Mean

This twangy track finds Taylor Swift taking aim at her critics. She told Entertainment News: "When you do what I do, which is you put yourself out there for a lot of people to say whatever they want, there's a million different opinions." "I get that, no matter what, you're going to be criticized for something," she added. "But I also get that there are different kinds of ways to criticize someone. There's constructive criticism, there's professional criticism - and then there's just being mean. And there's a line that you cross when you just start to attack everything about a person."

The song alludes at least in part to Swift's subpar performance of Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon" with Stevie Nicks at the 2010 Grammy Awards. A number of pundits laid into her, saying she was badly off-key and couldn't sing, but the specific review that got her blood boiling came from Bob Lefsetz, who wrote in his Lefsetz Letter: "Did Taylor Swift kill her career overnight? I'll argue she did. In one fell swoop, Taylor Swift consigned herself to the dustbin of teen phenoms... Taylor's too young and dumb to understand the mistake she made." Faced with such stinging words, you can understand why towards the end of this song, Taylor sings: And I can see you year from now in a bar talking over a football game With that same big loud opinion, but no one's listening Washed up and ranting about the same old bitter things Drunk and talking all about how I... can't... sing

The music video, directed by Declan Whitebloom, broadens the song's message to make it relate to school kids who are bullied or mistreated for being different. We see a boy reading a fashion magazine among the football players in the locker room, and a girl wearing blue instead of pink.