After eleven years of belting it out to screaming fans across the world, pop-punk-emo darlings Paramore are officially retiring one of the biggest, most iconic songs ‘Misery Business‘, after recognising that the song’s themes no longer align with the personal beliefs of the band.
[jwplayer QXcs6uRl]
At a concert over the weekend in Nashville, Tennessee, vocalist Hayley Williams sat down on the edge of the stage and emotionally told the crowd, “tonight we’re playing this song for the last time, for a really long time”, recognising that her and the band no longer felt comfortable performing a song that is all about slut-shaming and generally hating on other women in order to “get the guy”, so to speak.
Williams explained the reasoning behind culling the band’s breakout single – and a song that she wrote when she was 17 – from future performances.
This is a choice that we’ve made because we feel that we should, we feel like it’s time to move away from it for a little while.
This is to every bad decision that led us here, this is to all the embarrassing things we might have said, but we owned up to it and we grew.
‘Misery Business‘ is the standout single from the band’s second album, Riot!, released in 2007, and cemented them as one of the only highly-successful women-fronted pop-punk bands in a scene that was, and still is, dominated by men. A scene that has been exposed recently as harbouring men who have previously groomed and slept with underage girls and historically treated women poorly both onstage and off.
At the Paramore concert in Nashville and they just announced that they won’t be performing Misery Business again for a long time after this show. Omg. pic.twitter.com/wARvoYGz76
— Tyler Matl (@TylerMatl) September 8, 2018
Paramore fans are divided over the band’s decision to remove the song from live sets, with some upset that their favourite track – and probably the one that got them into the band over a decade ago – is being cut, and others accepting and thanking the band for recognising that the song’s themes and content perpetuate ideas of women chasing love and hating other women in the process.
hayley williams deciding to stop playing misery business live because the lyrics had slut-shaming language we won but at what cost 😔
— ✭ arma staur ✭ (@typilled) September 8, 2018
.@joshuadun and myself just saw @paramore play Miz Biz for the “last time for a long time.” pic.twitter.com/PvbFFHVCNs
— Mark C. Eshleman (@ReelBearMedia) September 8, 2018
https://twitter.com/SouljaJo/status/1038911458871062528
https://twitter.com/O_Carina_/status/1038943229591412736
‘Misery Business‘ was also the moment at live shows where Williams would invite a member of the crowd onto the stage to help perform the tail end of the song, so it’ll be interesting to see if that trend continues after the retiring of the huge track.
The Nashville hometown show was also the final show of the band extensively touring tracks from After Laughter, the band’s fifth album released in 2017 that was a move away from the pop-punk sound Paramore were known for, and into a more new wave power-pop sound.
Keep up with the latest in Australian music news with Pedestrian.
