In one of the most poignant and unsubtle diss tracks of Taylor Swift's illustrious career, the Kim Kardashian-bashing ‘thanK you aIMee' is creating a lot of buzz fresh off the surprise release of The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, a second additional set of tracks to Swift's highly-anticipated 11th studio album.
Even Swift's most obvious diss tracks are usually layered with subtlety and nuance, but this one flat out spells the name KIM in capital letters and doesn't leave much to the imagination. Obviously Swift's feelings about her 2016 standoff with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are still raw, but the question is, why release a diss track now, eight years after the fact?
There is no doubt about whether it is indeed a diss track. In “thanK you aIMee” Swift reacts to the sneaky and hurtful actions of a thinly veiled school bully named Aimee. “All that time you were throwin’ punches, I was buildin’ somethin’ / 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.”
There's also little doubt that Aimee is a stand-in for Kim Kardashian, with Swift even admitting in lyrics that she changed the real-life culprit's name. “And maybe you've reframed it/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,” sings Swift.
All that's left to uncover is why Swift waited this long — and these many albums — to clap back at Kardashian yet again.
The full depths of the Taylor Swift / Kanye West / Kim Kardashian beef go back to the 2009 MTV VMAs, when West infamously interrupted Swift's acceptance speech for Best Video by a Female Artist to express his opinion that Beyoncé should have won the award.
West was heavily criticized for stealing Swift's spotlight and apologized to her, with Swift explaining at the time that she accepted the apology.
Cut to a few years later, with Swift's star continuing to rise (and West's beginning its descent), and West making the ill-conceived decision to revisit the incident once again in his song Famous. West called Swift ahead of time to ok the song idea with her, although this is where facts get murky.
When the song was released, Swifties recoiled at the lyrics “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why? I made that b—- famous.” West claimed Swift had approved, but Swift's representative promptly denied that Swift was aware of the line “I made that b—- famous.”
Then, Kanye's then-wife Kim Kardashian made things worse by releasing edited footage to Snapchat of the phone call between West and Swift talking about the song, with Kardashian clearly trying to paint Swift as deceitful. However, Swift was allegedly being recorded without her knowledge and the clip did not have enough context anyway to conclusively inform an opinion about who was lying to who. Needless to say, it made Kim Kardashian look pretty bad too and reignited the feud between Swift and West.
Cut to the present day, where Kardashian's marriage to West has long since dissolved, West's career is in a shambles after his anti-semitic outburst in 2022, and Swift is at the top of the music world.
Put another way, Swift has clearly won her feud with Kardashian and West. So why did she need to respond to it again, eight years later, if at all?
Or maybe that's precisely the point. In Swift's mind, it took her roughly all this time to rebuild her career, restore her reputation, and let West's true character shine through. Maybe her beef with Kardashian is over the fact that the reality star should have known better than to defend West in the first place, even while they were married.
Taylor Swift‘s ‘thanK you aIMee' is a lot more blunt and on-the-nose than her other epic diss tracks, but perhaps that's what she felt Kim Kardashian deserved.
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