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Celeb News: Lorde A Successor Of Nirvana
Member Since: 8/12/2012
Posts: 13,665
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Lorde A Successor Of Nirvana
She's the Nirvana of now. If that statement seems outrageous, consider the parallels.
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Like Nirvana in 1991, Lorde brought forth something that had been incubating for a long while on the indie scene. Nirvana broke in the wake of a decade of indie bands blending punk and more melodic rock. Lorde follows edgier artists like Grimes and Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, young female voices finding themselves within a forest of electronically generated sounds. Her birthplace, New Zealand, is even farther from pop's centers of power than was the Pacific Northwest; that's helped her image as a self-generated outsider, though in fact she's had a development deal with Universal Records since she was 13 and wrote Pure Heroine with an older collaborator, Joel Little, who played a role not unlike the one producer Butch Vig had in Nirvana's breakthrough. "She's a child of the cloud," wrote Jon Dolan in his Rolling Stone review. That's Lorde's true regional identity, and it produces a sound evocative of the cyberworld: pulsing ether instead of heavy Northwest rain.
Risky artists change the Top 40 game by the luck of what precedes and surrounds them. Nirvana succeeded where Husker Du and The Replacements imploded; Lorde has benefited from partial successes of tart ingénues like Robyn, Sky Ferreira and Lana Del Rey. Then there's what the "new" sound pushes aside. Nirvana famously displaced Michael Jackson at No. 1. Lorde's arrival in the midst of Mileymania felt to many of her fans like a similar intervention.
Finally, there's the hit itself: a no that blossoms into a yes. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was an emerging generation's frustrated battle cry, and like "Royals," it decried the pop industry of which it became a part. Hitting hard, "Teen Spirit" revitalized the idea of what rock could be. Sneaking in, "Royals" suggests that pop can have deeper layers. Nirvana lobbed a Molotov into the charts. Lorde released a virus. Each weapon suited its time.
Subversive hits like these tap nerves that listeners otherwise have numbed. Gender and sexuality were Kurt Cobain's great topics: He wasn't what a man was supposed to be, in his semi-rural family, in rock, or in America in general, and so he wrote songs that ripped at the flesh of male and female identity. "A mosquito, my libido," he growled in "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Lorde's protests are less self-critical and at this point less radical, too. But she has the potential to make more complex statements, simply because she's becoming an artist now instead of 20 years ago. Today, both creators and fans are more able to see and — when they're brash enough — act on the connections across genres, tentatively integrating communities.
Her pale skin has proved a problem, however. Unlike in the early 1990s, when the myth of separate but equal realms allowed for rock fans who embraced Nirvana to disregard hip-hop if they chose, 21st-century pop is grounded in that African-American art form, and anyone who doesn't acknowledge that consigns themselves to only marginal relevance.
The cliché about millennials like Lorde is that they don't see race; in reality, they're negotiating the complexities of racial difference and appropriation every day, in the slang they use, the way they move their bodies, and most certainly, the music they make and love. Lorde has often talked about her love of hip-hop, but she also cultivates a distance from it. That choice can be read in myriad ways: as a result of her perspective as a non-American; as a critique of what Kanye West earlier this year dubbed the "new slavery" of mindless consumerism, often celebrated in mainstream rap and pop; or as a young upstart's insensitive dismissal of what people born without the comfort she enjoys see as valuable.
Because the chorus of "Royals" satirizes desires often expressed in songs by rappers and R&B crooners, Lorde has been called racist, or at very least, a clueless coddled kid. The song reignited a familiar conversation about hip-hop's relationship to glamour. Lorde, who's a ridiculously intelligent quote machine, further incited debate by declaring pop's star system unhealthy for girls, dangerous to stars themselves, and generally gross.
In 2013, pop often feels like a free-for-all of appropriation, insult, earnest idealism and incensed response, as kids negotiate contradictory identities that aren't natural but feel right. Kurt Cobain sang about his "little tribe," but while real life remains often tragically segregated, in 2013 the dream world of pop is one of mashups, remixes and blurred lines.
Lorde is one of these hyphenate beings. The cadence of her voice often recalls rap even when she's unsure of her relationship to it. A self-proclaimed feminist, she's also a girl having fun with fashion and the game of public image, like a musical version of the similarly gutsy Rookie magazine editor Tavi Gevinson. That's Lorde's world, too: the feminist blogosphere that is the next-generational flowering of the 1990s riot grrrl and Third Wave movements, more international now, and aware of difference, if not always diverse.
The young women who made up 2013's version of insurgent girlhood — as politically powerful as Nobel-worthy education activist Malala Yousafzai or as Hollywood-constructed as Jennifer Lawrence's embodiment of The Hunger Games heroine, Katniss Everdeen — have a self-possessed poise that feels game-changing. Lorde is bringing some of their seriousness into pop as it begins to show signs of binge fatigue. She has some company: Janelle Monae; Solange; over in country, Kacey Musgraves. A little time will tell if her success opens up a channel for others.
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Just an excerpt, for the whole article
http://wnpr.org/post/lorde-sounds-teen-spirit
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 5,066
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Not very pretty but we sure know how to run things 
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Member Since: 3/17/2012
Posts: 10,399
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Looks like death is imminent then.
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ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 9/3/2012
Posts: 29,405
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Member Since: 3/15/2013
Posts: 19,723
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She's the voice of our generation
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Member Since: 12/29/2011
Posts: 1,140
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Quote:
Originally posted by feuxtography
Looks like death is imminent then.
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The edit. 
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Member Since: 8/12/2012
Posts: 13,665
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Quote:
Originally posted by feuxtography
Looks like death is imminent then.
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She has ten years time to join the club.
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Member Since: 3/17/2012
Posts: 10,399
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Quote:
Originally posted by Aniston's Boobs
The edit. |
It was so extra I had to go back. 
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Member Since: 3/17/2012
Posts: 10,399
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Quote:
Originally posted by rbautz
She has ten years time to join the club.
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True! Still here for a Courtney Love parallel mess though!
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Member Since: 8/1/2012
Posts: 8,763
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Member Since: 9/17/2011
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Quote:
Originally posted by feuxtography
Looks like death is imminent then.
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Member Since: 8/17/2013
Posts: 16,461
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No ma'am
Why can't she just be Lorde? A popular singer, expressing herself and having a successful career. Isn't that enough? Why making these comparisons when they can easily backfire? We already had the "Gaga is the new Madonna" and look at the situation right now.
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 68,548
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Yasss Lorde save the music
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Member Since: 4/29/2012
Posts: 15,977
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When you think about it there are quite a few paralells
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Member Since: 10/27/2006
Posts: 10,536
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Interesting article. Lorde, her impact 
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Member Since: 8/18/2013
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Quote:
Originally posted by feuxtography
Looks like death is imminent then.
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Member Since: 9/12/2012
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This writer doesn't listen to much music if she thinks Lorde is edgy, risky or has a new sound. 
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Member Since: 3/15/2013
Posts: 1,488
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Quote:
Originally posted by Keon
This writer doesn't listen to much music if she thinks Lorde is edgy, risky or has a new sound. |
Agree!!!
Also, comparing Lorde to Nirvana, just NO.
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Member Since: 8/12/2012
Posts: 13,665
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Quote:
Originally posted by lflmuselp
Agree!!!
Also, comparing Lorde to Nirvana, just NO.
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Why not, are Nirvana some kind of sacred, I think not
I'm old enough to know what the fans of bands like Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth or Pixies thought when Nirvana became famous.
All the same pretentious Scheiß that I heard years ago. History repeats always itself.
Nirvana just used the sound of the Pixies and mixed it with the heaviness of Hüsker Dü and a little vulnerability of REM , quite smart and so I think is Lorde.
Oh I know what you will say, I have no understanding in music like that poster above with the showing tongue in his Avi.
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Member Since: 8/17/2013
Posts: 1,236
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Quote:
Originally posted by Keon
This writer doesn't listen to much music if she thinks Lorde is edgy, risky or has a new sound. |
Exactly - she evidently knows little about the 1990s - I assume she's just a diehard Cobain stan who watned to shoe-horn her fave into current affairs and trends.
The fact is Nirvana & grunge was actually a rejection of 80s rock (the hairspray, leather, black cowboy boot, neon light - glam metal kinda rock. That is what it replaced, not hip hop (hip hop actually broke out and became mainstream at exactly the same period as grunge!
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