Taylor Swift‘s new album 1989 (Taylor’s Version) is officially here, and you best believe die-hard Swifties all over the world are listening to one of her five new and unheard songs from the vault right now – the much anticipated song “Slut!”
The track became the most talked about on the upcoming album (originally released in 2014), once Swift revealed her new vault track titles over a month ago after fans cleverly cracked over a million coded puzzles.
Initially fans were semi-shocked at the NSFW title from the singer, who before her lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore never swore in her music.
But then fans doubled down on what they thought the real meaning was behind the song: a response to all the slut-shaming Taylor has experienced during her career, especially in her 20s when the media was obsessed with who and how many people she was dating.
Others even posited that the choice of wording was a perfect PR stunt – now when people google “Taylor Swift slut”, the song will come up instead of the latest news on her dating life.
Now that the song is finally here, let’s see if the theories way up.
If the lyrics in the chorus are anything to go by, then yes, Taylor is explicitly acknowledging the brutal slut-shamming she experienced whenever she stepped out in public with a man beside her.
Taylor sings: “But if I’m all dressed up / They might as well be lookin’ at us / And if they call me a slut / You know it might be worth it for once / And if I’m gonna be drunk / I might as well be drunk in love.”
But the actual song itself is much slower and somber than what was expected from the title, especially with its exclamation mark. Swift has only ever done that before on the Lover track “Me!”, which was an upbeat and colourful pop song.
It’s not until the last chorus in “Slut!” that Taylor’s vocals emphasise the word.
And even then the entire track is a dreamscape filled with “flamingo pink” and “aquamarine, moonlight swimming pool” descriptions set to a mid-tempo. It’s a sad yet beautiful listen.
While fans have called “Slut!” the long-lost sister to “Blank Space” – the widely successful second track on 1989 – it definitely doesn’t share the same satirical and self-indulgent tone, or qualities of the hit single.
The two songs however share the same imagery. In “Blank Space” Swift describes herself as a “rose garden filled with thorns”; and in “Slut!” she’s got “love thorns all over this rose”.
In 2016, when asked in 73 Questions with Vogue on what advice she’d give to her younger self, Swift said: “If I could talk to my 19-year-old self I would say, ‘you’re gonna date just like a normal 20-something should be allowed to, but you’re going to be a national lightning rod for slut-shaming’.”
She later told Vogue in an adjacent interview, that she didn’t date for two and a half years because of the hate she got.
To answer a fan’s prediction posted to X (formerly known as Twitter) on whether “Slut! by Taylor Swift will either break my heart or bring it back to life”, this song will definitely break your heart, but not in the way you were expecting.
