Songfacts®:

• This shrieking industrial rocker finds an angry Gaga physically disgusted as she cuts an "animal" out of her life. When the song was released in 2013, she held back details but posted in a Twitter Q&A that it was a "very personal song but it became very freeing. Put a lot of rage into this album. Its been hard to part from it."
  
  Introducing the song at London's Roundhouse that year, she offered more details, saying, "My heart, my skin and my pu--y felt like trash."
  
  Then in 2014, Gaga revealed to Howard Stern that the song was based on a teenage experience of being sexually assaulted by a man 20 years her senior. "I was about 19. I went to Catholic school and then all this crazy stuff happened, and I was going, 'Oh, is this just the way adults are?'' I was very naïve," she recalled.
  
  "I wrote a song called 'Swine.' The song is about rape," Gaga added. "The song is about demoralization. The song is about rage and fury and passion, and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release."
  
  "It didn't affect me as much right after as it did about four or five years later," Gaga added of the event. "It hit me so hard. I was so traumatized by it that I was like, 'Just keep going,' because I just had to get out of there."
• Gaga explained during a Sirius XM special that the song was an exorcism for her, which is why she bashes away at the drums during the tune.
• Fans who saw Lady Gaga perform "Swine" at the 2014 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, got quite a show. During the first few minutes of the song, a performance artist named Millie Brown stood on stage drinking a bottle of green liquid. As Gaga pounded away at the drums, Brown put the bottle down, inserted her fingers into her mouth, and vomited the liquid on Gaga in a striking piece of performance art. Both women then mounted a mechanical pig, where Gaga got another blast of barf.
  
  Gaga was known for gasp-inducing visuals like the meat dress she wore to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, but the SXSW "Swine" stunt was her first that repelled most who saw it and got a largely negative reaction.
• The song is from Gaga's 2013 ARTPOP album, which took her into avant-garde territory after a string of hits. It was her first album to underperform on the charts but was an important step in her personal and musical development. "That was the first time that I ever had major criticism about a piece of work that I'd made," she told Rolling Stone.