The Dichotomy of Lorde
a dissection of Solar Power that nobody asked for
I’m fascinated (dazzled, even) with the ways Lorde uses herself as a prism for the ideas she unravels on her album. She navigates opposites and murky in-betweens—
Celebrity and homebody
North and South
Happy and sad
City and countryside
Summer and winter
Lorde and Ella
As a supplement to listening to her new album on repeat, I’ve followed along with the emails she’s sent to fans in the lead up to its release. The messages read as personal, like she’s writing directly to me. She clips screenshots of her notes app and pictures of yellow flowers. She gives me a name: SCWWTS (sensitive cutie who worships the sun). She signs off each email with an initial and a kiss,
E x
The first time I heard Solar Power, I felt reminded of Sheryl Crow’s 2002 summer anthem, Soak Up the Sun. A bop featuring strumming guitars and playful percussion that I’d listen to on a CD in my childhood bedroom, or sing from the backseat in the car with my mom. I’m gonna soak up the sun / I’m gonna tell everyone to lighten up.
Lighten up: become less heavy. Feel happier. What is it about the sun, about literal solar power, that triggers euphoria?
Lorde is happy, and it feels a bit surprising after the angst and moodiness of her second album, Melodrama. But maybe we should’ve seen this coming. On Liability, Lorde sings: you’re all gonna watch me disappear into the sun.
Happiness feels shameful. Maybe that’s too cynical, maybe I’ll feel differently someday. In a culture of high productivity, happiness translates as the enemy. If we are happy, we should’ve aimed higher. Contentedness is a synonym for laziness. In the wake of a year of collective trauma, happiness implies that life hasn’t challenged you. Elation becomes void of complexity or nuance. Happiness is a privilege.
And yet, Online, everyone is happy. Happiness is a mirage, a performance. Lorde plays with this tension, citing Jia Tolentino’s widely shared essay on optimization as an inspiration for her track, Mood Ring. In the essay, Tolentino writes,
The ideal woman looks beautiful, happy, carefree, and perfectly competent. Is she really? To look any particular way and to actually be that way are two separate concepts, and striving to look carefree and happy can interfere with your ability to feel so.
To be happy is to invite skepticism. Is Lorde really happy? A mood ring gauges the temperature of the wearer's finger and associates the changing colors with emotions. Happy, Calm, Sad, Nervous. My mood ring never left my finger, though it was often waterlogged and therefore appeared black. I’m sure you can figure out what mood that labeled me.
Wellness is the commodification of happiness. If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands becomes if you’re happy and you know it post it on Instagram. Share your skincare routine. Buy these crystals. Read your horoscope. Rinse. Post. Repeat.
In an email, Lorde identifies ‘the ultimate mood ring,’ as her ‘iP***e.’ She sings: I can’t feel a thing / I keep looking at my mood ring / tell me how I’m feeling.
I think of social media, the consumption of lives and an algorithm-driven quest for validation. I start to examine my own relationship with the internet — does sharing make me happy? Substitute ‘mood ring’ for ‘Instagram,’ and Lorde is interrogating the close ties between projection, consumption and self worth. On her titular track, Solar Power, Lorde sings: no shirt, no shoes only my features / my boy behind me, he’s taking pictures; and later and I throw my cellular device in the water [or, if you’re me singing, waaaaaaaater].
She unveils a universe where images are kept for the self, not shared as invitations for judgement, ridicule or approval. In another email, she admits, being off social media makes me feel incredible. Her body is her own. On the cover, she upends the traditional gaze and leaps over the camera, baring skin in a playful, distorted fish-eye lens. My friend texted me: never thought i’d see so much of her butt. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, she describes the shot both as ‘innocent and playful’ and ‘feral and sexy.’ When I look at the image, I see the triangle formed by her outstretched legs. Is this her version of the Holy Trinity?
Her stage name already invokes religion, and Lorde plays with it. On the title track, she describes herself as kinda like a prettier Jesus. On the opening song, The Path, she denounces her position of influence: now if you’re looking for a savior, well that’s not me.
If not Lorde, do we turn to the sun? Let’s hope the sun will show us the path. Or better, her treasured dog, Pearl, that she dedicates the song Big Star. Everybody knows that you’re too good for me, don’t they?
While playing with the idea of celebrity as higher power, she taps into something extremely vulnerable and human by writing a song for her dog. Honestly, my dog is probably my savior. I’m obsessed with her, proved by the thousands of pictures I’ve taken of her on walks, or lying on the window seat, watching squirrels dance across the tree branches in our yard.
The Path uses specific memories to humanize her experience as a celebrity. Arm in a cast at a museum gala / fork in my purse to take home to my mother.
Her cast at the 2016 Met Gala is a literal break with our cultural expectation that aligns ‘celebrity’ with ‘perfection.’ To bring the fork home for her mother is endearing, something that maybe you would do if you brushed against fame or celebrity.
On tracks California and Stoned at the Nail Salon, Lorde uses place to explore this division of herself between Lorde and Ella. California opens Lorde as celebrity at the moment of fissure, when she won her first Grammy at sixteen years old.
Once upon a time in Hollywood / when Carole called my name / I stood up, the room exploded and / I knew that’s it, I’ll never be the same.
If Hollywood and LA are celebrity, New Zealand is home. New Zealand is all over Solar Power, as inspiration and literally. She writes, on the release date of the Solar Power music video,
I’ve made something that encapsulates where I’m from — my family, my girlfriends, my outdoors, my constant ruminations, and my unending search for the divine.
For Lorde, New Zealand is anonymity, boredom, the ‘roaring tunnel of cicadas,’ the beach. She records the crashing waves and humming cicadas using the voice memo app on her phone and uses them in the album. [Since originally drafting this post, she’s also released an EP of five songs from the album sung in Māori, the indiginous language of New Zealand.]
Stoned at the Nail Salon is the answer to California. If LA called Lorde into celebrity, on SATNS Lorde feels called home to New Zealand, to herself. In an interview with the NYTimes, Lorde admits that after touring Melodrama, she was drained, identifying herself as ‘a hothouse flower, a delicate person and a massive introvert.’ She’s describing burnout, a state of emotional or mental exhaustion. Burnout itself invokes heat, like a battery that’s been powered on for too long. I totally get it, maybe you do too.
It’s time to cool it down / whatever that means
Bonus Lorde content: