I’m not a music critic. I don’t know anything about music despite having played the cello for six years. My response to the new Lorde album is about the cultural reception to Lorde and the circumstances that lead to this album being created. Now normally, I don’t like to talk about twitter discourse in the newsletter but I feel I must in this particular instance. Also, It’s my newsletter and I get to choose the topics! Anyway, here are all my thoughts.
When Solar Power, the single, came out in June I immediately was on its wavelength. I had deduced that Lorde had gotten really into weed culture over quarantine. A lot of people were mad when the single came out because they didn’t like it but they thought the album would be better. If not better, then different. Certainly not a whole album about smoking weed at the beach. Now as a person who splits my time between Burlington, VT and Los Angeles, CA I knew that Lorde was absolutely going to write a whole album about smoking weed and going to the beach. You could spend your life only listening to albums that are about smoking weed and going to the beach and never run out of new music. I was excited because I enjoy both of those things. I braced myself to like even the stupid songs because I am stupid and I like it when music is silly.
The next two singles came out and the people who hated Solar Power were surprised when stoned at the nail salon and mood ring came out and they hated it. How could they not recognize that the mood of the new album was about white girls who smoke weed and in general having a good time. From the first listen I had clued myself into the vibe. It’s a dreamy beachy album about learning to enjoy yourself. That was the sound I was expecting and that was the sound I got. Now everyone is free to not enjoy that but to paint this album as an artistic failure because it sounds like being high on a sunny day feels unfair. Lorde told us what she was doing and yet people continued to be surprised when the album continued to sound like what she said it would sound like. We’re all allowed to have our likes and dislikes but what I can’t handle is refusing to meet Lorde at her level. From day one of this album cycle the message was this is going to be a sunny yellow album. Lorde didn’t pull any punches and yet people seemed to be melting down and shocked when each single and eventually the whole album dropped and it was in line with all the other messaging and branding she gave us.
People seem to be writing Lorde off as unable to make good music now that she’s happy but I see this album as a change to her perspective and aesthetic but not a change in her central premise as an artist and cultural object. This album is still about drugs and alcohol and their high highs and low lows. It just has a sunny exterior. She’s in her Jimmy Buffet era, which I unwittingly predicted in February. Anyone with a brain knows Margaritaville is not a feel good song if you listen to the lyrics. “There’s booze in the blender/and soon it will render/that frozen concoction that helps me hang on” is a self aware meditation on alcoholism, and in a way isn’t that what Lorde is all about? The push and pull of what it means to have fun? What one has to sacrifice to have a good time? Lorde has always written from a personal perspective and she no longer drinks like a teenager so her music will no longer be about what it feels like to drink like a teenager. It makes sense that as she ages and her relationship to having a good time changes, her music will too. It makes sense that as she keeps drinking and smoking and partying her music will sound closer to lifelong marathon drinkers and partyers like Jimmy Buffet, her fellow poet laureate of having a good time and less like other pop girls who rely on other songwriters to paint the picture of being like Lorde.
In connection to her entering her Jimmy Buffet era, we have to assess how Lorde has grown and changed as a person and the circumstances of her life that would have led to this album. This is necessary not only to better criticize this album but to manage one's own expectations for the next one. Pure Heroine sounds like being sixteen and Lorde’s ability to capture the moment and feel nostalgia as it's happening is what makes her a once in a generation artist. She feels every part of the experience and is also able to look back on it and hold on to it’s temporary nature for as long as she can. Melodrama was the same thing but for being 20. Those two albums sound different and are different because those stages of life are so fundamentally different. Lorde changed and grew and so did her writing but her fundamental skill did not, which is why it felt like she would be an artist that stayed with us for the rest of our lives. But those ages have pretty universal feelings attached to them. Everyone has to go to high school and everyone experiences the gap between how it should feel and how it does feel. In some ways, being sixteen feels the same for everyone. The same can be said about being twenty. Being lost in the adult world and unable to get a footing or feel accomplished is true for all of us regardless of industry, profession, or education level. Now, we’re 24 and it seems to me we’re all in wildly different places. Even people who I’ve essentially been on the same life path since I was 18 are living a different life than I am living. The gap that exists between the life Lorde lives and the life the rest of us are living is widening and will continue to widen as life continues on.
Lorde is a 24 year old from New Zealand who dropped out of high school to become a pop star. Her emotions mirrored ours for a long time and we can’t blame her for that lifestyle taking its toll and her needing to change her relationship to the world around her. I can’t speak to her actual health and mental well being but to make her whole career be album after album about young adult angst and hard partying is an unstable career path and an unstable life to lead. We love Lorde because her music feels so deeply personal and now a lot of fans are at a crossroads. We can either take Lorde as she is and follow her on her own journey that maybe is no longer in step with ours or we can hold it against her and resent her for living a life we gave her. I also think that this is a lifestyle change a lot of people are making but they're making it at different paces. 24 doesn’t have to be the age that you rethink and examine your relationship with alcohol and start smoking a lot more weed but it is for a lot of people, and it was for Lorde.
As she ages her music will be less and less prescriptive of the age she is and the age we are. The album she writes about things like getting married, having children, and getting divorced will not come at the same time those things happen for the rest of us. That does not mean she is losing her touch. I won’t relate to her album about her divorce until I get one. Just like a lot of people won’t like this album until they learn to calm down and enjoy the world around them. Like her namesake, She’s not always there when you call her, but she’s always right on time. The same is also true in reverse. She may never get married or have children and when the rest of us do we can’t be mad at her. Her album about being 28 will be so vastly different because by the time she’s 28 she will have spent more of her life being famous than not. Her music will not be able to accurately account for what it’s like to be a consultant at deloitte, or have a dead end job, or worry that she will never be successful and achieve her dreams. Her anxieties and our anxieties differ now and will continue to differ. The gap continues to widen. Don’t fall in.
Here’s the part of Solar Power that I don’t like and I’m unable to defend. The politics of it. It feels half assed and inarticulate. I only tuned into it because of the fact that she keeps talking about it. It is not present on the album unless you do a close reading and every quote she has given in regard to the politics of album has been next level stupid. If it is possible to listen to the album and ignore the political messaging she is trying to instill, then it seems the messaging has been lost. I wish we lived in a world where Lorde was as smart about social justice and feminism and race as she is about emotions and interpersonal relationships but we don’t. As I age I am more and more coming around to the belief that we don’t need to hear what celebrities have to say about politics. Mostly because it is often stupid and ill thought out. Celebrities can use their influence and power to make things better in their industry and to point their audience in the direction of their political thought process but that’s about it. Not everyone gets to be Jane Fonda, and even Jane Fonda married Ted Turner. I would be interested to know who Lorde is reading in regards to better understanding the world around her but I’m not really interested in what she personally thinks about everything. Especially from what I've seen so far. The quote about the door being open to capture the energy of the protests is so moronic and just shows how out of touch she is with the world. She also doesn’t need to do that. Politics were never part of her ethos and now that we know that she’s not that smart when it comes to talking about that, we want even less of it. If she were to educate herself and make it a more central part of her art, we could have a discussion but it seems to me that we, both her and us, would be better off if she stuck to the music. Not in a Lebron James, shut up and dribble way but in a “please stop talking you have no idea what you’re saying” way. In general I also think we should stop making people famous at 15 and then be surprised when they’re stupid because they’ve been living in a bubble for upwards of ten years.
Now all of this is not to say you have to like the album or that you have to be smart to get it. I’m actually saying the opposite, I’m very dumb and I like it for the reasons that make me dumb. I just wanted to explain why I felt the way I felt and get all my opinions out in one place. If you don’t like the album after reading all that and you knew that already and had contextualized Lorde in her own life and yours, go with God, I can’t make you love this album. What I don’t want and hate seeing is that Lorde somehow let us down. That she owed us “depression bops” and it’s her fault for not delivering them. Lorde becoming happy is to annoying gay stan twitter as Dylan going electric was to annoying hippies. It’s seen as a betrayal. That she’s leaving us behind and reneging on some promise that was made, To soundtrack our lives forever and ever. To grow as we grow but to keep giving the same perspective over and over. The expectations of her were too high not because she's not talented but because to many people, she stopped being a person and started to become a symbol. Everyone seems to be disappointed when an artist grows, and they all seem especially disappointed when they become happy. If we are miserable, we want others to be miserable with us and we resent them when they grow up away from us. We also hate when our relatable queens are no longer relatable for reasons that are in some way, our doing. The vitriol that has been hurled upon Lorde for this album feels familiar and bad. It’s nowhere near what other pop girls have encountered or are victim to but can’t we see a pattern here? She may not be Britney but does the word Artpop mean anything to anyone? It’s unpreventable that an artist can produce work that's ahead of their time and that fans aren’t ready for but it seems like an unhealthy pattern to spend the first few years condemning an artist's work and then coming around to it as the years pass. Artpop should be a lesson not a pattern.
All this is to say, regardless of how you feel about this album, we are undoubtedly in Lorde’s flop era. A flop era is defined not by the work of the artist but how the work is received. It’s unavoidable and makes you a better artist to come out on the other side of it. It’s also temporary. To quote an oomfie that I’m 90% sure has me muted,”I now believe that you have to be an interesting life-lover, a true fan of living interestingly, to appreciate flopping.” With this album I believe Lorde can handle it. This album is about loving life. She’s prepared for it in some ways. The tour this time is smaller than last time. She wants her real fans there and I believe scalping tickets for the sold out show in May 2022 in LA will be easier than it would have been had the album been universally beloved. A flop era means time to grow and respond to your fans. More than anything a flop era means low expectations for next time and maybe that’s all anyone needs. Say what you will about this album but it changed how people feel about Lorde as an artist. I like it and even I feel differently about her now. Maybe that’s what she wanted. Maybe this is Lorde’s version of New Coke. The theory goes that New Coke was designed to be a failure so that no one would notice when they changed the recipe from sugar to high fructose corn syrup when they brought back regular coke. Lorde had to take the pressure off and lower the expectations so she could create and think in peace. More likely, she just started smoking more weed, but whatever you need to believe to help you sleep at night.
this is excellent, especially the part about not falling into the gap between our lives and lorde's. while i agree about a lot of the "political" aspects being ineloquent, i am very interested to see how her climate anxiety continues to shape her artistry because she feels like one of the only artists of our time to have explicitly discussed aspects of her commercial success as they relate to the natural world. but, as you said, not everyone gets to be jane fonda!!!! <3 godspeed
Love the analysis of the flop era. It makes me so sad that stans carry so much embarrassment and shame when their star is in their flop era. Or they feel the need to flex their star’s stats to prove they’re not in a flop era. How exhausting it must be to actually believe someone is the best of all time forever.
Flop eras free artists to do the dumbest, silliest stuff. Like the Gaga documentary where she plays Joanne for her grandmother, expecting a teary, emotional reaction, and all she gets is an “oh, that’s nice.” And nearly all flop era albums eventually get their dues, so it’s best to just enjoy the flop music and the flop antics and not get so caught up in pop star good/bad dichotomies.