Paramore brought their 2007 smash hit Misery Business out of retirement as they kicked off their first tour in four years on Sunday.
In 2018, Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams announced that they were retiring their breakthrough single from their live shows due to the lyric “once a w**re, you’re nothing more” in the second verse being seen as anti-feminist.
However, they brought it back when they kicked off their North America tour in Bakersfield, California on Sunday night.
In the middle of the song, Hayley told the crowd, “Four years ago, we said we were gonna retire this song for a little while, and I guess technically we did! But what we did not know was that just about five minutes after I got cancelled for saying the word ‘w**re’ in a song, all of TikTok decided that it was OK. Make it make sense…
“I remember a time when we had a MySpace and we were still a really small band. We were really small. We hadn’t even put out this song and we had noticed that kids were calling themselves ‘Paraw**res’. We were like, ‘Eugh, that’s weird!’ But 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 w**re because that’s bulls**t… We can all learn from ourselves, right?”
Hayley stopped singing when the controversial line arose during the song, and as part of her speech, she noted that “90 per cent” of the crowd still sang the contentious word.
“I’m not gonna preach about it. I’m just gonna say thank you for being nostalgic about this because this is one of the coolest moments of our show and it’s very nice to feel like there’s a reason to bring it back that’s positive,” the 33-year-old said, before picking a fan in the crowd to sing the chorus.
Hayley brought Misery Business out of retirement to sing it with Billie Eilish during the pop star’s Coachella set earlier this year.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, she revealed she initially tried to convince Billie against doing the cover.
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