Taylor Swift is throwing fuel on a years-long beef with Kim Kardashian with new track “thanK you aIMee,” which fans have promptly noticed capitalizes the letters K-I-M in the title.
With her surprise deluxe album drop Friday, Swifties were little prepared for the obvious Kim K diss track, in which Swift sings that her “saintly” mother wishes the “bronze, spray-tanned” antagonist dead.
Swift goes on to say in the song that she “screamed ‘Fuck you, Aimee’ to the night sky” and she “can’t forgive the way you made me feel,” before ultimately concluding that “there wouldn’t be this, if there hadn’t been you”—a sentiment she previously expressed in her Time “Person of the Year” interview last year. Back then, she’d credited her success with the “catalyst” of “having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me,” before detailing her side of their longstanding beef.
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Swift and the head Kardashian have been feuding since 2016, when the latter came out in defense of then-husband Kanye West (now known as Ye), who’d referred to Swift as “that bitch” in his song “Famous.”
After the song’s release, Swift released a statement through her team that Ye’s lines “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous,” were “misogynistic,” and she hadn’t been aware of its inclusion in the song when he asked to share the song on social media. She then took another swipe at the rapper on stage at the Grammys a few days later, saying at the time that he’d tried to “take credit” for her accomplishments and fame.
That was apparently the last straw for Ye’s then-wife Kardashian, who posted a TikTok featuring a phone call between Swift and Ye, in which Swift seemed to be OK with the song’s lyrics. In the video, Swift can be heard telling the rapper, “I don’t think anybody would listen to that and be like, oh, that’s a real diss.” And then, “If people ask me about it, I think it would be great for me to be like, ‘Look, he called me and told me about the line before it came out.’ Like, ‘Joke's on you guys, we’re fine.’”
Swift hit back after the video was dropped, saying that her comments on the phone call were made before she knew she was going to be referred to as “that bitch” in the song. No footage of Ye revealing the “that bitch” line to Swift was ever shared.
Kardashian later alleged in GQ that Swift’s lawyers sent a letter demanding that the footage of her phone call with Ye be destroyed. Swift didn’t address those specific allegations at the time, but said through her reps that she “cannot understand why Kanye West, and now Kim Kardashian, will not just leave her alone.”
The singer addressed the ordeal again last year in an interview with Time, where she described what went down this way: “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.” She added that the debacle “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 anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
Given the striking similarity between those comments and the song’s lyrics, “thanK you aIMee,” is almost certainly about Kardashian, who she digs further into by referencing the actress-influencer’s daughter: “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.”
