Taylor Swift is not known for being subtle—just ask Jake (or John, or Joe, or…you get the idea). So when The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology dropped at 2 a.m. on April 19 with a whopping 15 additional bonus tracks, including “thanK you aIMee,” Swifties immediately clocked those capitalized letters as a likely reference to Kim Kardashian, with whom Swift has had beef since 2016.
In the song, Swift sings about a high school bully, one whose “bronze, spray-tanned” statue stands in her home town. While there are no other explicit references to her particular feud with Kardashian, the takeaway—that her experience with the bully only made her stronger—in addition to the title, all seem to confirm the theories that “thanK you aIMee” is about K-I-M, not anyone named “Aimee.”
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The song’s title may also allude to Britney Spears’s 2008 song “If You Seek Amy,” another pop anthem that is…not about a woman named Amy, but something else that’s being spelled out.
In her 2023 Time person of the year cover story, Swift delved into greater detail about her fall from grace after Kardashian leaked an edited cut of Swift’s phone call with Kardashian’s then-husband Kanye West, who was asked permission to namedrop Swift in his song “Famous.” In the edit, Swift appeared to give her consent West; she later said that she had not heard the lyric in full, in which Kanye refers to her as a “bitch” that he “made famous.”
“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before,” she said of the fallout from the leaked recording. “I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year.”
