Self-described as her “weed album”, Lorde’s latest record finds her attempting to make peace with the world around her, and maybe herself as well. The first singles from Lorde’s highly anticipated third studio album Solar Power clearly indicate that the singer was trying something new on for size. As Madame Spears once famously proclaimed, she’s not a girl, but not yet a woman. Their author was still a young white woman finding herself in an increasingly divided digital world. While the singer’s youth-oriented indie music would indeed make her the face of mid-2010s pop, a persona sustained on her 2017 follow-up Melodrama, hasty labels, acclaim, and accolades led many to ignore and forget the elephant in the room. Culture critics of 2013 were evidently embarrassed by the twerking and blurred lines that plagued popular culture that year and found Lorde’s rebellious genre-jumping pop to be a groundbreaking breath of fresh air. It was also one that led teenage Ella Yelich-O’Connor, known professionally as Lorde, to be instantly named the voice of her generation (a label she would ultimately reject) with only one album under her belt. This Internet discourse would pave the way for Gen Z icons of the moment like Halsey, Billie Eilish, or Olivia Rodrigo.
To quote a tweet from just last month, “Anyone who had a Tumblr account from 2010-2014 has a master’s degree in social media.” They made an entire virtual personality out of using lyrics like “I’m kind of over getting told to throw my hands up in the air” as captions. To be on Tumblr in 2013 or 2014 meant scrolling through an endless sea of bad jokes, dangerous beauty standards, and a parade of Lana Del Rey and Lorde fans. One where Twitter was still merely the place to speak into the void about your hobbies and minor irritants in your life, and Tumblr was the place where adolescents published things that probably should’ve remained deep in their psyches for all eternity. That was also, of course, an earlier age of social media that almost seems prehistoric now.
I had the unfortunate coincidence of turning 16 when Lorde released her debut studio album, Pure Heroine.
0 kommentar(er)
