In a series called Mondo Ironico, let us discuss how fucking antithetical something in pop culture is.
Lorde may have been checked out of “mainstream reality” in New Zealand for too long. How else could one explain a certain out-of-touchness that has been made apparent with Solar Power? Not just the content of the album itself, but a certain “non”-product being sold to bolster its profits and chart placement. We know that the island nation where Lorde hails from is one of the few parts of Earth that’s deemed truly livable if you don’t want to sacrifice most of your soul and psyche. But the “socialist hermit kingdom” is the privilege of relatively few (as has been made all the more evident of late by rich people retreating to the bunkers they’ve created there). Lorde being one of them by circumstance of winning the birth lottery.
Because of the country’s “oasis”-like qualities, Lorde has been allowed ample time to reflect upon her existence in an ambient, nature-filled setting—far from big, bad Hollywood-as-a-construct (which she lambasts on “California”). She’s a regular Thoreau, Emerson reincarnated—or so she would have us believe. But there’s something almost cruel about expressing a reverence for nature while still continuing to shill one’s products and go on tour—all things undeniably that will contribute to the downfall of the environment. But people—especially celebrities (even “well-intentioned” ones)—have never been all that adept at seeing past their own myopia. For Lorde, she’s just giving the people what they want and, in her mind, doing it “sustainably.” At least by selling one product she can call as much.
She even shows us how aware she is of Mother Nature’s inevitable (/current) collapse with a song like “Fallen Fruit,” on which she woefully croons, “Through the halls of splendor where the apple trees all grew/You’ll leave us dancing on the fallen fruit.” The “us” in this permutation being Gen Z and the “you’ll” being, invariably, baby boomers, who will die off just as the shit they initiated really starts to hit the fan, thereby evading any real consequences for their longstanding behavior. Because yes, the boomers (especially the Nixon and Reagan Republicans) were the primary advocates for capitalism despite all their erstwhile talk of free love and the idea of, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Boomers, unfortunately, didn’t stay true to their slogan, one that, as Timothy Leary, the man who popularized the phrase, explained as follows: “‘Turn on’” meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end [side bar: Lorde calls Solar Power her “weed album”]. ‘Tune in’ meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. ‘Drop out’ suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. ‘Drop out’ meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice and change.” Boomer acolytes, clearly, did not stay committed to that change, as we now know. But oddly, this description sounds like the sort of theme and lyrics that could be found on Solar Power. To that end, the Gen Z parallel to boomers in the 60s (see also: Billie Eilish playing Twister in the “Lost Cause” video) at present adds an extra layer of irony to Lorde’s “nature reverence” album at a time of environmental collapse.
Yet because everything is made “okay” so long as we have meta references to turn to, Lorde includes the query, “But how can I love what I know I am gonna lose?/Don’t make me choose.” Unfortunately, we’re made to believe we have no choice anyway (“Capitalism: is there no alternative?” The corporations shouting back a resounding, “No!”). We must exist as we are with the knowledge that said existence will decimate the Earth. We’re the willing participants in our own demise, which would seem to corroborate Greta Guttman’s death wish theory of advertising on Mad Men. Itself a show that took comfort in being self-hating with the meta angle of Don Draper knowing that he was part of America’s problem by making it buy shit it didn’t need or even really want.
Lorde, too, seems to know it, though she still places most of the blame on previous generations—as though she wouldn’t have done the exact same thing in that era. Plus, because she is playing the Nicole Kidman part of Masha Dmitrichenko (even if feigning a “sendup” of that wellness guru hooey in “Mood Ring”), Lorde, despite telling us she’s no savior, seems to want to offer up scripture in the form of her nature-worshipping lyrics. As though we can, by reciting that scripture, ignore the reality of what is to come. Her declaration of nature’s healing powers seeming to sidestep the idea that as it heals us, we suffocate it—leading to the reversal of roles in the dynamic that manifests in things like wildfires in the West and hurricanes in the East as Nature fights back to heal itself since it can’t count on humanity to do so. Of course, none of this will apply to New Zealand when the climate apocalypse arrives, right?
