Hayley Williams is the lead singer of Paramore, and a role model for many young women in the world who are following their dreams. Williams has described herself as a proud feminist, but she recently came under fire after fans accused of being anti-feminist due to some lyrics that were used in “Misery Business” which was released in 2007.
The specific line that received backlash was: “Once a whore, you’re nothing more / I’m sorry that’ll never change.”
Hayley recently did an in depth interview with Track 7 where she talked about the history of Paramore and she reflected on “Riot” ten years after its release. When talking about the backlash to “Misery Business” she noted that at the time she wrote the lyrics she was only 17, and she had already been thinking about the context of the lyrics before fans brought it up.
“The thing that annoyed me,” Hayley Williams says, “was that I had already done so much soul-searching about it, years before anyone else had decided there was an issue. When the article began circulating, I sort of had to go and rehash everything in front of everybody. It was important, however, for me to show humility in that moment. I was a 17 year old kid when I wrote the lyrics in question and if I can somehow exemplify what it means to grow up, get information, and become any shade of ‘woke’, then that’s a-okay with me.”
Hayley also added that the lyrics came directly from a page in her diary.
“It was both of those things,” she says. “[The lyrics] 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. The whole, ‘I’m not like the other girls’ thing… this ‘cool girl’ religion. What even is that? Who are the gatekeepers of ‘cool’ anyway? Are they all men? Are they women that we’ve put on top of an unreachable pedestal? The problem with the lyrics is not that I had an issue with someone I went to school with. 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. It’s the fact that the story was setup inside the context of a competition that didn’t exist over some fantasy romance.”
Even though she’s been singing the lyrics for a decade now, Hayley has listened to the feedback and made a change. During a recent performance at Royal Albert Hall in London, Hayley left the lyrics out of the song.
