Taylor Swift apparently knows how to torture her fellow poets — and hold a grudge or two.
The singer has dropped several variants of her album “The Tortured Poets Department” since its release in April to protect her No. 1 perch atop the Billboard 200 charts, and just did so again — this time beating Kanye West and his new “Vultures 2” album.
“Poets” has now held 14 nonconsecutive weeks at the top of the charts; “Vultures 2” debuted at No. 2.
Swifties on social media are celebrating the stunt, which arguably proved that there there is still bad blood between Swift and West. The rapper infamously ruined Swift’s 2009 MTV Video Music Awards moment and dissed her in his 2016 song “Famous.”
Eagle-eyed fans have also noticed that Swift has quietly changed how she spells the name of a song on the album, previously titled “thanK you aIMee.” The upper-case letters, spelling out “KIM,” were a rumored slight against Kim Kardashian. For her new, live version, the song title is “thank You aimEe” — and the upper-case letters spell out “YE.”
Swift and West, who changed his name to “Ye” in 2021, appeared cordial in the years after the VMAs incident, but Ye later went on to ponder having sex with Swift on “Famous” — and rapped that he “made that bitch” popular.
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West claimed that Swift had fully approved of his lyrics, which the “Wildest Dreams” singer denied, only for Kardashian, who was married to West at the time, to release an edited video of a phone call between Swift and West that falsely suggested Swift had completely approved of West’s lyrics and supposed joke.
“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,” Swift told Time in 2023. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before.”
“I moved to a foreign country,” she continued. “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 anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
Swift has never acknowledged who inspired the “Aimee” track, but the lyrics are suggestive.
“All that time you were throwing punches, I was building something,” she sings in the song. “And I can’t forgive the way you made me feel, screamed ‘Fuck you, Aimee’ to the night sky, as the blood was gushing — but I can’t forget the way you made me heal.”