Selena Gomez would like to be excluded from the Justin Bieber narrative. Gomez's new song "It Ain't Me" seems to make that very clear. The track — her first in almost a year — has the pop star going in a more mature direction, singing about a relationship gone wrong. "Somewhere along the lines/ We stopped seeing eye to eye," she sings on the moody Kygo banger that features her vocals. "You were staying out all night/And I had enough." With the pop star talking about an ex-love, it's hard not to assume "It Ain't Me" is about Bieber, but there's also signs that make this more than an irrelevant assumption.
Gomez is the co-writer of the track, along with Kygo, according to ASCAP. Brian Lee, Ali Tamposi, and Andrew Watt also have credits on the song. They're the writers behind DJ Snake and Bieber's "Let Me Love You." The fact that she had a role in writing this song means it could very well be about her own experience with a guy who liked his whisky neat — which just happens to be the liquor of choice for Bieber — but had a life that was a little too messy for her taste.
"I had a dream, we were back to 17/ Summer nights and the liberties/ Never growing up," Gomez sings. When she teased this song on Instagram, this was the line she used. As Elle pointed out, the singer just so happened to meet Bieber when she was 17, which is unlikely just a coincidence.
Sure, you could call this a diss track but that doesn't get at the real point of this song. Once and for all, Gomez is trying to separate herself from Bieber. It's a final statement, a way to put a moratorium on the Bieber talk.
It's something she's been trying to do for the last two years. In a 2016 interview with Marie Claire Gomez made it clear she no longer wants to talk about Bieber by alluding to him without even saying his name. "I would try to promote something that I loved," she said, "and the entire interview would be about my personal life." At a concert last year, she went as far as to rip up a sign that read "Marry Justin Bieber" to show how she really feels about the past that she can't seem to escape from no matter how hard she tries.
This song may or may not be about Bieber, and it's unlikely Gomez will ever say for sure. That because this song is about the singer putting her foot down and heading in a new Bieber-less direction. After close to four years, she has moved on and she wants everyone else to, too. That just ain't her anymore.
