June, She’ll Change Her Tune
Do you remember being 19? What do you remember about it? What made it 19 for you? The parties? A new relationship, a difficult breakup? How many nights did you spend with music and booze that throbbed together, and how much of those nights did you spend feeling lonely with friends and lonely without? Do you remember much at all? Did you remember much more of it then? What was left when you were sober?
Lorde was 16 when she released “Pure Heroine,” and now, upon the release of “Melodrama,” is well into 20. Pop music is changing. Melodrama, though stronger in theme, is a brighter record than Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s debut. The intuitive growth curve in music is to get more brooding with age, but Lorde has gone from chilly and grim to melodramatically uplifting like a sad movie released during Christmas break. Do you remember the disparity between 16 and 19? At 16 I felt my life was winding down. Time was speeding into shorter intervals of perception. I started noticing the ills of the world, even though I was at the peak of the brightest time in my life. When I was 19, my life felt like it was in fast forward. Hours grew even shorter, and the world, unlike in high school, was a daily exhausting adrenaline rush. In some strange twisted negative correlation, my outlook grew sunnier as my life slid further into heavy responsibility. The future was wide open. The world was poppier.
We (my tribe) were squeezing all that was left out of our second decade, spewing and sucking up emotions with the teenaged fervor we’d practiced plus the scientific adult deliberation we applied to all our debauchery. We kicked down doors to climb on roofs for the sake of the roof itself. My best friend and I spent an entire house party in a petty feud of glances and scoffs, and as the scene died and we emerged, we screamed and screamed at each other until we were suddenly kissing on the street in the pouring rain. Nothing was just a moment, and everything meant something. I remember melodrama.
I can posture and puff my chest all I want about this album or that album, but I really don’t know that much about millennial pop music, that broad brand of artistry whose defining quality is a shiny smooth surface free of aesthetic scars or ripples. I have, in the past, harbored real disdain for this “genre.” I’ll vent to anyone who’ll listen about pop meaning “popular” and how any characteristics it picks up are not intrinsic but a reflection of the era that it accumulates like a rolling stone (if I were baked I would be incredibly proud of this reference to the Stones in an all too masturbatory sense). If one extends this theory and applies it to the early 2000s, one must conclude that the millennium is vapid, obsessed with sex in a sterile and pornographic sense, and began exposing a postmodern meta-appreciation for both the artifice of “cool” and the wholehearted subsumption of the concept as a replacement for rock/folk personal humanism (see: Paris Hilton as a flashbang phenomenon and early mass culture meme, the boy band explosion). As the millennium dragged on we got Five For Fighting and Jack Johnson and Vanessa Carlton, and they are all earnest but are also rife with poptimism and lacking in skepticism. I’m not sure what to make of Maroon 5 releasing one of the only good pop albums of the decade and then spiraling into the worst undead has-been band of the past thirty years.
My relationship with my 19th year is like my relationship with modern pop: I wan’t quite there for all of it, I remember it swirling all around me, but I was also unable to take it in fully. There was something about the world as it was, the surface world that wasn’t enough. If I were a person who could settle for the world as it is, would I like the music I do? Would I be able to like pop without all of my stupid caveats and theories? What I’ve written here isn’t all that coherent. There are holes in my knowledge, big ones. Maybe if I’d been less of a pompous fuck for 18 years I’d know a thing or two about the pop of my childhood instead of looking at it like an alien does a sandwich. It’s all at arm’s length, like 2014 — I wasn’t present for it, I wasn’t humble and wise. I can only analyze as autopsy, which is demoralizing to say the least. But I do remember 19, vividly, or I remember the mirages I walked through.
And so I remember “Melodrama.”
This album is a triumph. That is undeniable. I have yet to hear or read a negative review, but I cannot help but exhort and attest to this truth. I personally jive harder to the steel girder and concrete jams of “Pure Heroine” but this record is more touching and heartbreaking on every level. I’m a very cishet male, regardless of my history as a shy young man and huge fucking dweebus nerd, so any record that makes me see and experience and inhabit a woman’s human experience is a trip and a treasure. I’m not sure what “Homemade Dynamite” is about lyrically, but this habitation is what I feel in the bass and noodling synths.
Now that I’ve finally gotten to analyzing the actual songs I can’t spend another second writing about anything but “The Lourve,” a track that word for word describes the drama and romance of my 2014. Ella Yelich-O’Conner has no right to be this wise at her age. I barely understand my hazy party past, and she sees it with such devastating clarity: “Blow all my friendships / to sit in hell with you;” where was this lyric when I was 19? Where was this album when I was 19 (that’s the second time I’ve asked that of an album in 2017, the first time referring to Harry Styles’ self titled pop devastation and yet another brick paving this silvery path of modern earnestness)? I’m a procrastinator when it comes to concerts but I seriously might buy Lorde tickets for next April because I’m not sure I can survive without hearing Ella sing “a rush at the beginning,” a line that is followed by some other shit but needs no explanation or context; I feel it. I feel the guitar echoes at the end of the song. I feel what she feels; it doesn’t matter if her album is largely about fame. The youth shines through.
Here at the first quiet turn of the album is “Liability” which, with “Slide” and “Up In Hudson” is one of my top songs in 2017, maybe the very top song. “Play at romance, we slow dance / In the living room, but all that a stranger would see / Is one girl swaying alone / Stroking her cheek.” I’ve told girls that they’re too much for me. I’ve lost friends in my heavy fear of saying they’re too much. I think I’ve been told I’m a liability, and again, Lorde sees this about herself but I was oblivious to the rejection when I was told. I was most certainly a liability.
Are you listening to “Melodrama?” Does this piece make you want to? She’s so much more eloquent than me, Ella is. While I was looking the other way at Kanye and Bon Iver and Childish Gambino and Kendrick, pop was invaded by artists firmly in the singer-songwriter tradition. Two Junes ago Carly Rae Jepsen released “EMOTION,” as good a starting point as any. I’ve spent so long with a low boiling disdain for pop, Kiss FM, top 40, and now it’s stuffed with wise women showing the world what it is to feel. It’s so appropriate then that Lorde spent much of her time writing and recording “Melodrama” obsessed with Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” and I’d truly appreciate it if she’d stop attacking me through imitation. I fell in love with “Graceland” in my 19th year. It’s my favorite album of all time by the greatest songsmith and lyricist in pop music (eat my ass Bob Dylan, you crusty old whine peddler). Lay it on thick, Ella — study up, you’re one of the greats now.
So “Melodrama” fits in the new paradigm, is both in and out of this curve where “Slide” is about swinging and detachment, Kendrick writes exclusively sad lyrics, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” laments the fantasy of drug culture and pop throws the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune over a dance beat. “Pure Heroine” fits in an open wound, sits in the forefront of heartache tempered with dejected teen apathy, attuned to the exhausting futility of feeling in this postmodern nightmare we live in. “Melodrama” is, excuse my obtuse obviousness, an all-around more dramatic statement, and represents drama in both its lighthearted and painful nature, a broad spectrum of unabashed feeling. It is one of these new pop stories, a sickly sweet revolution of the earnest, honest, righteous open heart of the endless present, a slow thawing actualization of Wallace’s urging for the purging of the distance of the harmful literature ironique. Listen to “Supercut” and hear the impassioned Romantic cries to the lost-love throes of the soul of the world, “in my head I do everything right,” “in your car the radio up / we keep tryna talk about us,” an attempt to sort out these memories time left us. If we can only put them in order, what will be revealed? Hear in Lorde’s voice the post-post-irony, a world of spirals between non sequitur and absolute classical sequitured dispatches to the heart of our culture. Maybe I’m just growing up, but I’m coming to believe that the greatest and most useful application of complex 21st century feeling is earnestness.
“Melodrama” is, if not totally perfect melodic achievement, a thematically perfect vehicle for that truthful open expression, is as unafraid to feel joy and as it is to engage in churning and deep sadness, the two Jungian sides in the eternal search for meaning. Lorde can see and understand her ending youth with more clarity than I’ve ever seen in any living being, but don’t believe for a second that she has found that meaning. “What the fuck are perfect places anyway” is what that feels like. 19 was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite age to assign his flapper heroines, and Lorde captures that greatest of all English language yearnings: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Here is the truth, friends — 19 is as real as you want it to be and is full to bursting with the pain of human nature, and Lorde has you covered in case you ever forget.
