Taylor Swift is not always known for being subtle with her references—just ask Jake (or John, or Joe, or…you get the idea). So when The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology dropped on 19 April with a whopping 15 additional bonus tracks, including “thanK you aIMee,” Swifties immediately clocked those capitalised letters as a likely reference to Kim Kardashian, with whom Swift has had a beef since 2016.
In the song Swift sings about a high school bully, one whose “bronze, spray-tanned” statue stands in her hometown. While there are no other explicit references to her particular feud with Kardashian, the takeaway—that her experience with the bully only made her stronger—in addition to the title, seem to confirm the theories that “thanK you aIMee” is about K-I-M, not anyone named “Aimee.”
The song’s title may also allude to Britney Spears’s 2008 song “If You Seek Amy,” another pop anthem that is…not about a woman named Amy but about something else that’s being spelled out.
In her 2023 Time person of the year cover story, Swift delved into greater detail about her fall from grace after Kardashian leaked an edited cut of Swift’s phone call with Kardashian’s then-husband Kanye West, who had asked Swift permission to name-drop her in his song “Famous.” In the edit, Swift appeared to give West her consent; she later said that she had not heard the lyric in full, in which Kanye refers to her as a “bitch” that he “made famous.”
“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before,” she said of the fallout from the leaked recording. “I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year.
“I was afraid to get on phone calls,” she added. “I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
After the Time article was published, TMZ reported that Kardashian had never offered an apology to Swift for the leak, or the vitriol she faced in the aftermath. “Our sources say Kim’s never apologized to Taylor for the call,” TMZ claimed. “And even after the Time article, it’s still crickets.”
In “thanK you aIMee,” Swift sings, “It wasn’t a fair fight or a clean kill,” and rather cuttingly, “Everyone knows that my mother is a saintly woman / But she used to say she wished that you were dead.”
Ultimately, however, the song is about rising from the ashes. “But when I count the scars, there’s a moment of truth,” Swift sings. “That there wouldn’t be this, if there hadn’t been you.”
You can read the full thanK you aIMee’ lyrics here:
1st verse
When I picture my hometown
There’s a bronze spray-tanned statue of you
And a plaque underneath it
That threatens to push me down the stairs at our school
Pre-chorus
And it was always the same searing pain
But I dreamed that, one day, I could say