U Need A Poet

Lorde and underlorde

Rivertribe 'n' Technicolour, Fats White c. 2020

To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead.
~ Norman O. Brown, Love's Body, 1966

We go through the trauma of life and death every day, so it’s not as much of a worry about what sex we are anymore.
~ John Lennon, 1971


Poptimism began with the noblest of intentions. Pop music, compared with the more critically respected Rock music, was more likely to be the expression of women, or ethnicities marginalized by a rock-as-high-art focus, or working class and rainbow communities valuing dance music as a cultural nexus. Writing about pop, thinking about pop and its culture gets you closer to the social and instinctual forces shaping all of our lives. So far, so good; these days it’s getting harder to tell what’s authentic or original in rock music (tho surely poptimism is partly to blame for the yacht rock revival), and easier to spot the authentic note in pop. But, and it’s a big but, music is commerce and the counter-culture roots of rock have historically acted as a barrier, if only symbolically, to its maximal mainstream exploitation. Rock stars and their fans have always been exploitable, but the most influential artists’ suspicious and uncooperative response to industry goals used to provide a baked-in Anarcho-Marxist critique. The Pop star’s goals - popularity and wealth, with less importance placed on critical respect or political self-regard - are more closely aligned with those of the industry itself. So poptimism easily becomes corrupted to consumerist populism, in which popularity (or even, in a failure, its semblance) becomes the measure of Art. The masses like sport, its players can be traded for billions, so soccer becomes “the beautiful game”, its practitioners regarded as philosophers. The masses like superhero movies, so they become worthy of critical study, and before you know it you’re morally defective if you can’t see them as objects of equivalent artistic importance to any other film. Once, only SJ Perelman would have taken that tack. Academics line up in truly astounding numbers to pretend that Taylor Swift alone can be used to demonstrate any thesis, and in this panchreston we see the failure of poptimism; supposed to make criticism more inclusive, its rhetoric has become a promotional tool of the already-successful, and a defense of the ideologically orthodox, serving to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

So, it’s with some trepidation that I venture into the waters of NZ pop to critique new music from Lorde. I might end up being denounced by David Farrier, the local commissar of poptimism, or by hordes of Lorde stans hissing “it wasn’t for you!”. Are you kidding? “Not for me” is my favourite genre, “not for me” is my specialty subject. The worst thing Lorde could do in my eyes is to make something that inadvertently appeals to my demographic.

Let’s start with the song that - not nearly controversially enough - won her an Aotearoa Music Award for best single, her duet with Charli XCX on the remix of ‘Girl, So Confusing’. In the original, Charli sang about her sense of insecurity in her relationship to another female star. Commentators guessed this was about Lorde and that we had the makings of a beef. What we got instead is something more revealing; guesting on the remake, Lorde let Charli know that the roots of her own inferiority, if anything, run deeper. It’s reassurance, but also one-upping by gentle self-abasement. ‘Girl, So Confusing, feat. Lorde’ is an open lesson in the complexity of female friendship. It’s not a song that men could have written.

In her Brat Summer period, I watched as Charli XCX was interviewed on the subway; asked what separates an artist from any other pop drone, she said “an artist creates a world”. Lorde definitely creates a world, if anything better than Charli herself, and she does it from a viewpoint of awkward self-revelation. Lorde’s marked gaucheness makes her easy for the haters to hate, but they’re dumb, it’s both a clever (obviously winning) strategy and (one guesses) authentically her, and her ability to balance these aspects shows her skill as pop’s poet.
The first of Lorde’s new singles, ‘What Was That?’ pushed this divisive awkwardness, both lyrically with the unambiguous drug reference and romantic confessional, and musically, with beats that almost back-pedal to some earlier stage of modern pop. Not for Lorde the sophisticated 2025 nous of, say, Pink Pantheress, or whatever Charli’s up to now. She prefers something a little shopworn, but because the lyric is nostalgia for the recent past, and the song has a proper chorus, ‘What Was That?’ holds together.

It made my playlist, without truly winning me over, because there’s still something that bothers me about Lorde, say, “doing drugs”, a hint of class injustice related to my earlier concerns about poptimism. She’s the Ponsonby version of a K-road concept, I thought; and nothing about the next single, ‘Man Of The Year’, disabused me of this notion.

One of my pet hates is when someone writes a normie ballad then dresses it in some dangerous new productive style, and ‘Man Of The Year’, pitching the Lorde musical, is a prime offender. A well-written song revels in and enlarges its idiom, its genre qualities. Which perfectly describes the bopping, euphoric ‘Hammer’, the best of the three singles released ahead of Lorde’s much-anticipated fourth album Virgin. The acoustic conservatism of Solar Power is nowhere in sight, and she’s found an ideal collaborator in Jim-E Stack, who takes her to the edge but no further.

Taken together, Lorde’s individuated bourgeois life, its delights and its depths, is well-illuminated by these randomly visionary yet psychologically coherent lyrics. Sofia Coppola should be directing her videos.

There's a heat in the pavement, my mercury's raising
Don't know if it's love or if it's ovulation
When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail
The mist from the fountain is kissing my neck
The liquid crystal is in my grip
Anyone with a snake tongue, I show 'em the chambers of my heart

Pop music, from the point of view of individual groups and artists, is a Ponzi scheme, in which a few people skim the cream from the top of a vast pyramid which includes those they inspire to enter the game.¹ Hoping to model this distributional pattern statistically, I asked the Google AI how many Taylor Swift wannabe’s there are for every one Taylor Swift, but its poptimistic programming warned me that the term “wannabe” can have negative connotations, and gave me vague bromides about “influence” instead. Ideological poptimism requires everyone to be treated as equivalent in worth, even as it facilitates the greatest upwards transfer of wealth and prestige in the history of Pop. Beginners at pop ought easily to have their own distinctive sound and their own poetic voice, but it’s amazing how many don’t because they need to get something else right instead; performance, or pitch and tone, or paint-by-numbers song design. I’ve just read a Substack post about Benson Boone because it talked about him “flipping”. I thought this empty popster’s career had led to him starring in a reality TV home improvement series. No, Boone just does backflips in public with more seriousness than he makes music. But Benson Boone is a flipper. He gets hold of some cheap musical property, redecorates it in the received “latest” style, then treats us to the spectacle of tasteless wealth occupying space where real talent could squat.

This being a Ponzi scheme, if you’re starting from the bottom, with a dream and hopefully a little talent, you’ll need to pay to play the game today; the publicists and advertisers that your manager or record company would have hired once you reached that level are your responsibility if you’re to have any hope of being noticed. The entire strata of journalists and critics who noticed stars in the past, who brought them to our attention and explained their art, is being laid off and bought up. That critic Lou Reed knew back in the day, “who'd eat shit and say it tasted good/If there was some money in it for him” is drowning out more principled voices (conveniently, Poptimism makes such venality seem like an an ideological imperative).
In practice, this often means that aspiring artists find it cheapest to provide their own account of themselves and hire a platform to broadcast it. This differs from the self-made claims occasionally put on a poster or a record insert manifesto in the past in two ways - firstly, it’s mandatory, and therefore levelling, a babel of competing, overlapping pitches, and second, it involves the artist doing a job that used to be someone else’s, and paying for the privilege.
Recently I came across a local version of such a platform, Empty Spaces NZ. There’s a great deal of writing about music on the website (it’s not too busy, and it reached me, if you’re in the market for this sort of thing) but none of it is critical writing, all of it’s approved by the artists. Who are thus hearing nothing new about themselves and their work. Empty Spaces features some artists or songs with global reach, like Yumi Zouma’s ‘Blister’, noted by Dave Moore last week, a rampaging bit of fuzz pop-rock with 3Ds melodic energy and a satisfying sound.

Fazer Days and Reb Fountain appear there, so it’s not just a place for aspirants, but no-one in NZ is really getting rich unless they’re Lorde, and even these household names could use more attention. Anyway, I ran my ears over Empty Spaces and came up with two songs I liked, the first being Phoebe Vic’s ‘It’s My Pleasure’, which is perhaps trying to do too much at once, but does it with panache; the song’s a collaboration with producer Emily Browning, who pulls out all the stops. There’s a facetious quality to ‘It’s My Pleasure’ that reminds me of The Dare, but I’d rather hear Vic’s song down the disco. ‘Wasn’t That Deep’ from the EP was also enjoyable.

More restrained but equally appealing, Pat Piasta’s ‘Small Talk’ (2024), is full of little touches that expand its intimate world cinematically; the clinking glass, the Fender Rhodes jazz breakdowns (like Vic and Browning’s work, ‘Small Talk’ is a little more structurally ambitious than the average contemporary pop song). ‘Give It Up’ from 2023 hits the same aesthetic bliss points, plus strings; these slinky songs transcend the brassy big ballad soul pop of her earliest efforts.

New Zealand is a notoriously small country and we all do, in some capacity or another, know each other. I just play the occasional gig, record intermittently, and live far from the centre of things, yet I’ve worked with 2 or 3 of the people involved in recent releases up for review. For example, Fats White, the surprise star of this new video from Ringlets, was the singer in The Amps, the first punk band I joined in Wellington in 1978. The song, like Yumi Zouma’s, shows that kiwi rock music is still in good hands, from the album The Lord Is My German Shepherd (Time for Walkies), a collection of dynamically varied and ambitious songs with intelligent lyrics. And cool titles, like ‘Rolling Blunts on the Dresden Codex’.

And I’ve recently collaborated with Phaedra Love, bassist and singer from Pearly*, on a couple of tracks for an upcoming EP, one of which, ‘Fables’, I first shared on this blog a while back. The first single from Not That Sweet, the Pearly* debut album due in August, ‘Superglue’, like the Ringlets record, features some wonderful 2-guitar noise, this time in a grunge pop style, with a minimal lyric, bubblegum maybe, but perhaps not that sweet.

Matthew Bannister’s recent solo LP The Dark Backwards features some of his expert pop-rock songwriting, here’s the Hawkwind/Bergson mashup Space and Time.

He’s as old and storied a songwriter as I am, and if some of the songs on The Dark Backwards are witty but heartfelt meditations on ageing, so are some of Lorde’s, and so was ‘Husband House’, the big hit of Matthew’s youthful period, if you think about it.

Matthew’s someone who does think about it, who teaches media studies and writes surprisingly accessible academic papers about popular music. He’s also written a nice essay about Lorde that explains, in part, how the NZ context has helped to form her art. One of the few tweets I saw effectively dunking on Lorde at the time of ‘Man Of The Year’ pointed out that her early songs were always pleading poverty and othering wealth, exactly the sort of false identification that can bother me. But, seen another way, Lorde in ‘Royals’ et al speaks for all of us kiwis, with our deficit in cultural capital, as we line up cap in hand for the world’s attention. To quote Dr Bannister,

”[’Royals’]was a hit in Austria too, so what made it such a zeitgeist tune? Was it because Lorde (aka Ella Yelich-O’Connor) offered an alternative to the shiny, sexy, female pop stars of that time - Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga (who was a bit different but definitely used her sexuality)? She came over more like a Goth (which in international parlance is shorthand for nerd).”

This is on point, yet Gothic has a particular meaning in art and music, and Lorde, despite a certain Byronic broodiness, still has more of Princess Bubblegum than Marceline the Vampire in her musical DNA.² As does Charli XCX, who proved it by dedicating Brat to Kamala Harris, the Princess Bubblegum figure of her Brat summer.³ It can’t be otherwise for an actual pop star; Marceline is, by definition, the underground archetype. But it’s true enough that a Goth is a nerd, someone who does need to read books - Malleus Maleficarum, The Great Beast, Froissart’s Chronicles, Conan the Barbarian, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the mad bits of The Bible.⁴

Actual Gothic pop from NZ has been a rare commodity until Vana’s ‘Bite Back’ made a surprise appearance on Dave Moore’s playlist, under the heading “false metal (a compliment)”.

Vana’s voice and production sound amazing - she’s the Britney Spears of trap metal - but her lyrics hit every point, relentlessly, where a little of Pat Piasta’s restraint would pay off - it would be more Gothic, more Metal, more distinct from other pop, to also dream about what’s going on, to show ambiguity about one’s state, to glimpse the distorted world that also looms in the mirror. Which Lorde would do. I am totally down for Lorde’s Gothic album. Sacrifice would be a cool title.

Algorithmic assignment - ‘Body’ by Jaz Paterson

1. This can also be true of more “rock” acts - compare the Beatles’ success with the fortunes of the power-pop bands they inspired, like Badfinger or Big Star.

2. In the Adventure Time mythos, Princess Bubblegum, ruler of the Candy Kingdom and Queen of Ooo, is a well-meaning technocrat whose secret experiments and high-handed interventions occasionally inspire conspiracy theorists among her subjects.
PB, like a recent PM of NZ, is also a DJ (or electronic beat maker). See e.g. s8 ep17 High Strangeness (2017)

3. Ludwig van Beethoven used to do this sort of thing all the time, in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. The recent revival of the practice by Charli XCX is thus an interesting comment on our times.

4. “…the essence of Gothic culture is in understanding, accepting, and in some cases celebrating, the grim realities of humanity. In this context, human history is not something to be either outrun or returned to; it is simply the most detailed story of the unchanging facts of human nature. For someone who follows this philosophy, history doesn’t inform art; it is art.”
Dan Wohl, quoted in my essay on Rasputina