Swift played a mashup of the track from her latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” with 2010’s “Mean.”
Never one to let go of a good feud, Taylor Swift revisited her beef with Kim Kardashian during the London stop on her still-ongoing Eras Tour.
Swift played the alleged Kardashian diss track, “thanK you aIMee,” from her eleventh studio album The Tortured Poets Department for the first time live at Wembley Stadium over the weekend.
Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian
Related: Taylor Swift performs 2 diss tracks the day after Scooter Braun retires from music management
“It really makes me think about how every time someone talks s—, it just makes me work even harder and it makes me even tougher,” Swift prefaced the song. “So, it also makes me incredibly thankful for those people.”
Stylized with a not-at-all subtle capitalized K, I, and M, “thanK you aIMee” tells the melodic tale of a school bully, the titular Aimee, whom Swift thanks for helping her build “a legacy which you can’t undo” and how “there wouldn’t be this, if there hadn’t been you.”
Swift then mashed up the newer song with “Mean” from 2010’s Speak Now, aimed at her early critics.
The “Bad Blood” between Kardashian and Swift goes back to the 2009 MTV VMAs when Kardashian’s future ex-husband Kanye West interrupted Swift’s acceptance speech, thus setting off a chain of events now decades in the making.
@saffronslayter WEMBLEY N2 SUPRISE SONG THANK YOU AIMEE X MEAN #theerastour #erastour #taylorswift #suprisesongs
Kardashian got involved in 2016 around the release of West’s song “Famous,” featuring the lines: For all my Southside n—-s that know me best / I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous (Goddamn) / I made that bitch famous.”
Swift disavowed the song when it came out, but Kardashian claimed Swift had previously given her approval, leaking a recorded phone call, and then a video of that phone call, to prove her point. In the call, Swift can be heard saying, “If people ask me about it, look, I think it would be great for me to be like, ‘He called me and told me before it came out … Joke’s on you, guys. We’re fine.’ ”
Swift, however, maintained that she never heard the whole song and that West had only told her about the line about them having sex.
“Of course I wanted to like the song. I wanted to believe Kanye when he told me that I would love the song. I wanted us to have a friendly relationship,” Swift said at the time. “He promised to play the song for me, but he never did. While I wanted to be supportive of Kanye on the phone call, you cannot ‘approve’ a song you haven’t heard. Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination.”
Swift then responded with the 2017 album Reputation and specifically the lead single “Look What You Made Me Do.” Then in 2020, unedited video of the phone call between Swift and West was leaked online, causing both Kardashian and Swift to double down on their previous stances. Kardashian would later claim that she had moved on and couldn’t understand why Swift hasn’t.
Swift explained why she couldn’t in her 2023 Time Person of the Year profile, saying that the fallout from the phone call affair felt like “career death.” She went on to record two songs for The Tortured Poets Department that fans thought referenced Kardashian, “Cassandra” and “thanK you aIMee,” which pretty much catches us all up.
