Lorde

For my soul I need to write about music, so here’s some of that.

On “Ribs” by Lorde, there’s a line:

And I've never felt more alone, feels so scary getting old.

When that song came out, Lorde - or Ella Yelich-O'Connor - was 16. It came on in my spin class tonight, and I was thinking about why I gave Pure Heroine such a mediocre review when it came out in 2013. It just didn’t deliver what it promised - for me, anyway. I gave it harsh feedback because I wanted her to grow, which isn’t my place necessarily, but as a critic I was hopeful she’d be back with further albums, and that they would execute her ideas in a more complete way. And she was, and they did. And no 16-year-old should write a line about feeling scared about getting old, as though it’s already the case that she’s old. Lorde refused to do an interview with the magazine because of the review. My fault, again.

“Feels so scary getting old”. I’m not scared about getting old any more. I’m scared about the in-between. Recently I find myself scared about how I’m going to get to the bit where I’m old. I’ve discovered that I’m the problem. I’m a dissident in these times of “progressivism”, aka Instagram socialism. It’s been a bit liberating framing it this way in recent weeks, because now I understand plainly. Everyone has a problem with me, and therefore I’m the baddie. Now it makes sense, I can continue being bad. I will be terrible. Enfant terrible will be my new Twitter handle. *Bedazzles horns*.

The truth is, however, before I get old I don’t want to be alone. Alas, I’m a writer. I’m a swallow that migrates alone. I am inherently secluded. Real writers are. We don’t have time to talk on the phone or hang out with people or go on weekend sojourns to Martha’s Vineyard or Santorini or Provence. (Not that I’d say no). We don’t go to islands. We are the islands. We sit. We think. We walk. We sit some more. Oh, suddenly a word. Hello friend.

I’m not a moonlight writer. There’s no class or course in what I’ve done. It’s just me for years carving away at the edges of a postcard to send out to you, wondering how you’ll receive it. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always found the songs so fascinating, and what they say in the songs, particularly the pop stars, who take four years to come up with a dozen tracks for a world in waiting. What will she say? It’s so much drama.

I gave Lorde an NME six out of ten so she had room to grow. That’s a gift; the arc of development. None of us are the finished article, and that’s something. We all have room to expand. Being 16. I can’t imagine it. And yet, in many ways I am 16 again. I am back in a place where I have nothing to lose. Trying to get back to the young girl I was when I had a hunger that sort of stuns me now. I was starving. Walking into pubs in West London, with copies of my CV folded into my leather jacket. I gave them out. I gave a CV to Adrian Chiles at the BBC in a pub once where Amy Winehouse was playing, because I saw him and thought maybe there was a phone I could answer? A cup of tea I could make? What was I doing?

It’s a strange feeling to look back and see the destruction that lies behind me. I hustled through the wee side streets of Soho. I negotiated my way to free gig tickets while crashing on couches. I built my little empire byline by byline, offering the critique nobody dared to offer, in a style I figured out by myself, and my god there were so many dudes in the room, but so few ladies. I was naked and unafraid in an objectively terrifying world that - to me - was just a carnival of undiscovered magic. Trying to work out who I was, in the open, with eyes staring at me, judging my words, my syntax, my humor. Was I funny? Please laugh, I thought. Every time, on the verge of publication, a rush of fear. What will they say? Again, so much drama.

Fuck it, I don’t care what they think, I thought. And that’s sort of how I wound up here, I guess. I never cared if people liked me. I cared if they understood what I was trying to say. What I was trying to do. Don’t you get it, I thought?

I love Lorde’s new album, Virgin. It’s been on repeat in my headphones and on my speakers since it came out a month ago. It’s her best. It’s Greek. As in - not that virgin, but like Astarte or the Egyptian Isis: a goddess alone. It’s the album I wanted to hear when Pure Heroine came out 12 years ago. We got there. Thank you, Ella.

OK I hear you shouting: She’s an antizionist!

I know, it’s very annoying, I know.

You know what? We’re Jews, people hate us.

Does that mean we don’t get to experience stuff we enjoy?

If you go to Tel Aviv, you will hear Dua Lipa play in every bar.

And what? is their attitude. “Electricity” is a banger.

(It is).

I’m not going to talk about every song on Virgin like I’m reviewing it for my supper, because I always found that rather dry. But there are some exceptional moments worth noting, and it’s significant that she made it from a place of feeling like she’d never write music again. And so Lorde enters on a song called “Hammer” with her own smashing re-birth via a titular lyric rushing over pulsating synthetic beats: “when you’re holding a hammer, everything feels like a nail”. There are more obvious sexual overtones for that given the album’s themes, but I like to think of it as –if your only tool is a hammer then you just have to break everything to break through:

I might have been born again
I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers
There’s peace in the madness over our heads
Let it carry me up

“Shapeshifter” is considered the highlight. It’s a staggering meditation that she speak-sings about the disappointment of fame, the multiple characters she’s had either projected onto her or has had to play to people please and also to survive, and the newfound free desire to just “fall” into her various complexities and be her true intimate self.

“I’ve been the ice, I’ve been the flame
I’ve been the prize, the ball, the chain
I’ve been the dice, the magic eight
So I’m not affected
I’ve been the siren, been the saint
I’ve been the fruit that leaves the stain
I’ve been up on the pedestal
But tonight I just wanna fall.”

She takes on roles so she can hide her vulnerability. But no more. There is so much cutting honesty throughout the record, particularly on a track in which she confesses the dark truth of an eating disorder she developed during the pandemic. On the chorus she battles her body dysmorphia by singing about punching the mirror to remind herself that it’s just “Broken Glass”. Her icy vocals dance above the shards of dislocated synthesizers.

The track I can’t stop playing, however, “If She Could See Me Now”. If only for the lyric: “I swim in waters that would drown so many other bitches”. It’s about the battlefield of a terrible love. And how she eventually recognized a pattern of repeated toxic choices and cut them dead.

“Baby whenever you’d break me
I’d watch it happen like an angel looking down
It made me a woman being hurt like that”

Every time I hear it I wonder what the price is for being the independent goddess. I’m not scared of getting old. I’m scared of being 16 forever. I’m scared of getting in the way of it all. All of what I want, while still being free.

Anyway, this performance is a vibe.