Taylor Swift fans are convinced that the musician made a subtle dig at Kim Kardashian while performing onstage during her second night at Wembley Stadium.
As the pop superstar played the introduction to her song “thanK you aIMee”, which is largely believed to be a reference to her years-long feud with reality star Kardashian, Swift told the London crowd: “Every time someone talks s***, it makes me work even harder.”
“It makes me that much tougher. It also makes me incredibly thankful for those people,” she said, before playing “thanK you aIMee” live for the first time since it was released as part of her new album The Tortured Poets Department.
After hearing Swift’s “thanK you aIMee” introduction, one fan concluded: “Taylor just basically confirmed that thanK you aIMee is a million % about Kim.”
When Swift released the track in April, her fans were quick to notice that the singer seemingly makes several references to Kardashian on it – including the capitalisation of some letters in the song’s title, which spell out: K, I, and M.
Fans also noticed other clues, including a potential reference to Kardashian’s 11-year-old daughter North West previously dancing to her 2014 single “Shake It Off” on TikTok. “Shake It Off” is about ignoring “haters”.
She also mentions “Aimee” stomping over her grave, in a possible nod to the one Swift crawls out of in her music video for “Look What You Made Me Do”, from her 2017 album Reputation. That record was widely interpreted as a “revenge album” after Swift was “cancelled” in 2016, after her feud with Kardashian erupted.
“And maybe you’ve reframed it,” Swift sings on the song. “And in your mind, you never beat my spirit black and blue/ I don’t think you’ve changed much/ And so I changed your name, and any real defining clues/ And one day, your kid comes home singin’/ A song that only us two is gonna know is about you.”
She then sings the chorus: “All the time you were throwing punches, it was all for nothing.”
“And I can’t forgive the way you made me feel/ Screamed “F*** you, Aimee” to the night sky, as the blood was gushin’/ But I can’t forget the way you made me heal.”
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Swift and Kardashian’s long-term feud began when the reality star’s then-boyfriend, rapper Kanye West, notoriously stormed the stage at the VMAs when Swift won the prize for Best Female Video in 2009, as he protested that Beyonce instead deserved the award for “Single Ladies”.
Quashing any appearance of animosity, however, it was Swift who presented West with the Vanguard Award at the VMAs years later in 2014. In a later interview, though, Swift claimed that she and the rapper didn’t speak backstage.
She told Rolling Stone: “I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body.
“I realised he is so two-faced. That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk s***. And I was so upset. He wanted me to come talk to him after the event in his dressing room. I wouldn’t go.”
Then, in 2016, West released his song “Famous”, which featured the lyrics: “I feel like me and Taylor Swift might still have sex/ Why? I made that b**** famous.”
West and Kardashian went on to leak a phone call that appeared to show Swift approving the use of her name in the song.
Swift’s team immediately denied the claims in a statement, claiming that West had not run the lyrics past her as he alleged, but had instead asked her to promote the song: “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. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that b**** famous.’”
The led to backlash against pop star, with critics branding her a “snake”, with the singer taking a hiatus from the public eye.
“My career was taken away from me,” Swift told Time in an interview for her Person of the Year 2023 award.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar. That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before.
“I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone any more. I went down really, really hard.”
“I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life,” she said.
The Independent has contacted Kardashian’s representatives for comment.