Taylor Swift has changed the title of her alleged Kim Kardashian diss track thanK you aIMee for a new live version of the song.
When Taylor dropped the original single in April, fans instantly noticed she had capitalized K, I, M, and leapt to assume she was taking aim at Kim.
Kim and Taylor have carried on a simmering feud for nearly a decade now, lending credence to the rumors the song was about the reality star.
This week, however, Taylor treated her fans to a new live recording of the song, and the title has been slightly modified to indicate she now has a new target.
Although the name of the track sounds the same when said out loud, Taylor has tweaked the capitalization in a sly switch-up.
Kanye‘s previous 11 albums have all debuted at number one, so his long streak has been broken.
Now the song is written thank You aimEe, so that Y and E are capitalized to spell Ye – the new name of Kim’s third ex-husband, controversial rap star Kanye West.
thank You aimEe for the #TSTTPD digital albums featuring bonus tracks thank You aimEe (Mean – Live from London) and The Prophecy (Long Story Short – Live from Lyon).
Available until tonight at 11:59pm EDT. 🤍 https://t.co/ZSGtuHSAkb pic.twitter.com/98Zk94HjJ3
— Taylor Nation (@taylornation13) August 15, 2024
The lyrics are about a school bully who ‘wrote headlines in the local paper’ sneering at her and even threw ‘punches’ that left her blood ‘gushing.’
‘Everyone knows that my mother is a saintly woman, but she used to say she wished that you were dead,’ Taylor sings in one blistering verse.
Just days before Taylor released her new live version of the song, she was able to achieve a professional victory over Kanye.
Kanye’s previous 11 albums all debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 chart, but his new release Vultures 2 was unable to do so – because the number one position was occupied by Taylor’s The Tortured Poets Department.
Vultures 2, which is a duets project with Ty Dolla $ign, includes a track in which Kanye makes fun of Taylor’s romance with NFL star Travis Kelce.
‘I twist my Taylor spliffs tight at the end like Travis Kelce,’ Kanye raps on the song Lifestyle (Demo), in an unmistakable jab at the relationship.
When the original thanK you aIMee dropped in April, a source told DailyMail.com: ‘Taylor has humiliated Kim, and she knows that there is nothing she can do about it. Kim got what she feared was coming to her eventually, and is now backed in a corner because she knows Taylor’s army will destroy her if she says anything.’
Now the song is written thank You aimEe, so that Y and E are capitalized to spell Ye – the new name of Kim’s third ex-husband, controversial rap star Kanye West
Kanye’s previous 11 albums all debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 chart, but his new release Vultures 2 was unable to do so
Meanwhile, Taylor and Kanye’s feud began explosively in 2009, when he bounded up onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards and cut off her acceptance speech in order to shower praise on her competitor Beyoncé.
Kim married Kanye in Florence in 2014, and a couple of years later she also became embroiled in his feud with the Bad Blood singer.
In 2016, Kanye dropped a song called Famous that included a provocative line about his encounter with Taylor at the VMAs: ‘I made that b**** famous.’
The music video for the single contained a notorious sequence of Kanye laying in bed next to dummies of several topless people, including Kim and Taylor.
Taylor claimed she had no idea Kanye would use the line: ‘I made that b**** famous,’ prompting Kim to denounce her as a ‘snake.’
At that time, Kim leaked a video of Kanye’s phone call to Taylor in which he pitched her his lyric: ‘I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.’
The video suggested Taylor had lied about not being warned about the song, and she received a massive public blowback as a result.
Her social media battering is thought to be part of the reason that Taylor subsequently took a hiatus from music.
She made her comeback in 2017 with her score-settling song Look What You Made Me Do, whose music video made multiple references to the ‘Kimye’ feud.
At one point Taylor mimes shooting a gun while sitting in a tub full of diamonds – apparently a joke about Kim’s Paris robbery, when the reality star was thrown into the bath bound and gagged as the burglars made off with her jewelry.
Early in 2020, as the COVID-19 lockdowns swept America, the feud bubbled up again when a fuller video emerged of Kanye’s phone call with Taylor about Famous.
Over the course of the video, Kanye never consults Taylor about the use of the word ‘b***h’ or the suggestion that he ‘made her famous.’
The Swifties seized on the video as proof that their idol had been vindicated, and the clamor on social media became so intense that Kim issued a response.
Kim accused Taylor of ‘lying’ and sneered at her for deciding ‘to reignite an old exchange – that at this point in time feels very self-serving given the suffering millions of real victims are facing right now.’
She claimed: ‘To be clear, the only issue I ever had around the situation was that Taylor lied through her publicist who stated that “Kanye never called to ask for permission…” They clearly spoke so I let you all see that. Nobody ever denied the word “b****” was used without her permission.’
Kim added: ‘At the time when they spoke the song had not been fully written yet, but as everyone can see in the video, she manipulated the truth of their actual conversation in her statement when her team said she “declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message.”‘
She doubled down: ‘The lie was never about the word b****, It was always whether there was a call or not and the tone of the conversation.’
However, at the time of the original Famous controversy back in 2016, a spokeswoman for Taylor had told a rather different story.
‘Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single Famous on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message,’ she explained. ‘Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, “I made that b**** famous.”‘