Paramore played their first concert in four years Sunday in Bakersfield, California, and if that wasn’t exciting enough, the show featured the un-retirement of “Misery Business.”
You may recall that at Paramore’s last show, all the way back in 2018, Hayley Williams told the crowd that the band planned to stop playing “Misery Business” “for a really long time.”
“Four years ago, we said we were gonna retire this song for a little while, and I guess technically we did,” Williams told the crowd at the show. “But what we did not know was that just about five minutes after I got canceled for saying the word ‘whore’ in a song, all of TikTok decided that it was OK. Make it make sense.”
Williams, of course, is referring to the controversial “Misery Business” lyric, “Once a whore, you’re nothing more/I’m sorry, that’ll never change.”
As she continued to talk to the audience, Williams noted that Paramore fans in the band’s very early days called themselves “Parawhores.”
“I guess, what I’m trying to say is, it’s a word, and if you’re cool you won’t call a woman a whore because that’s bulls***,” Williams said. “We can all learn from ourselves, right?”
Williams didn’t sing the line, though the crowd certainly did. “Just for the record, 90 percent of you said ‘whore’ tonight,” she quipped. Also, as is tradition, she handed the mic to a fan in the crowd to sing the song’s bridge.
“I’m just gonna say thank you for being nostalgic about this because this is one of the coolest moments of our show,” Williams said. “It’s very nice to feel like there’s a reason to bring it back that’s positive.”
Fan-shot footage of the performance and Williams’ comments were posted by YouTube user VivaLaBry.
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