Y'all

Most of you have heard her song "Royals", a great song, well produced, well written..

Lorde is 16 years old and she has the most critically acclaimed album of the year so far by a solo artist along with Janelle Monae's The Electric Lady.

What do you think of her? I listened to her album "Pure Heroine" and it has it all... and while I'm listening I hella wonder how a 16 year old chick writes such deep lyrics!!! while other 16 year old gurls are all about fangirling One Direction n Bieber and duckfacing all over facebook.

[Edited 9/27/13 4:45am]

Or to put the question another way....why are so many others her age such uninformed brats? Different culture perhaps?

I'm proud that such an intelligent and humble pop star comes from my town

i'm actually really liking her work. I had no idea she was only 16. i haven't listened to the album yet, but i did listen to her EP, and it was great!

I like her voice reminds me of Fiona. I put her in the new artist thread a couple of months ago.

Shawy89 said:

while other 16 year old gurls are all about fangirling One Direction n Bieber and duckfacing all over facebook.

nd33 said:

Or to put the question another way....why are so many others her age such uninformed brats? Different culture perhaps?

I'm proud that such an intelligent and humble pop star comes from my town

What's wrong with that? I don't understand why people put down what other folks like and insult them or call them names, because they think they have some kind of "superior taste". Why are they "brats" because they don't listen to whatever you think is so-called "high class" or "intelligent"? It's not that serious.

I'm gonna check her album out. I know she has an EP too.

Timmy84 said:

I'm gonna check her album out. I know she has an EP too.

If you're itching for good alternat music, this will be your beloved cup of tea.

MickyDolenz said:

Shawy89 said:

while other 16 year old gurls are all about fangirling One Direction n Bieber and duckfacing all over facebook.

nd33 said:

Or to put the question another way....why are so many others her age such uninformed brats? Different culture perhaps?

I'm proud that such an intelligent and humble pop star comes from my town

What's wrong with that? I don't understand why people put down what other folks like and insult them or call them names, because they think they have some kind of "superior taste". Why are they "brats" because they don't listen to whatever you think is so-called "high class" or "intelligent"? It's not that serious.

I actually was bitching about the fact that the younger generation have nothing to "produce".

Not necessairly in music, but in other fields, how many teenagers done something good and innovative?

We live in an age where a girl grows up idolizing her big sister who is a belieber, so she turns out to be a belieber too, fangirling and staying all day idolizing his ass or any other popstar on twitter, giving no shit for school and taking "THIS HEARTTHOB" as the only thing that matters in this life.

People should start thinking that music industry isn't larger than life, instead producing something of it wether it was poems or songs, that would actually be good and proud-worthy.

[Edited 9/27/13 14:54pm]

Shawy89 said:

Timmy84 said:

I'm gonna check her album out. I know she has an EP too.

If you're itching for good alternat music, this will be your beloved cup of tea.

Hehe I definitely have an itching for that stuff.

Shawy89 said:

MickyDolenz said:

What's wrong with that? I don't understand why people put down what other folks like and insult them or call them names, because they think they have some kind of "superior taste". Why are they "brats" because they don't listen to whatever you think is so-called "high class" or "intelligent"? It's not that serious.

I actually was bitching about the fact that the younger generation have nothing to "produce".

Not necessairly in music, but in other fields, how many teenagers done something good and innovative?

Because they're teenagers. Most kids are boring, haven't done anything, and don't have anything to contribute until they get to their mid-late 20s, especially these days. But the industry fawns over anything under 22 so what we get is a bunch of half-baked shit produced by people who haven't lived.

it scares me a little that she's only 16 years old...it's so strange..not to make an accuse but I don't want to discover in some years that she was a product selled by Universal records as the smart teenager to make money..I really hope it's not her case of course..

Shawy89 said:

MickyDolenz said:

What's wrong with that? I don't understand why people put down what other folks like and insult them or call them names, because they think they have some kind of "superior taste". Why are they "brats" because they don't listen to whatever you think is so-called "high class" or "intelligent"? It's not that serious.

I actually was bitching about the fact that the younger generation have nothing to "produce".

Not necessairly in music, but in other fields, how many teenagers done something good and innovative?

We live in an age where a girl grows up idolizing her big sister who is a belieber, so she turns out to be a belieber too, fangirling and staying all day idolizing his ass or any other popstar on twitter, giving no shit for school and taking "THIS HEARTTHOB" as the only thing that matters in this life.

People should start thinking that music industry isn't larger than life, instead producing something of it wether it was poems or songs, that would actually be good and proud-worthy.

[Edited 9/27/13 14:54pm]

That's no different than any other time, except there was no internet. In the early 1900s, women were crazy over silent film actor Rudolph Valentino, and later others like Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Burt Reynolds, & Robert Redford. Teen idols is not a new thing either. There were teen girls fawning over Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, Frankie Avalon, Davy Jones, Jackson 5, Donny Osmond, soap opera hunks, Scott Baio, Cheyanne, Duran Duran, Don Johnson, Greg Evigan, Andy Gibb, Elvis Presley, New Edition, Wham!, and many others over the decades. Tiger Beat magazine 1st came out in the mid-1960s and Right On! in the early 1970's and girls would hang the pictures on the wall and join fan clubs of singers/actors they liked and wrote letters to them. There were also gossip magazines like True Confessions and Jive.

.

Daydreaming over an entertainer is better than joining a gang, smoking, doing drugs, and getting into fights. Sure there might be a few extreme cases where a fan becomes a stalker or something, but in most cases it's harmless fun.

I heard one of her songs (royals? which ever one is a hit) I'm indifferent towards it. I have a 19 and up rule so sadly I can't listen to her

Royals is good, but the earlier Tennis Court was far better.

cindymay said:

it scares me a little that she's only 16 years old...it's so strange..not to make an accuse but I don't want to discover in some years that she was a product selled by Universal records as the smart teenager to make money..I really hope it's not her case of course..

Here are her own words:

_

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/music/9208190/Our-Lady-Lorde-The-Kiwi-schoolgirl-turned-pop-Royalty

_

A couple of weeks ago I was up on a stage. This is not particularly wild news - I'm on stages pretty often. This stage in particular was long and slim, bathed in light, situated on the Lower East Side in New York, and was surrounded by my first American audience.

_

I played that night to a few hundred people and I gave them everything I had. I had fun - lots of it. People said afterwards that it was good. I was speaking to a journalist from The New Yorker recently and he told me he'd overheard something in the VIP section of that first show.

A silver-haired record company guy had pointed at me, up there onstage, and said slowly to his friend, "Lots of zeroes." I laughed at this. The journalist said, kind of rueful: "Nothing but a spreadsheet with hair." Quite a lot has happened to me, if we take things back pre hirsute, statistical brilliance.

_

You probably know all about that - most interviews tell the story of my intermediate school talent show performance being filmed and sent to Universal Music, and the subsequent development deal, and the EP written in my school holidays with Kids of 88 contributor Joel Little. You can find out where I live, and go to school, and which famous people have talked about me on Twitter. That's the how and the what of it, I guess -the sped-up version of my involvement in music.

_

So here I am. Or maybe I'm not here. At the time of you reading this I'll be in another country, on another stage, or in a car with my head out the window, or laughing in the aisle seat of a plane. You could say it's all a bit of a whirlwind, but I hate those stupid clichés so I'll just tell you a bit about what I do, and what it's like, and if you want to use the word whirlwind, or rollercoaster, that's up to you.

_

I wasn't expecting the Love Club EP to do what it's doing. Not by a long shot. To see it in the top 10 on iTunes in the United States is one of those ludicrous things I'll never get used to. I remember getting 10,000 plays on SoundCloud in the first few days of it being up, and tweeting Joel about it. I used the word booya. Look at us now. I think what's crazy about the success of that EP is the selfishness of it all. Songwriting is selfish - I make music for myself, using it as an outlet, something to fulfill my creative desires - yet the rewards of deciding to write something can keep an artist going for a lifetime, can whip me across datelines, throw me under lights.

_

I constantly ponder the absurdly cool nature of this. It's personal, and private, writing songs, until you release them. Then they stop being this internalised thing, as people start to live inside them and give them different meanings. There's a changing of hands. They aren't just my secret thoughts any more. That too, is crazy to me - that I can write about moments of complete pain, or fear, or joy, and feel overwhelmed by the starkness of what I'm saying, even when I'm the only one hearing it.

_

Yet letting the world have it, and understand it, and like it? Or love it? It's a sort of magic, really. A weird magic. One of the things I find most challenging, after making art, is trying to keep that art as pure as possible. Sometimes it can be hard not to let record company dudes turn things to crap. Or bad stylists, or music video directors who don't get it, or whatever. Everyday I turn down countless requests from TV shows and brands and films that want to use my music to sell their product, because I don't feel that they're right.

_

If I'd granted every sandwich chain and skincare brand and coming-of-age blockbuster use of my songs, I'd probably be a millionaire. But I'm extremely fussy. A while ago I watched a clip of Patti Smith (eternal queen of cool in my eyes) relay this thing William S Burroughs had said to her. He said, "Build a good name for yourself, because eventually that will become your currency."

That has always stuck with me, and every step that I've taken since I signed my development deal has been to ensure I am exactly who I want to be, perceived how I'd like to be perceived. Like I said, this isn't the easiest thing in the world. I'm a teenager, and I'm a girl, and those are factors that can stand in the way of maintaining control. I've had more people than I can count talk to my manager in meetings instead of me, like it doesn't matter what I think. This usually lasts all of 10 minutes, until I insert the kind of dry sentence that makes most adults splutter and blush and reach for their water, and after this they start taking me seriously.

_

It's a two-sided coin because they don't realise that before they walked into the room I was busy spinning around on my chair as fast as it could go. I'm a kid when I want to be, I guess. Lots of people ask me if being a female in the music industry is difficult. I think in some ways it is. Nicki Minaj spoke in this brilliant video that you should all watch, taken while she applied her eyeliner, about sexism in the industry. Nicki complained about the poor quality of a photo-shoot, and received this wave of aggression and insult.

_

"If I am assertive, I'm a bitch. If a man is assertive, he's a boss. No negative connotation behind bossed up!" Truth is, if Nicki doesn't complain about a bad photo-shoot, people working with her assume those low standards are acceptable, but if she does complain it's very hard for her not to be pegged as a diva, which I think is one of those music industry double standards that has hung around far too long.

_

I identified with her so strongly when I saw that video - I know what it's like to walk on set and demand something of quality, and feel people thinking, 'Oh, we've got a piece of work here.' That's just me trying to protect my image and my name. I sometimes think if I were a male musician, the reaction to such a basic request would be different.

_

There're parts of this industry that are shitty, for sure. I've missed more birthdays this year and let more friends down than I can count; I've grown accustomed to 4am wake-up calls and sleeping on command; sometimes my boyfriend and I get photographed in the street when we just want to have time that doesn't belong to other people.

_

Sometimes I feel so lonely I don't want to do it any more. But truth is, I love what I do so much. I've never been so happy, or worked so hard. Adults like to ask me how I'm coping with things, because adults are always nervous there's a looming breakdown on the horizon, I guess. But what I say is for all the moments I dislike, there are these moments where everything feels slow motion, full colour, sweet. Playing at [Byron Bay, Australia, music festival] Splendour in the Grass was one of those. It was in that kind of hazy, crisp period of the newest night, that cool air just touching me.

I sang, and I loved it so much. I felt like all those people in their bright colours were flowers I could walk through, or this great lapping ocean I could leap from the stage into and swim, it stretching out as far as I could see. I felt five metres tall. Things like that, for me, make everything worth it.

_

I haven't talked yet about the thing you probably all want to read about, the only thing that really matters, which is the record. Pure Heroine. I started writing again as soon as I put out the EP, around November or December, and it was finished midway through July. Joel and I wrote every song together, made every beat. It's all ours, which is kind of cool to me - it lends this cohesion to it, I think. We wrote, as we always have, at Golden Age, Joel's studio in Morningside.

_

I'll always remember this so vividly -walking to the same few places to get lunch or dinner every day; moments outside the studio when we hurried back, or let our feet drag, either terrified or elated at the prospect of that room; listening back at the end of a day, the fairy lights winking, and both feeling this weary but budding excitement.

_

Each day I'd take the train. The night-time rides were my chance to breathe, relax for a few minutes. Then I'd pull out my laptop and hit play on whatever we'd worked on that day. For a few seconds with a new song there's always this thudding amnesia, like it's not your work,and you get to listen with fresh ears to this thing that's still newly born. For months and months I took that night train and listened to my voice and the beats over and over, silvery, suspended.

_

I'd grin like a creep from Kingsland to Grafton, face all moony under the white light. It's the best thing I've ever made. At the end of the lyric booklet inside Pure Heroine, there's a portrait of me. I'm wearing a grey sweater, a silver chain. I'm not smiling. There's a heavy, funereal black border. I showed this to my 11-year-old brother. He looked, and smiled at me, said, "About the author." I really like that. The record can be read as well as listened to, digested as well as danced to. I'm a singer,a performer, a popstar and a writer.

_

My little brother's reaction to that one photo of me is why I do what I do, why I cultivate a little mystery - why photographers call me difficult and web designers call me a diva. In that one second before he smiled and went to play, I knew it would never be about zeroes. I'm not a spreadsheet with hair; will never be. I am an artist, an author, with a hunger for showing people what I can do and a talent for making people turn my name into a call while they're waiting front row. It's me. I'm here.

- Sunday Magazine

I'm loving her - the album is just as good if not better than the EP. It is a little creepy how talented and mature she comes across - especially in that article. It would probably be unbearable if the music wasn't so good and the lyrics so personal.

based on what she writes on twitter she doesn't sound mature at all...another reason to be skeptical...she's always there bashing someone else in the music industry...not very classy and mature at all...but again she's only 16 years old..

cindymay said:

based on what she writes on twitter she doesn't sound mature at all...another reason to be skeptical...she's always there bashing someone else in the music industry...not very classy and mature at all...but again she's only 16 years old..

Quotes? I've never heard any "bashing", in fact she's very polite.

She is different from her peers in terms of lyrics which is nice but I don't get the big deal about her talent-I personally don't care for her tone at all. Parts of "Royals" sound pitchy and just unpleasant.

nd33 said:

cindymay said:

based on what she writes on twitter she doesn't sound mature at all...another reason to be skeptical...she's always there bashing someone else in the music industry...not very classy and mature at all...but again she's only 16 years old..

Quotes? I've never heard any "bashing", in fact she's very polite.

It's more of "harsh critisism" and I think she's right to do so, I think at some point she said that songs like "Come & Get It" by Selena Gomez shouldn't be written, like in terms of lyrics "When you're ready come & get it" it just shows how a woman can give up her precious thing easily for men, which could brainwash teenage girls mentality, I think she's right to say so.

She also criticised Lana del Ray for lack of lyrical depth, I think she just has to put it in a "nicer" way.

Myself even if Lorde is great I say she says bullshit when it comes to Lana Del Rey, even her music is inspired by Lana.

dm3857 said:

i'm actually really liking her work. I had no idea she was only 16. i haven't listened to the album yet, but i did listen to her EP, and it was great!

I am shocked she is only 16. But some young people just have a "old soul" about them and depth i believe your born with. also your surroundings have a lot to do with it....of course.

I like what ive heard so far. You Go Lorde! Do your thang!

I liked "Royals" the one time I've heard it so far. Bored by the Brilliant Artist versus Pop Product polarizing talk--Janelle Monae's music (when I finally decided to listen in spite of what people said against others in trying to promote her) was worth listening to. Maybe Lorde's will be too.

Thanks to MickyDolenz for his contribution to the conversation.

Just bought her new release with 10 songs. She played NY tonight and someone said on facebook that she was killing it. I'll catch her on the 2nd CD.

[Edited 10/1/13 0:10am]

Bought her album today. Tennis Court and Royals are obvious standouts - maybe thats just because I've heard them alot - I think it's a grower. Good luck to her.

[Edited 10/2/13 1:54am]

for Royals. it.

Last night on Fallon: http://news.radio.com/201...on-fallon/

This year it is Lorde. Last year it was Lana Del Rey. Every year they roll out some self conscious, "deep" artist for the teens who consider themselves above the antics of Miley Cyrus. They are always female, dressed in black with a weird, affected vocal delivery and presense. Its all so calculated, and by the book. The standards for pop music have sunk so low that anyone who reaches slightly above it is a hailed as a genius.

lrn36 said:

This year it is Lorde. Last year it was Lana Del Rey. Every year they roll out some self conscious, "deep" artist for the teens who consider themselves above the antics of Miley Cyrus. They are always female, dressed in black with a weird, affected vocal delivery and presense. Its all so calculated, and by the book. The standards for pop music have sunk so low that anyone who reaches slightly above it is a hailed as a genius.

I think I'm feeling you on this. Lorde is definitely interesting. Her performance on Jimmy Fallon last night was intriguing and intense, definitely for a a girl her age but it's true that now we have a marketing scheme, which is teens that are a bit more complex, than say someone like Taylor Swift. I think it's coolthough. Something for everyone, I suppose but i can see this becoming a new fad and it won't be long before record labels start churning out more "Lorde's". Before Lorde just last year in fact it was Charli XCX. Are you all hip to her?? She's great but Lorde really seems to be blowing up. Personally I prefer Haim. I think they are awesome.

lrn36 said:

This year it is Lorde. Last year it was Lana Del Rey. Every year they roll out some self conscious, "deep" artist for the teens who consider themselves above the antics of Miley Cyrus. They are always female, dressed in black with a weird, affected vocal delivery and presense. Its all so calculated, and by the book. The standards for pop music have sunk so low that anyone who reaches slightly above it is a hailed as a genius.

I've been following her in our local paper...

Read the interview earlier in thread. Lorde is presenting herself as she wants and she is dictating the direction of her image, which is almost unbelievable, from what we've come to know of the pop scene.

Earlier this year in NZ, she released her single and radio picked it up and it ended up going to number one. Then she released her EP and insisted that it be free, because she just wanted her music out there, to as many people as possible. Universal was not happy, but she got her way.

She didn't want to release any photos of herself on her website, against the norm, as she wanted people to focus on her music and not image. Her website, up until last month had simply one drawing of her as the only image, and that's it! Been fun story to follow and so unexpected coming from here.

So regardless of whether you think "it's all so caluclated, and by the book", she's calculating it herself. Her success is a byproduct of her making the music she wants to make. Pretty amazing!

Mayer Hawthorne covers Lorde:

http://www.hollywoodrepor...ist-641770