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Taylor Swift's new album Lover is due out at the end of this week, and we've gotten a handful of pretty good singles out of it so far, from the slow-burning introspective "The Archer" to the inevitable wedding anthem "Lover." I'm even personally fond of the polarizing, GLAAD-naming "You Need To Calm Down." But before any of those, we had "ME!" her excruciatingly bombastic collaboration with Panic! At the Disco's Brendon Urie.
"ME!" is by no means the worst song I've ever heard, but there's one part in particular that sticks like a cavity; right before the bridge, which finds Urie and Swift trading verses on how "you can't spell awesome without 'me,'" she chirps out "hey kids, spelling is fun!" It may be the most infantilizing moment of pop music this year, an effective curdling of all the cotton candy that came before it. See 2:39 below.
But all that's insufferable isn't unforgivable. As Pop Crave points out, Swift is righting her wrongs, and has edited the "spelling is fun" bit out of the album. Though the line still appears in the music video (for now), it's totally absent from the version that's streaming on Apple Music — and "ME!" is heaps better without it. Stream the new version below, and then read our conversation on Swift's stylistic evolution across her first seven albums here.
Lover is out August 23.
