Not even Beyoncé is immune to the outrage cycle. Although her latest album, the critically acclaimed Renaissance, has been out for less than a week, Beyoncé is already making changes to two of her songs after being called out on social media.
The singer got into an argument with Kellys for interpolating part of her 2003 hit “Milkshake” into “Energy” without giving her a heads-up warning. (Kellis is not credited as the song’s writer.) “I heard about it the same way everyone else did,” Kellis said in an Instagram comment. As of Wednesday, the interpolation was removed.
The song “Heated” originally featured lyrics that included the same slur that got Lizzo heated up on Twitter just a few weeks ago. On Monday, just three days after the album’s release, it was announced that Beyoncé would replace the word. As of Wednesday, the lyrics have been changed from “sp***in’ on that ass” to “blastin’ on that ass” on YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify (although the lyrics on Spotify still have the Old Version).
The Kellys situation is specific and probably more about her feud with Pharrell than her relationship with Beyoncé. But the insult on “Heated” is part of a long tradition in the industry of retroactively editing songs. It’s almost a right of passage – an artist writes a lyric that ages poorly and is eventually changed or removed entirely. In the past, this process could take years and the original versions would be preserved in physical albums or previous song downloads. The changed lyrics will only be apparent on re-releases or when the song is played in concerts. In the age of Twitter and Spotify, that response is as immediate as the backlash.
Once a song is altered and re-released to streamers, that’s the only version that will be in circulation outside of TikTok snippets and a handful of CDs and vinyl copies. Kanye West took advantage of this flexibility in 2016 with his Life of Pablo updates. Beyoncé, one of the smartest artists in the industry, knows that the faster she moves with edits, the less likely anyone will remember she was changed in the first place.
The edits also prompted Monica Lewinsky to suggest her name be removed from Beyoncé’s 2013 song “Partition.” The Beyhive was less amenable to this change.
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