Justice for the Teenage Taylor Swift

In smoothing over a messy lyric on the rerecorded Speak Now, Taylor Swift loses the pained, angry, and sanctimonious sound of her teenage self.

Before she released Speak Now, her third album, Taylor Swift was best-known for writing lyrical fairy tales such as “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me,” in which she pined for romantic love and happy endings. But “Better Than Revenge,” from that 2010 record, was something different—an angry song, filled with lines that sounded like they were torn from the pages of a Mean Girls–esque burn book. Over crunchy electric guitars and a pop-punk beat, Swift taunted the new girlfriend of an ex. She ripped apart her subject’s fashion sense, her career choice, and, most controversial at the time, her Sєx life: “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress,” Swift snarled, in the song’s big sing-along chorus.

It was a nasty number, filled with the type of inelegant insults one spews when truly hurt, and it posed a dilemma for Swift’s ongoing project to rerecord her work. If she scrapped the song entirely for its Sєxism, she would have failed to fully rerecord her third album. If she did what Paramore did with their hit “Misery Business”—admit that the song has troubling lyrics but keep it as is—she’d potentially receive more backlash than she did in 2010. In the end, the singer gave “Better Than Revenge” a mini-makeover on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), the album released last week. Instead of sneering at her target’s experience in the bedroom, Swift delivers a misogyny-free metaphor about how her ex’s new relationship came to be: “He was a moth to the flame / She was holding the matches,” go the new lyrics. The sentiment is tamer, and the imagery more poetic, continuing Swift’s overuse of fiery language and willingness to edit her published songwriting. (Swift has previously changed lyrics to “Picture to Burn,” off of her debut album, and “Me!,” off of Lover—tracks that contained offensive, or in the latter’s case, plain bad writing.)