'I Forgot That You Existed': Taylor Swift's new song may have just 'Swifted' Kanye West
On August 23rd, 2019, Taylor Swift released her seventh studio album 'Lover' just hours after dropping the music video for the title track. The album has many Swifties remembering her 'Speak Now' and 'Red' days, feeling that the new songs are musically similar to them. The lyrics and videos for her new songs also feature easter eggs referring to her previous music.
The first track of 'Lover' is 'I Forgot That You Existed', a fierce song where she sings about moving beyond the negativity. While many are convinced that the song is about Calvin Harris, her ex-boyfriend, we think the song is most definitely about the feud with Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian.
Taylor is singing the song to someone who did her wrong in the opening lyrics. This clearly refers to the beginning of the Kanye-Taylor feud, when during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards when the rapper did not let her complete her acceptance speech for Best Female Video and went on to rant about Beyonce deserving to win it instead. She even sings about how she had to live in the shade the person was throwing, unable to get away from it. While Kanye and Taylor reconciled in 2011, the feud picked up again when Kanye released his song 'Famous' in 2016 which referred to Taylor badly (both in the lyrics calling her a bitch and the video where he used a naked wax lookalike of Taylor).
When Taylor sings "And I thought that it would kill me", we think it refers to when Kim's Snapchat video and the "snake" namecalling sparked the #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled trend on social media. In Vogue's September cover story, Taylor said this was "sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as Kill yourself."
Taylor sings she would have stuck around for this person and even gone to their shows were it not for the hate. In 2011, Kanye and Taylor made up and at the 2015 VMAs, she presented Kanye with the Video Vanguard Award. But then they "got out some popcorn as soon as my rep started going down" and that this "sent me a clear message / taught me some hard lessons". In the Vogue interview, Taylor said of the 2016 cancel campaign that "these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much".
Taylor is now letting the haters know that she has moved past them now singing that what remains is just indifference. Now we just have to wait for the music video for the easter eggs to confirm our suspicions. Sorry Kanye, but she "forgot that you existed".
Hear the song below: