Taylor Swift has been slowly rolling out the contents of her forthcoming album Midnights ever since she announced it at the most recent MTV Video Music Awards show. Amidst the excitement from her fans, one notable piece of information came in the form of the 31-year-old’s first ever track featuring a swear word in its title, “Vigilante Sh*t. While this is unprecedented for the “Blank Space” artist, it is not the first time she has used profanity in her music.
Swift’s 2020 album Folklore was the first time she used the word “f*ck” and it was so significant that she was asked how it felt to do so in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Taylor’s response? “F*cking fantastic.”
She added more context to the experience, saying, “Every rule book was thrown out. I always had these rules in my head and one of them was, ‘You haven’t done this before, so you can’t ever do this.’ ‘Well, you’ve never had an explicit sticker, so you can’t ever have an explicit sticker.’ But that was one of the times where I felt like you need to follow the language and you need to follow the storyline. And if the storyline and the language match up and you end up saying the F-word, just go for it.”
In that same year, she released Evermore, which a Reddit user showed was statistically her most profane album to date in an elaborate chart. Given all she has endured over the years, namely her feud with Scooter Braun, it makes sense that Swift wants to let loose and express herself without a filter. Time will tell if Midnights takes the throne amongst her explicit musical canon.
Midnights is out 10/21 via Republic. Pre-order it here.
