Lorde of Austria

Recently I talked to an Austrian radio station about Lorde

Austrian National Radio have a programme about memorable pop songs https://oe1.orf.at/100songs

They wanted to do a programme on Lorde’s “Royals”, and ended up talking to me (via the IASPM mailing list, but that’s another story). I taught that song in my first year media classes back in the day (the song was released in 2013). Obviously I liked it, or I wouldn’t have bothered, and equally obviously it was (and is) the biggest hit single by a New Zealander ever. It was a hit in Austria too, so what made it such a zeitgeist tune?

Was it because Lorde (aka Ella Yelich-O’Connor) offered an alternative to the shiny, sexy, female pop stars of that time - Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga (who was a bit different but definitely used her sexuality)? She came over more like a Goth (which in international parlance is shorthand for nerd)? She wasn’t showing a lot of flesh. The megatrend here was the feminisation (it seemed to me) of the pop charts. More than ever, pop was a female domain. It has always been characterised in terms of a female audience (think teenyboppers) but more recently also the artists. Arguably pop now is a genre mainly for and by women - Taylor Swift and her Swifties, Lady Gaga and her little monsters, Rihanna and her Navy, Lorde and her ladies? Of course I don’t know what proportion of their fans is female, but I bet it would be in the majority. So Lorde was the vanguard of a new type of woman pop star.

But Lorde’s song was also different. It wasn’t about romantic love. Or only in the most ironic way possible: “I cut my teeth on wedding rings in the movies.” On “Royals” (and throughout Pure Heroine), Lorde favours “we” over “I”; tempting to term this “the royal we”. It gives her a magisterial, impersonal tone, a dry, observational, detached perspective. Old before her time. Was this a New Zealand thing? the Austrians wanted to know. Did isolation impart distance? A tempting proposition, given that Lorde self-deprecatingly refers to her home, “the torn-up town, no postcode envy.” The lyric features much imagery, and little sentiment. Lorde’s mum (Sonja Yelich) is a poet, and I’m reminded of a passage in Maurice Gee’s novel Going West, about poet Rex Petley: “When we started writing verse I dealt with what I saw and how I felt about it, and what my feelings meant; Rex with what he saw and what he saw next.” All images; no feelings. This is what early New Zealand writers took from modernism - rejecting Romantic feeling, focusing on description, which became the dominant style of the cultural nationalists - a group of male Pakeha writers led by Frank Sargeson. It made it hard to know how the writer felt, or if they felt anything at all. In some ways, it was quite a masculine style. But now it was coming from a 13-year old girl. Perhaps then NZ was in a state of cultural adolescence, when, like teenagers, they didn’t want to examine their feelings too closely - writing was a barrier against the world as much as a portal to it.

“I’m not proud of my address”. Pakeha thought real culture and art came from elsewhere - the UK, or more recently, the US. Most settler colonies have this syndrome, but NZ had it worse than, say, Australia. Why? Because NZ was much more closely tied to the UK, right up until they joined the EEC in 1973, when the cord was cut. It ties into the “Godzone”, South Seas paradise line (basically hype, while Australia could never quite shake its image as a penal colony). NZ, a slice of heaven, the place where nothing ever happens. Certainly not the place of “bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin' the hotel room”.

The other point about cultural nationalism was it was all pretty blokey. And for a long time, NZ music was too. But by the late 90s, it was starting to change, the key figure being Bic Runga. Bic broke into the boy’s club and started redefining Kiwi music as girly. If you look at NZ music now, women are now prominent, running the gamut from pop stars (Lorde, Benee, Kimbra, Gin Wigmore, Holly Smith) to folkies (Brooke Fraser, Tiny Ruins, Aldous Harding, Reb Fountain, Nadia Reid, Anika Moa, Maisey Rika), female fronted groups (The Beths, Goldenhorse, Fur Patrol) indie chicks (Fazerdaze, Vera Ellen, Bachelorette). Some of this came down to government policy - Helen Clark’s Labour government made NZ music a priority and this created a lot of opportunities. Naysayers complained about commercialism, and there is nothing more commercial than an attractive woman singing a pop song, but Pakeha male guitar bands losing out to girls and non-white people was no bad thing.

However, marketing female pop stars in the US did require re-imaging - even Bic Runga got a makeover: compare the NZ and US videos for “Get Some Sleep” and “Sway”. In the former case, the NZ video is a folksy travelogue; the US video features her writhing on a bed (get some sleep, right?). In the NZ “Sway”, Bic is basically stalking a guy, while the US video is more conventional montage, no narrative and lots of sexy close-ups. With “Royals”, it was similar, although it was two cuts of the same video, rather than a remake. The NZ version is a lot artier, there’s more focus on the story, the kid who gets a buzzcut, while the US version has a lot more close-ups of Lorde singing to the camera, the conventional male gaze kind of thing.

The final thing that made “Royals” stand out was the music. Working with NZ producer Joel Little, the two favoured a minimal soundscape, with prominent hip-hop beat, layered vocals and not much else, unlike the frenetic, generally maxed-out typical pop single. This spareness melds perfectly with Lorde’s ironic tone, sustained throughout Pure Heroine, including of course its title, the perfect (beautiful?) collision of innocence and experience. Lorde would not be the first women artist to make herself into a choir on record; there is a history, starting with Joni Mitchell, running through Kate Bush, Aretha Franklin, Bjork, Bachelorette… In terms of the beats, there was a perhaps unintended irony in that the song draws on musically what it seems to distance itself from lyrically - the supposed excesses of the hip-hop lifestyle. Verónica Bayetti Flores went as far as to claim that the song was racist. There is something to this - Lorde is a Pakeha New Zealander, a subsequent settler in a country where the first settlers were Maori. When a song gets this famous, it’s bound to be analysed from all points of view, including that popular music is indebted to the non-white people who made up a lot of its basic tropes and styles, but seldom get credit for it. This is as true of NZ as anywhere - Maori, the driving force behind so much local music, rarely get recognition (perhaps this is starting to change). Then again, Lorde was only 15 when she wrote “Royals”. In 2021 she released Te Ao Marama, an EP on which she sang tracks from her 2021 album Solar Power in Te Reo.

The sign of a resilient artist is that as they change, they can take their audience with them. Lorde’s second album, Melodrama (2017), was nothing like her first. It was maximal where Heroine was minimal, it was passionate and direct where Heroine was distant and veiled. I found it hard going at first. But I learned to love it. Lorde had grown up. Solar Power was more relaxed, and I’m not entirely sure that a relaxed Lorde is a good thing, artistically. But “Fallen Fruit” is a masterpiece, a paean to the boomer generation that left Lorde and her contemporaries to wander (wonder) through autumnal gardens: “How can I love what I know I am gonna lose? Don't make me choose.” Long may Lorde reign.