Paramore played their first show in over four years at Mechanics Bank Arena in Bakersfield, CA last night. They opened with the live debut of their great new single "This Is Why," played "Simmer" off Hayley Williams' 2020 debut solo album Petals For Armor, "Boogie Juice" by drummer Zac Farro's HalfNoise project, and they brought back "Misery Business," which they'd previously retired due to its controversial lyric. About halfway through the song, Hayley paused and explained:
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 ‘whore’ 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 "Parawhores." We were like, "Ughh, 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 whore because that’s bullshit. You know, we can all learn from ourselves, right? But just for the record, 90 per cent of you said whore tonight. That’s all I’m gonna say. 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.