Paramore Announces They Won't Play Breakout Hit 'Misery Business' Anymore

It’s not often a band turns their back on their first big hit — but that’s what happens when you grow up.
Paramore announced on Saturday night, to a hometown crowd in Nashville, they would not be playing their breakthrough hit Misery Business anymore.
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Hayley Williams told the crowd this would be the last time playing the song “for a very long time.”
See the opening remarks and a snippet of the finale performance, captured by fan Tyler Matl (below):

At the Paramore concert in Nashville and they just announced that they won’t be performing Misery Business again for a long time after this show. Omg. pic.twitter.com/wARvoYGz76

— Tyler Matl (@TylerMatl) September 8, 2018

In case anyone wants to see the last ever live performance of Misery Business here ya go! Paramore is still amazing. Hope you all continue to support them. pic.twitter.com/q6Q532IYEG

— Tyler Matl (@TylerMatl) September 9, 2018

In case you missed it, Hayley said:

“Tonight we’re playing this song for the last time for a very long time. This is a choice that we’ve made because we feel that we should, we feel like it’s time to move away from it for a little while. This is to every bad decision that led us here, this is to all the embarrassing things we might have said, but we owned up to it and we grew.”

Growing, ironically, is what the controversy is all about. The song, about a girl who gets her man stolen away, has been called anti-feminist for how the other woman is described in the second verse:

“Second chances they don’t ever matter, people never change
Once a whore, you’re nothing more, I’m sorry that’ll never change”

As Hayley said in Nashville, the lyrics are exactly wrong — “calling someone a whore isn’t cool” but second chances are.
The singer has previously disowned the lyric, which she wrote when she was just 17 years old. She said in an interview with Track 7 last year:

“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?”

She’s been avoiding singing just the line for a while (she did not sing it on Saturday night either), but now 12 years later the band is simply retiring the song.
So, once more with feeling, here’s the 2007 track in all its high school glory:

[Image via Patricia Schlein/WENN.]