The problematic Paramore lyrics that Hayley Williams refuses to sing
The most popular Paramore song by a distance is ‘Misery Business’, the lead single from the outfit’s 2007 second album, Riot. The song tells the story of Hayley Williams’ friend, who she felt was being manipulated by another girl. Eventually, Williams and her friend dated, and she wrote the song to free herself of her past feelings. However, the Paramore singer has a complicated history with the track.
Around 2015, the song started to come under scrutiny when several fans of the band pointed out that it appeared to be written from a misogynistic perspective. The lyric in question is, “Once a whore, you’re nothing more, I’m sorry, but that will never change.”
It was the word “whore” that brought about the criticism, and in 2018, Williams said Paramore would be retiring the song. At a concert in Nashville, she told the audience: “Tonight, we’re playing this song for the last time for a really long time. 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.”
Evidently, the spotlight on the lyrics of ‘Misery Business’ was unwanted, even if Williams had written them when she was just 17 years old in the starkly different socio-political realm of the mid-2000s. Williams expressed her naivety at writing them in the first place, telling Track Seven: “They literally came from a page in my diary. What I couldn’t have known at the time was that I was feeding into a lie that I’d bought into, just like so many other teenagers – and many adults – before me.”
Understandably, it was the word “whore” in particular that Williams particularly regrets. “The problem with the lyrics is not that I had an issue with someone I went to school with,” she added. “That’s just high school and friendships and breakups. It’s the way I tried to call her out using words that didn’t belong in the conversation.”
Despite the criticism, Williams is thankful that the attention brought to the song made her “more compassionate toward other women, who maybe have social anxieties and toward younger girls who are at this very moment learning to cope and to relate and to connect.”
In an unexpected turn of events, recently, Williams has started singing the song with Paramore once again. “Four years ago, we said we were gonna retire this song for a little while, and I guess technically we did,” she said during a concert in California in October, 2022. “But what we did not know was that just about five minutes after I got cancelled for saying the word ‘whore’ in a song, all of TikTok decided that it was okay. Make it make sense.”
