Earlier this summer, Paramore played “Misery Business”, alongside Stranger Things’ cast member Gaten Matarazzo, a performance that, it turns out, marks what’s likely one of the last times the pop-punk outfit will ever play their breakthrough single. See, frontwoman Hayley Williams wrote the song when she was roughly the same age as Matarazzo, and it contains lyrics that she, now an adult, no longer finds appropriate. As noted by AltPress, Williams made the announcement at the band’s first-ever Art + Friends Festival this past weekend, telling the crowd that they would be playing the song “for the last time for a really long time.”
This is a choice we made because we feel like we should.We feel like it’s time to move away from it for a little while,” Williams explains on stage. She added, “We wrote a song that now, as a 29-year-old woman, I don’t know that I’d use the same language. Calling someone a whore isn’t very cool.”
“Once a whore, you’re nothing more/I’m sorry that’ll never change.” she sings on the track, and it’s easy to see why listeners would bristle at what can be perceived as slut-shaming sentiments. Williams has addressed the blowback to the lyrics numerous times; in a 2015 blog post for example, she emphasized that “those words were written when I was 17,” saying they were “quite literally a page in my diary about a singular moment I experienced as a high schooler.”
See some fan-shot footage of the announcement below:
Luckily, Paramore have plenty of other songs to fill their sets. Last year’s After Laughter, after all, was one of 2017’s best albums.