Ever since Swift started rerecording her first six records after a dispute with her former Nashville record label, the bonus “vault” tracks included on every album have become a major event within her die-hard fan base. Sometimes they’re collaborations, sometimes they’re versions of hits she wrote for other artists, and sometimes they’re songs updated with new lyrics that cause an internet meltdown. You just never know what you’re going to get.
So fans were especially intrigued in recent weeks when the “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” vault titles were released and the first one was “’Slut!’” — an unusual title with extra quotation marks and an exclamation point. However, when the album dropped at midnight Friday, listeners discovered the song itself is actually a quiet, low-key song about a relationship so magical that it doesn’t matter what anyone else says.
“And if they call me a ‘slut,’ you know it might be worth it for once,” Swift sings in the chorus, indulging in the exclamation point in the last verse when she puts extra emphasis on the word.
But even though the vibe of the song is quite chill, there’s an underlying message of frustration running through it, particularly when Swift sings “Love thorns all over this rose, I’ll pay the price — you won’t.”
For years, Swift has spoken out about how infuriated she was by the demeaning narrative that followed her in her early career, when she was frequently used as a pop culture punchline — during award shows, on talk shows, in tabloids — for dating multiple famous men and writing songs about her ex-boyfriends. In 2014, she lightly addressed such criticism on the original “1989” in songs such as the peppy “Shake It Off” (“I go on too many dates, but I can’t make them stay, at least that’s what people say”) and satirical “Blank Space” (“Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane”).
Later, she became more direct about how much the mockery affected her state of mind. In one much-circulated 2019 interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Swift said some of her most difficult public scrutiny was when she was in her early 20s and “people were just kind of reducing me to kind of making slideshows of my dating life … and deciding that my songwriting was like a trick rather than a skill and a craft.” In her “73 Questions” video with Vogue in 2016, Swift said she wished she could go back and warn her 19-year-old self that one day she would become “a national lightning rod for slut-shaming.”
Swift is still thinking about this today, and even though she didn’t elaborate on it within “‘Slut!’,” she addressed the idea much more harshly in a letter she included in physical copies of “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” which started circulating on social media on Thursday. She wrote that when she was first working on this album, she was in the process of reinventing herself, partially to silence the people who “had begun to shame me in new ways for dating like a normal young woman.”
“In the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut shaming — the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today,” Swift wrote. “The jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath. The media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt.”
“So I swore off hanging out with guys, dating, flirting, or anything that could be weaponized against me by a culture that claimed to believe in liberating women but consistently treated me with the harsh moral codes of the Victorian era,” she continued.
Swift said she tried to stop the criticism by focusing on her career and female friendships. “If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that — right? I would learn later on that people could and people would,” she wrote, referencing the rumors and headlines speculating that she was dating various friends.
On these rerecord projects, Swift always makes it obvious which songs are the most personally meaningful — and on Apple Music, fans noticed that “’Slut!’” is the only “1989” vault track that has separate album art and a designation that it’s a single. Even if the track itself only hints at her many thoughts about the topic, it’s clear for many reasons that the idea behind the song means a lot more.
