RETINOL, RIBS AND ROMANTICIZE A QUIET LIFE — Inhabiting the Art of Lorde
It’s Lorde’s world and we are just trespassing.
It wouldn’t be much of an outcry if I say that I owe my late teenage years to Lorde’s music. Around the time when Melodrama was released in 2017, I was fragmented between a sense of deliberate insecurity and condensed vulnerability. I was sitting at the back bench of my life’s classroom, letting the time pass away without having to learn any more harder lessons than the ones I was already choking and dry swallowing on.
But, did I try to escape Melodrama?
“We are driving Cadillacs in our dreams”; “We aren’t caught up in your love affair.”
Stemming inspiration from Aristocracy subject and Marie Antoinette, Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor became Lorde. Having rose to the fame in 2013 by her single, Royals, Lorde was bringing her own league of alternative pop music. Her debut album, Pure Heroine, instilled the themes of materialism, societal norms, social status and fame, from the lens of a 17 year old — with the festoon and candor without a vignette filter.
Team, Tennis Court and Ribs is a trio speaking the minds of youth whose dreams sips on rebellion and talents chase after anonymous identity with lyrics such as :
“We live in cities you’ll never see on-screen
Not very pretty, but we sure know how to run things
Livin’ in ruins of a palace within my dreams
And you know we’re on each other’s team” (Team)
It’s a new art form, showin’ people how little we care (Tennis Court)
The drink you spilt all over me
“Lover’s Spit” left on repeat
My mom and dad let me stay home
It drives you crazy getting old (Ribs)
Coming to think of psychedelia entangled with a kind of confessional lyrics that scares your “being”, switching between the Daisies’ and Demogorgons’ phases of the world, Lorde has so far reigned the journey of a teenager to adolescence of modern century (millenials) through a kaleidoscope of different emotional elements, dispersed in the atmosphere and yet, too intangibly fallible for us to feel.
Intermittently, in my alternate “spill the tea” show, Lorde is, seemingly, a female dream-pop version of Twenty One Pilots. On a personal note, Liability (Melodrama) and Secrets from a Girl (Who’s Seen It All) (Solar Power) makes her the confluence sister of Lana Del Rey and Phoebe Bridgers where my 3 AM deconstructed mind would eventually play Cinnamon Girl and Motion Sickness.
From understanding the visuals and impressionist schemes of a blooming personality, crimping itself inside the trunk of a getaway car to the nowhere land, Melodrama was a personal excursion of Lorde visiting heartbreak, adulting and self-evolution.
Lorde’s innate characteristic of Chromesthesia (Sound-to-color Synesthesia) derived this masterpiece with audios which exudes a sense of abstract visionary and realism emoticons, while listening to the songs. As Melodrama connotated Lorde’s heartbreak phase, it also weaves itself through the FOMO and MIA — of being present to yourself and for being absent by yourself.
The song Hard Feelings/LOVELESS and Supercut leaves you tearing apart under dimmed blue bedroom light about a love interest, which breaks your soul into pieces only for you to rearrange it into a self-romantic version. The genius of Lorde contains in the sudden drift and unpredictable shift in the themes and emotions of the song, without dropping the ball.
Sketching a poetical inspiration from Theatre as well as Greek Mythology, Melodrama intensifies the effect in the title track, SOBER II(Melodrama).
“Ubering” my way back home from a busy day, I listened to SOBER II amidst the chaos of streets and slithering distress of moonlight. The imagination and progressive bass of the song felt like a live performance of the greatest plays with a modern choreography where Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and Eurydice are acting out the climax of their stories at one point of time.
With random onomatopoeia and unabridged swearing, the beauty of Lorde’s discography is her relentless articulation, which holds your emotions professionally, yet unedited and involuntarily. “Broadcast the Boom, Boom, Boom! and Make them all dance to it!” (The Louvre) and a quick tch,tch… in Perfect Places wins it for me, as it coarsely defines the freedom of art at its best.
And, the transgression of adapting to January through Writer in the Dark and finding a sunlit disposition in April by Solar Power, I am hooked up to continue this journey with honest interventions and midnight snacks, while dancing in the kitchen.
Here’s to finding the artist’s holy ground, here’s to the intersection of maturity.
Here’s to discovering a new taste of music.
Every time when I relapse out of feeling depressed, I put on some Lorde to compensate for the heaviness of my mind the same way I put on my retinol to compensate for the lack of skincare as I stand looking at my reflection in the sink mirror.
