swifties, including me, on TikTok). She also removed a jubilant lyric—“spelling is fun!” from the 2019 single “ME!” because her fans found it so cringey. (“ME!” is a horrendously cringey song even in this edited version.) Just last year, she cut an image of a scale reading “FAT” from a music video she directed after she received backlash online.
In this latest case with the infamous mattress lyric, it feels like she was simply trying to get out ahead of that vitriol. But the process of bringing her much more grown and measured writing skills to this track also undermines her greater endeavor of reclamation, as Rolling Stone’s Larisha Paul pointed out in the run-up to Speak Now’s release and the predicted lyric change. Why would you incentivize your fans to listen to a version of the song that doesn’t belong to you?
I certainly wouldn’t love if Taylor Swift wrote a new song shaming a woman for her sexual habits (or the perception thereof). Obviously she’s grown up, she’s evolved, and she’s even embraced some pseudo-liberal politics. But “Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version)” isn’t a new song, and the rerecordings aren’t about creating new, less-problematic music.
Sure, it’s also a little immature of me to be upset about one line in a song. And in spite of it all, when I heard the opening guitars blaze on “Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version)” this morning on my bike commute into my grown-up job, I could still delight in the childish villainy the same way I did when I first heard the track at 13. Even without the invocation of a bed, there are quite a few vindictive lines in this song, all delivered with the same mean-spirited fun of the original version. So why don’t you scooch a little closer and share a headphone with me? If we’re just screechy enough in our singalong of the chorus, we might be able to sneak that original lyric back in.
For more on how Taylor Swift is aging, listen to Slate’s 2021 look at her work on The Waves:
