Taylor Swift knows better than most that the haters are gonna hate, hate, hate — and she said that smack talk motivates her to “work even harder” just before the live debut of her apparent Kim Kardashian diss track, “thanK you aIMee.”
Swift, 34, explained how she turns snide remarks and disparaging comments into fuel during her second night playing London’s Wembley Stadium on her Eras Tour on Saturday, June 22. The “Anti-Hero” singer was introducing the acoustic portion of her set when she was bowled over by the sheer scope of eight shows in the 90,000-seat stadium.
“I was thinking about getting to play Wembley Stadium. That’s not remotely normal [and] it is so insane for you to [have] done that for me … and for my crew because we get to play Wembley Stadium eight times this summer,” she told the crowd. “You clearly thought this was a good idea [and] you wanted this to happen. Blows me away. I’ll spend forever trying to thank you for that.”
She continued, “On the other hand, it really makes me think about how every time someone talks s—t, it just makes me work even harder and it makes me even tougher. So, it also makes me incredibly thankful for those people.”
Swift underlined the point by debuting “thanK you aIMee,” a song that is believed to be about her long-standing feud with Kardashian. A rift developed between the two stars over Kardashian’s ex-husband Kanye West’s song “Famous.” Swift objected to the song’s assertion that Kanye was responsible for Swift’s fame.
Kardashian shared a selectively edited phone call between Swift and West that appeared to show her signing off on the song, but Swift maintained that the offending line, which referred to her as “that bitch,” wasn’t in the version she heard. Eventually, a longer version of the call was released, seemingly vindicating Swift’s version of events.
“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. “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 anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
A source exclusively told Us Weekly in April that “aIMee” is Swift’s “final word” on the matter.
“Taylor has moved on and is not looking back,” the insider shared.
