Produced by Swift and Nathan Chapman, "Mean" is a six-string banjo-led country pop and bluegrass track that incorporates hand claps, fiddles, and multitracked vocals.

With themes of self-empowerment and anti-bullying, it was praised by some media for encouraging a positive attitude, but questioned by others because of its unclear narrative.

The American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift began working on her third studio album, Speak Now (2010), two years prior to its release.

[1] According to Swift, the album is a collection of songs containing confessions she had wanted to but could not make to the people she had met in real life.

[3][4] In an interview on 60 Minutes, Swift said that the inspiration came from a critic who chastised her after her performance at the 2010 Grammy Awards, where she sang off-key.

The package includes the Target exclusive deluxe edition of Speak Now, a free pair of headphones, and the choice between either the "Sparks Fly", "The Story of Us", or the "Mean" CD single.

[19] In AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine compared the song's production, which serves as a country-music flavor to the album, to the Dixie Chicks' music.

[20] Music scholar James E. Perone commented that "Mean" is the only album track congruent with Swift's self-identity as a country musician, as opposed to Speak Now's dominant mainstream pop and rock styles.

Analyzing the song structure, Perone noted the instrumental sliding up a whole step in open fifths at the end of each refrain, and the whole-step slide up from the lowered-seventh scale-step to tonic, which evokes the Mixolydian mode typically found in Anglo-American folk music.

[4] This is echoed by Jill Serjeant of Billboard, who wrote that "[the song] appears to take aim at critics who slammed Swift's shaky vocal performance at the 2010 Grammy Awards and at other live shows last year.

"[21] In the verse, Swift accuses the critic of pointing out the flaws that she is self-aware of, which makes her walking "with [her] head down" and being "wounded".

"[17][15][23] Ann Powers from the Los Angeles Times also agreed that "Mean" "smacks down critics who say she can't sing (I stand accused) by declaring that someday she'll be "livin' in a great big city" and they'll be drunk in some dive bar, bloviating into the void.

Club, Steven Hyden considered "Mean", among tracks where Swift "[indulges] in such overt nastiness" confronting those who wronged her, one of the album's strongest.

It made Swift one of two women (the other being Carrie Underwood) to begin her chart history with 13 consecutive top ten hits since the survey's 1944 launch.

The week of August 14, 2011, "Mean" became Swift's thirteenth song to sell more than one million copies, which is more than any other country artist in digital history.

As the song begins, the curtains open to reveal Swift, wearing a cream-colored dress and playing a banjo guitar.

Another is a girl (played by Presley Cash) who is earning money for college by wearing a costume to promote a fast food restaurant.

It is revealed that the boy reading the fashion magazine is now a famous fashion designer, the fast food girl has saved up for college and is now a big-time executive, and Swift effortlessly removes the ropes binding her and walks away from the tracks once the villain and his friend have passed out from drinking heavily.

The final scene shows the girl with the unique-colored ribbon sitting as the only audience member in the theater, watching and applauding as Swift finishes her performance.

Story Gilmore of Neon Limelight perceived the clip to be "adorable",[72] while Amanda Lynne of Gather.com was not disappointed with the video and thought that Swift delivered once again.

[74] Jocelyn Vena of MTV wrote that the video "is the latest entry in an avalanche of empowering clips, which we've seen from artists like Katy Perry ("Firework") and Pink ("Raise Your Glass").

"[76] Kyle Anderson of Entertainment Weekly thought that the message in the music video was confusing, writing "is she really equating a professional critic questioning her ability to sing at an awards show to getting bullied because you're different?

[78] Drew Grant of Salon.com felt that the video tried to disseminate an anti-bullying message from "a person who has never been bullied by equating it with an evil vision of a fairytale.

"[79] Sophie Schillaci of Zap2it noticed that the flaw in the video was the assumption that "mean ole' bullies just rot in their hometown," whereas in reality, plenty of successful people are simply mean.

[80] The video's themes of self-empowerment and anti-bullying received positive feedback within the LGBTQ community, specifically with a scene where a young male character sitting in a locker room reading a fashion magazine is harassed by football players; at the end, the said character is seen presenting a runway fashion show with his designs of women's clothing.

[22][81] Adriane Brown also noted the song and video resonated with Swift's core audience of teenage girls.