In my review of the new PinkPantheress mixtape for CHUNES, I made the following statement: mainstream pop music no longer has an ‘outsider’ figure in the way it used to. You know, the unexpected superstars that seem to stumble their way into success, often with very understated and minimalist presentation, and an appeal that transcends pop conventions. Your Alessia Caras, your Billie Eilishs, your Lana Del Reys. Although the biggest example of a pop outsider breaking through this in the past decade is, without question, Lorde.
When ‘Royals’ smashed onto the scene in 2013, it bulldozed charts worldwide. The track spent nine weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, with Lorde becoming the youngest woman in 26 years to top the chart. It was a sensational and meteoric rise to fame, ironically with a song critiquing the materialistic excess of Hollywood lifestyles. Why was it so successful? Partly because it was remarkably ordinary, especially in contrast to the Katy Perry’s and Miley Cyrus’ she shared the top spots with.
But, going back to my PinkPantheress review and the context of mainstream pop not having an outsider figure, I made the assertion that Lorde ‘came and went’, putting her in the same category as Alessia Cara. But is that really fair? On the surface it might seem so. Lorde’s 2017 follow up album Melodrama was significantly less commercially successful than her debut, and she’s only seen more diminishing returns since then. But is commercial success even the best metric to judge Lorde by? Or perhaps the better question is, has mainstream pop still got its outsiders, but in a different way?
The TikTok Pipeline
Like it or not, we can’t have this conversation without first considering how the stars that we might consider outsiders in the modern pop landscape got their start. I want to preface all of this by asserting that this is not a new phenomenon. I still remember when TikTok was called Musical.ly and stars breaking through and securing charting traction included Jacob Sartorius, but a more relevant example might be Lil Nas X with ‘Old Town Road’, arguably the closest comparison to a song like ‘Royals’ in the years that followed in terms of an outsider breaking through with an international smash. The track’s rise to fame was multifaceted (the #YeehawChallenge, the insane number of remixes, Billboard’s blatant racism inadvertently boosting the song’s popularity), and highlights the different ecosystem in which both songs gained success. The outsiders of today ride algorithms that Lorde did not have the luxury to in the same way.
I bring this up because the way we see ‘organic’ success has changed over time, and thus the way we see those who ride that success changes too. Lil Nas X rode the algorithms and preposterous amounts of remixes. For Lorde, there wasn’t the system to ride in the same way, so one artist gets piled with ‘industry plant’ allegations, while the other’s success is viewed as a seismic event that seemingly came out of nowhere and is viewed as more organic, and thus better, with a song all about criticizing the mainstream pop structure it rose to the top of to boot. My argument is that the way that Lorde embodied that outsider figure in mainstream pop can’t be replicated in the modern day thanks to the way streaming algorithms have distorted our idea of virality and success. Of course it doesn’t feel like mainstream pop has an outsider figure since Lorde stopped charting. In some ways, she’s irreplaceable, although that doesn’t mean the industry didn’t try.
You’re a little much for me – the Hot 100 immediately post Lorde impact
I’ve already mentioned Alessia Cara and Billie Eilish (the latter of whom arguably came along too late to be fully part of this conversation), but think of all the other husky voiced women who were pushed by the industry around this time. Daya, Halsey, Tove Lo and Kiiara all broke through with similar vocal styles and presentations to Lorde. Most of them, much like Lorde, shone brightly on the charts for one album before fading from the spotlight.
You could view this in a few ways. You could say that, while Lorde wouldn’t match the commercial success of Pure Heroine in the years to come, she shook up the industry in a way that is still being felt to this day, highlighting her cultural impact. However, the fact that Lorde’s sound was so quickly commodified by the industry arguably made her sound feel so much less special in contrast, inadvertently creating the illusion of an artist whose influences overwhelmed her relevance, so much so that when the critically acclaimed Melodrama arrived in 2017, there was all of a sudden no space for her on the charts, and the result was an album that did not live up to the arguably already unattainable commercial heights of Pure Heroine.
The other way of seeing this is through the realist lens. You could argue that Lorde’s trajectory when it comes to chart success is neither surprising, nor new. As I’ve already alluded to, Lorde as well as all the other acts I mentioned before were pretty much discarded after one album, not because of some secret agenda or anything against those artists, but simply because that’s how the industry works. That’s how it goes for the majority of pop stars, whether you like it or not, and that’s true whether you’re an outsider or conventionally pop. It shouldn’t be surprising that it feels like Lorde simply came and went because that’s what pop stars do. Why overcomplicate it? The music industry isn’t a meritocracy after all, so why make a big deal about any of this. Surely this is all just the natural result of an industry running its course. Well…
Dancing in a world alone – unfortunately, this is an industry
When an artist puts out an album that you love, you might wrongly assume, on the basis of their previous work, that they can do it again. If you’re a little more entitled than that you might wrongly assume that the artist has a duty to appeal to your emotions, and if they don’t do that, you might feel some sense of betrayal. The whole ‘selling out’ discourse is entwined within this, and it gets ugly in a hurry. Likewise, if an artist gets popular on the charts, you might also wrongly assume that this past performance is a guarantee of future success, when, as we’ve already previously established, it’s not. It’s here that we get to ‘stanning’ culture, a topic that would deserve its own article, but it is relevant here too, as it highlights the messy human emotions that underscore how we engage with art and the artists who make it.
It’s easy to characterise Lorde as an artist who ‘came and went’, because we so strongly wanted her to stay. The same can’t quite be said of the other artists I listed. Her departure felt like a bigger loss to the commercial pop landscape, so she’s easy to single out, even when it might be unfair. It’s not like her music got worse, quite the opposite, but the frustration that she didn’t gain as much traction post Pure Heroine might have caused me to paint her impact in a more disposable light than would be fair.
And that’s the thing. My argument perhaps overemphasises commercial success and looks past the wider impact that Lorde would have in popular music in the decade that followed, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
I just hope the sun will show us the path – 2014-2024 in mainstream music
In the mid 2010s, many cultural commentators noted that mainstream music had begun to shift from the EDM and club music of Zedd and The Black Eyed Peas, to something darker. Trap overtook pop as the dominant genre on the charts thanks in part to the success of Migos, and number ones of the era included ‘Panda’ by Desiiner, ‘Trap Queen’ by Fetty Wap, ‘Bad and Boujee’ by Migos and Lil Uzi Vert, ‘Rockstar’ by Post Malone and 21 Savage, and ‘HUMBLE.’ by Kendrick Lamar. It wasn’t just the men either. Ariana Grande scored a mega hit with ‘7 rings’ playing to a frail pop-trap sound that saw her popularity skyrocket. The Weeknd’s alternative RnB certainly did something to turn the tides as well, but Lorde’s impact is at least partly responsible too, and, out of the two, she came first.
This could also have been reflective of the changing times. 2016 was the beginning of a period of huge political instability with the UK voting to leave the EU, and Donald Trump being elected president of the United States, and it’s often cited as a year the tides began to turn on the Hot 100, and, on aggregate, the charts got significantly worse. Perhaps it’s unfair to say that Lorde was a catalyst for the charts getting worse, but she was certainly a catalyst for the charts getting darker. Perhaps it’s no surprise that when Melodrama came around with a more urgent, riskier sound, it just did not fit into the landscape, once again creating an illusion of an artist unable to land a follow up, when in truth, the ground was moving underneath her in real time. And it’s not like Melodrama was a commercial failure anyway. It only appeared that way in comparison to the aforementioned unattainable heights of Pure Heroine.
To put the cherry on the cake, Lorde has gone on record saying that she strongly dislikes ‘Royals’, and I find that extremely revealing. The sound that made her famous, the sound that transformed the music charts, the sound that was the downfall of everything that would come after is a sound that Lorde doesn’t even like. Perhaps the commercial and critical underperformance of Solar Power proves the music she actually wants to make doesn’t belong anywhere near the charts. Perhaps it proves once and for all that Lorde was never meant to be anywhere near as famous as she was.
What the fuck are perfect places anyway? – Circling back
If you want to, you can characterise Lorde as an artist who ‘came and went’ pretty easily. After all, she was briefly commercially successful, then stopped being quite as so. Surely you don’t need to fit any other criteria for that to be a reasonable statement… but I totally get how that could have come across as dismissive of the legacy that lives on even today in modern pop. Lorde will never have another ‘Royals’, mark my words, but, in a way, we should feel lucky she got even one cultural moment. Lorde should never have been successful, and where she is now, a beloved cultural icon with legions of fans but just outside the mainstream in a similar vein to Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX, is probably a better reflection of where she always belonged in the popular consciousness.
Solar Power might not have been particularly commercially successful, but units sold is not the only way to measure success in an ecosystem as turbulent and with as many variables at play as the music industry. In essence, Lorde was the first of her kind – the ultimate outsider. She rewrote the rules of what was possible in mainstream pop, for better and for worse, then left us to deal with the aftermath. Nowadays, the outsiders are those who feign organic groundswell through playing to TikTok algorithms and disposable social media challenges. That’s not to say the TikTok pipeline can’t produce good music, but the pop landscape is unlikely to give us another Lorde for that reason. The fact that she’s such a singular entity in recent chart history, the pioneer of sophistication in modern mainstream pop, made me wish and hope she could have reached the same commercial heights as someone like her friend Taylor Swift. But that was never going to happen, and in hindsight, that frustration perhaps coloured my dismissiveness.
But, in truth, I don’t think I’d have it any other way. Lorde’s music was a window into what mainstream pop music could sound like, but, in this timeline at least, it was never going to stick around. What’s important now is that we acknowledge her not as an anomaly, but as an icon. An icon who’s still making music to this day and aren’t we all lucky for that. She found those perfect places after all.