It’s been four years since Florence + the Machine came out with High As Hope, the band’s fourth record released over a nine-year period. If that pattern is indicative of anything, it’s that lead vocalist Florence Welch takes her time. Doesn’t let the pressure of “rushing” to put something out get to her as it does to other musicians, particularly female ones being told they have a more limited amount of years to be “viable” (read: fuckable) in the industry. And it is with “King,” the lead single from whatever the fifth record might be called, that Welch acknowledges what she has been trying to ignore for the majority of her career, but can’t any longer. That she has to make decisions that men never will. Ones related to, what else, biology. And how that subject makes a woman its bitch.
Discussing the lyrical content of “King,” Welch remarked, “As an artist, I never actually thought about my gender that much. I just got on with it. I was as good as the men and I just went out there and matched them every time.” To interrupt here, this goes back to the common mistake women make of constantly trying to “measure up” to a man despite actually kind of despising them and thinking they’re far more mediocre as artists specifically, and as a gender overall. Cyndi Lauper faces this issue in her so-called feminist anthem, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” as well. Ultimately trying to say that women want (and deserve) to have the same luxuries as men automatically get as a “birthright” in terms of the “boys will be boys” philosophy, Lauper instead ends up painting women as vacuous twits, particularly with the accompanying visuals for the song. In any event, Welch adds to her take on being a woman in the music business, “But now, thinking about being a woman in my thirties and the future, I suddenly feel this tearing of my identity and my desires. That to be a performer, but also to want a family might not be as simple for me as it is for my male counterparts. I had modeled myself almost exclusively on male performers, and for the first time I felt a wall come down between me and my idols as I have to make decisions they did not.”
So she sort of had the Sheila Heti epiphany that spawned the book, Motherhood (in Heti’s case, a lack thereof). A woman, especially a woman who is an artist, and actually doesn’t hate children for the life-sucking forces they are, will eventually reach a point where she has to make that hard decision: do I fully commit to my life as an artist or do I delude myself into thinking I can “do both” (art and motherhood)? Women who know the honest answer to that question are few and far between, and Eve Babitz was one of them (never “took a husband,” and certainly never reproduced). Maybe Florence will be, too—if the lyrics and video for “King” are any indication. The latter was directed by Autumn de Wilde (rejoining Welch after “Big God”), who, fittingly, also brought us the 2020 version of Emma starring Anya Taylor-Joy. A narrative about matchmaking and falling in love as only Jane Austen could bring us that falls in direct contrast to what Florence is exploring in “King.”
Wearing a hooded cape that makes one want to go right out and buy one, Florence hovers on a windowsill in a modern-looking space filled with arbitrary furniture. But before we see her, we see the man she’s going to upset with her talk about maybe not wanting to have children. Hence the lyric, “We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children”—the kitchen itself being a very pointed milieu for Florence to single out in that it has long been deemed the place where women “truly belong.” A representation of female imprisonment, if you will.
Among other aspects of the argument, especially with regard to having children or not, is “the world ending.” Why bother subjecting another human being to this dystopian nightmare that can only get worse? Yet with this being increasingly a consideration that helps to take Having Kids off the table, how will women be controlled by the thus far unrelenting role society has carved out for them?
They also argue about “the scale of [her] ambition,” which would never be a question if she were a man. Thus, she decides to announce to us all that, like a man, “I need my golden crown of sorrow, my bloody sword to swing/My empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology/I am no mother, I am no bride, I am King.” Alas, here is where the feminist intent of the song fails as a result of language itself not only being limited, but it being decidedly patriarchal. She cannot say she is “Queen,” because that wouldn’t be deemed a powerful enough title for the purposes of this song and its intent to render a woman as wholly dominant and authoritative. That Welch feels obliged to only lend further weight and importance to a male title draped upon a woman (sort of like what happened to Elizabeth I) doesn’t come off as entirely empowering, so much as capitulating. Not just to language, but to the cause women have taken up in constantly trying to be deemed “the same” as a man, even though they patently are not—and this isn’t a bad thing. Or a way to somehow be viewed as “lesser than.”
In opposition to male artists, Welch points out in the song that a man never really has to ask himself, “And how much is art really worth?/The very thing you’re best at is the thing that hurts the most [you know, because of all the relationships it endangers—see: Taylor Swift]/But you need your rotten heart/Your dazzling pain like diamond rings.” A man gets to have that and so much more without the worry of a biological clock ticking. This is something women have known and discussed in songwriting for decades. Along with the curse of constantly being pigeonholed as a trope in a manner that men never are. Take, for example, Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch” when she says, “Just when you think you’ve got me figured out/The season’s already changing.” Florence instead sings, “Just when you think you have it figured out/Something new begins to take.”
Florence maneuvers her knack for the poetical in another line that seems tailor-made for the Rosemary’s Baby Soundtrack: “What strangе claws are these, scratching at my skin/I nеver knew my killer would be coming from within.” Depending on interpretation, this could mean either, straightforwardly, a woman’s predilection for self-sabotage or the presence of a fetus that will inevitably kill all dreams and ambitions as the female artist is subsequently expected to focus on motherhood (which some cornballs will try to say is the ultimate “art”). This, incidentally, is very heavily present through the character of Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky) in the recent Inventing Anna.
In another verse, Welch sings, “A woman is a changeling, always shifting shape.” This much is proven when she hovers like a vampire over her lover, guides him—floating in mid-air—outside and ends up snapping his neck somewhere desolate in the dead of night. Maybe it’s time for him to be remade in her goddamn image, how about that? To this point, she and her now-dead (or is he?) lover, both still floating, ascend the stairs in an industrial-type edifice as Florence’s “sister witches,” so to speak, join her for some signature Ryan Heffington (who, of late, is best known for his work on Euphoria) choreography. As they all skip and cavort outside the oppressive building, more floating-dead men surround Florence to comprise the band she seems to be constructing. Creating the orchestra that best suits her own life’s symphony.
A close-up on her face occurs before de Wilde zooms out again to let us see the same tableau of the opening scene, with Florence’s lover alive yet again (or is he?) as he suddenly looks as attentive and accommodating as a woman is typically expected to. He runs right toward her and she takes him in, very literally, enveloping his head with her hood. We then hear a sound that mimics the life being sucked out of someone (again, like kids do). Is it a metaphor for what men, so often adult babies themselves, do to women with the script being flipped? Maybe. But it can never truly be without suitable language to do so. “King” not being the most effective word to convey a woman’s independence from or “on par-ness” with men.
