12:00 Chariot. Let's get back on track here.
1.05 – Lorde – Pure Heroine – 2013
Simply and coldly put, this album was both a function of and catalyst for change of pop in the aughts, encompassing format, distribution, and content. It blew my mind when it came out but I was personally unable to bring to abstraction what was so good about it, and an appreciation of it came to me again later this decade upon the release of her second, which also took a sit-down moment and recommendations to finally break through. I think
Pure Heroine displays a clarity, bona fide lyrical prowess, and a deconstruction of the elements of pop sound that had come heretofore from the nowhere zip codes she alluded to in her decade-best (IMHO) song "Royals."
Long write-up and links in spoiler
Reveal hidden contents
Was anybody paying attention to the young adults of the early aughts? How absolutely danceable the good punk had become, how coked out the rap/hip hop sounded and aspired to, how aughts dance had fragmented in a million ways, leaving algorithms to rule the airwaves in the form of uploads and streams on social media? And was anybody paying attention to the seismic shifts in the music industry thenceforth? The music industry, circa 2000, a dead one because of these developments, sure had found a way to function again by the late aughts. How to get around the death of everyone's favorite, binary-cropped “disc,” in both copyright publication ownership and the CD charge against the artist and public in record contracts themselves had been answered thusly: Achieve the most amount of playtime via cheaply-compensated streams aimed at the largest demographic, and then perform those songs extensively live – preferably in arenas or festivals. If this was not viable, you could, even better, find a format laden with commercials on the airwaves. Your biggest hits? Never mind ad-supported, they now work in the ad’s or program’s experience. And the gorging at the industry’s trough continued. The biggest counters to this by the musician and public? The rise in the early and mid-aughts of slow and warmed-over guitar twee, served with a side of the Beach Boys and their attendant rock clubs mixed with non-copyrighted beats coming from banging dance clubs (one presumes) in Europe. But the bankers got to that mostly, too, probably the day Modest Mouse floated on into the sky sonically and epically, or the day Kanye broke Daft Punk finally in America, leaving every dance and indie act now struggling to come to the fore resultant in a twenty dollar t shirt mark up charge.
I’ll still give you my money, Daft Punk.
But enough: it all seemed so prime for a takedown, or so inevitably careening toward mathematical and behaviorist certainty, that it began to propel and stack us Eight Million American Idols High, with a surprising emphasis on slightly chubby girls with triceps once unheard of and impossibly skinny men with tucked in calves and glutes all leading the way to a weird sort of bones and dough display, all grossly and baldly androgynous until Miley shaved everywhere but her armpits, leaving us with a shorn freak who was always going all the way but for spirit and humanness; where even tepid creativeness fought the algorithm, or, if you’re into the human for the moment like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs once were, you had your own riff of the decade totally ripped off for a mechanical imagining spewing forth from machines, vox changed from desperate longing and tears abounding to something more sterilized, palatable and feminist coming from the actual original AI winner.
Maps and longing were not cold enough for the feminine, spoke the machine, and a John Greene protagonist in copyrighted Paper Towns was born ever so gladly for the next gen.
So was this to be the final shot? Wherein was the remedy needed, the purge of this? Was a dialectical purge of this even possible? Desirable? Well, where would it come from? Folk/indie, ineffectually looking toward lost innocence however sadly? Post-punk and frustration bass ad nauseam? Guitar-based singer/songwriter introspection? It didn’t look too good. Who on earth would could? Who on earth would really dare?
But then. It was answered in one of those typically weirdly lucky ways America often operates upon when there is a cultural stasis or problem. Quite simply, we are bailed out by an utterly unique ally whereby the solution to the melting pot of dialectical issues comes from abroad in our vacuum, maybe sometimes twenty years ahead of America’s time, and aligns with ours. We are unique in lots of things, and accepting this help bit and branding it our own is indispensable to the American experiment. This time the system shock came from a husky-voiced, seventeen year-old residing in a small town in New Zealand, at once wonderfully seductive while also being freshly acne-faced and problematic-looking for a teen star.
Ella Yelich O’Connor, or Lorde, the person in question, had signed her first music deal in her mid-teens having already read 1,000 total books and proofreading her Mother’s doctoral thesis. She was singing for a mother’s friend who happened to be connected in some way to the industry. A Soundcloud success later, three years passage, and still singing after releasing a successful EP in NZ, there she was, smacking, as if instantly, off of the FM dial somehow with that song. That damn song that actually hit on U.S. radio. It directly addressed the zeitgeist of the aughts and the time – the top artists, the men and women within rap/hip hop/R&B were spending their cultural capital and their creative niche outlets having fights over their total worth and selection of inventory. And the public was buying it as art. The artists’ assets and goodwill brands acted as if, according to the “artist,” that the imprimatur of their new wealth sanctified poetry set to a music backdrop -- and was the raison d’etre of the effort. The songs and appearances had lurched almost fatally to celebrity appearance and cash. Accountants with attitudes showing up to work. It was so silly…and then…
But every song's like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin' in the bathroom
Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin' the hotel room
We don't care, we're driving Cadillacs in our dreams
But everybody's like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece
Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash
We don't care, we aren't caught up in your love affair
And we'll never be royals
It don't run in our blood
That kind of lux just ain't for us
We crave a different kind of buzz
Let me be your ruler, you can call me Queen B
And baby I'll rule (I'll rule I'll rule I'll rule)
Let me live that fantasy
Who said that? Why were they/it/her/he saying it? The entire industry was completely blindsided. The song hit, and hit hard, spending nine weeks at the top of the billboard charts, longer but not before cries of nihilism, elitism, racism, how dare she... flew over the song. And Lorde? That name? What the hell was that?
And did I mention she was young? Well, she knew what some of her songs were. They were shots across the celebrity bow, announced with more authority than Nuke LaLoosh of Bull Durham fame had ever dreamed, and devastated or at least turned some careers creatively toward other things then capital. People were especially thinking the song was a shot at Jay-Z and Beyonce, That caused problems, quickly put out. But it's hard to imagine a 4:44 and Lemonade might not even be subject fodder worthy of a listen without “Royals” four or so years earlier. The irony? Now everyone knew who Lorde was, too, this now-famous and likely very rich girl from a small town under the equator where even now the water goes the other way, doesn't it? And she’d tell you, too. Her lyrics dealt with the inevitability of her arrival on the scene, and with a bit of humility kept reminding us, not overtly and directly, but with well-composed lines of all too-prescient spirit, that...
- She’s good.
- She’s going to be famous.
- This is how she’ll deal with it. And if you respect it, hey, come along, too
To further emphasize: I’ve read stuff I’ve written at thirteen. It’s as laughably bad as one can imagine. Say, for instance, Walter in The Big Lebowski penned odes to his ex in a fictional world of his own. The emotions of fifteen-seventeen year-olds, however earnestly and deeply felt, are often left best to the hands of the few, and Lorde is one of them. Her talent is something that happens once in a generation, once in two or three generations, even. Bowie said he listened to this album and it "felt like tomorrow." She even treats and addresses her male teenage paramours in an unusually multi-dimensional way, which means she treats them like humans, and therefore, rather well for that age. There's no oversexed libertine or demanding shelterer; but rather a real, contemplative young woman about to embark on her life's journey. Even if the boys in that verbal picture have the inevitable teenage acne and are burning their faces and hair off casually and literally. Ever burn your own face? I have twice. Grease and glass. It’s horrendous and scary. And likely something you should be nowhere near. There’s a lot of experience that has to go into that event, at least most likely, and through little snippets like that, she plays a fairly reliable emotional narrator of her own journey. She announces thusly about her impending certain fame and future press clippings and who she’ll share it with and announces, to no one in particular, her life and potential loves. Even a slight sojourn is admittedly her first, but it feels like she’s done it before:
Pretty soon I'll be getting on my first plane
I'll see the veins of my city like they do in space
But my head's filling up with the wicked games, up in flames
How can I #### with the fun again, when I'm known
And my boys trip me up with their heads again, loving them
Everything's cool when we're all in line, for the throne
But I know it's not forever (Yeah)
It’s quite remarkable, these tracks, this album. Its minimalism in its percussive repetition for beats, like the Neptunes did to hip hop with Clipse on Grindin’, changed the tenor and tone of female pop. It’s almost percussive acapella. Ella wrote the lyrics and conducted the music with songwriting partner Joel Little, fairly enough for massive credit and publishing crediting backed up by every version of the event, so to speak. And it worked: I’m not alone in that assessment. The dark minimal sound of hip hop and pop would be changed for the better part of the decade because of it. It’s hard to imagine my second pick for AOTD without Pure Heroine’s outsider success both lyrically and topically, so there it stays until next pick, snipe willin’.
Wonderful write-up at Billboard about “Royals” here:
https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8544122/lorde-royals-songs-that-defined-the-decade
Standout, wonderful tracks:
Tennis Court
Royals
Buzzcut Season
White Teeth Teens
. I think it's one of the best albums of the decade and almost certainly the one I've heard the most because, like me, both my daughters love it. It has received a lot of air time in our household. 
