Lorde is a 28-year-old teenager. As such, she spends her days looking at herself in the mirror, then scribbling down furious reflections on how much she hates herself. When she’s not doing that, she’s thinking about boys.
The New Zealand singer, also known as Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, first slouched on to the world stage with her acapella-style hit “Royals” as an actual teenager in 2013, when her door-slamming earnestness made sense. A tangle of wild hair and breathy vocals, she emerged as an understated prodigy at a time when high-gloss X Factor alumni crowded out the charts. She also masterfully captured the greatest fixation of Gen Z: themselves. In her hands, songs became mopey private reckonings; concerts were reverential affairs imbued with the cringe sincerity of a slam poetry night. Audiences of excited girls were shushed for singing along so that the teary archteenager could wail about being dumped. Shut it — I’m talking about my trauma!
Lorde’s great thesis is that being uncomfortable in her own skin makes her fundamentally interesting. It is unfortunate, then, that most of her fans are girls and young women — a demographic for whom being a bit self-conscious is basically the cost of admission. Now, however, the singer has gone nuclear in her battle to prove that she is not like other girls: maybe, she suggests, she isn’t a woman at all. Perhaps nobody should be surprised that after more than a decade of submersion in the entertainment industry and its attendant fantasies, Lorde has come out with revelations about her own gender trouble: the most popular song on her new album Virgin, saucily titled “Man of the Year”, hard-launches a non-binary era with the lyric “some days I’m a woman / some days I’m a man (oh-oh)”. Imagine Lorde’s dismay, then, when the boring old cis girlies of TikTok started clipping her song to use over videos showing horrible texts sent by ex-boyfriends, sarcastically declaring them “man of the year”. As much as she yearns to break free of the breakup ballad, her conventional fanbase drags her back.
In some ways, Lorde is a good bellwether for Gen Z’s self-centred neuroticism. Adam Curtis’s new documentary series, Shifty, goes some way to describing how we got to this stage, when collective culture and the external world gave way to personal fantasy and self-expression. In one episode, a woman explains to a cut-glass Seventies reporter that her boxer dog is undergoing a sex change, and must now be considered a girl. The dog looks entirely nonplussed, oblivious to the delusions of his owner. Curtis splices the clip with others of societal discontent and political upheaval, heavily implying — but of course not saying outright — that gender identity is a feature of bourgeois individualism which has disconnected people from reality. Lorde’s confusion of the realities of womanhood with a fundamental mislabelling crisis enacts this process perfectly: instead of questing to the root causes of her stated problems, from bodily discomfort to the vagaries of love and sexual politics, by considering the macro issues like misogyny, medicine or the media, she has turned inwards and focused on herself. This technique, and the high-concept misery it inflects her music with, is what makes Lorde and her ilk so ineffectual — and so difficult to take seriously.
If Lorde is sometimes a bloke, she’s a bad one. The singer, it is rumoured, split up her producer and his partner — and took him for herself. A few years ago she was also rumoured to have had an affair with Lena Dunham’s boyfriend, Jack Antonoff, another producer. The naked facts of Lorde’s love life, the great theme of her work, reveal her to be nothing more or less than a melodramatic young woman, subject to the same bland human frailties as the rest of us.
“Lorde is a good bellwether for Gen Z’s self-centred neuroticism. “
Lorde’s obsession with beauty standards — and freeing herself from them — is all-encompassing. She recently left a comment under a post of Addison Rae frolicking about in her pants, saying: “It’s so yummy seeing someone so in their body.” Rae, who became famous by dancing on TikTok, is probably okay with how she looks — but no matter. The point of the compliment was really to signal Lorde’s own delicious complexity, her saintly self-alienation. She recently told Rolling Stone of her own far more interesting relationship with her body: “I went to the cupboard, and I got the tape out, and I did it to myself,” she said of putting duct tape over her boobs. “It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.” Enlightenment, after all, is how you look.
Pretentious androgyny has proven the refuge of the overpromoted teen star ever since Harry Styles popped on a frock for Vogue. Unfortunately, such an approach cannot salvage bad music. The former One Direction heartthrob may have cribbed his dresses from Bowie, but it has not saved him from churning out record after record of froth destined to be piped into the changing rooms at River Island. A similar problem confronts Lorde, whose new album is impossible to listen to without imagining a teenage girl angrily lip-syncing into a mirror, because that is, essentially, what it is. “I swim in waters that would drown so many other bitches” is the sort of lyric that could only ever sound good if you’re 13 and practising applying eyeliner.
There is a hidden revelation in Virgin, though: Lorde is, it turns out, horridly conventional. She has a unique talent, but not the one she thinks: the talent for transforming real-world problems into yet more mirrors for her own inner jaggedness. The most honest thing about Lorde’s latest album, which pledges to bare all with a sleeve showing her own pelvic X-ray and artwork that includes a picture of her own vagina (brilliant), is the following lyric on “Hammer”: “I don’t have the answers.” In this, I heartily agree.
Many of my Gen Z comrades, however, have bought Lorde’s world view — that of her own navel — wholesale. One young woman playing about with duct tape and publicising the granular details of her journey to self-discovery is not the end of the world; I’ll not hold this single New Zealander accountable for the mopey, limpid youth culture which raised her. But I will say this: sadgirl pop is indicative of a bigger problem, a global self-awareness deficit, of which our Lorde and saviour is the sulking face. The message of this album is that the world is impenetrable and victimising; the solution is to turn inwards and wage war on your own body, taping and drugging and titillating it until you can bear your own company. We may forgive 13-year-old girls for being broody, pouty and self-obsessed, but as grown-up women we have a responsibility to look beyond ourselves. If only someone would tell Lorde that.
