The Relatable Lorde
One of the reasons for why Lorde is relatable is because she is a product of what Dyer calls the myth of success. As developed in the star system, it suggests that the American society is open for anyone to be successful. In relation to stardom, there are several contradicting elements functioning in the success myth, such as ordinariness being a distinctive feature of the star; the system rewarding talent (specialness); luck launching a star’s career; and hard work being necessary to get to the top of stardom (42). In this sense, Lorde gives hope to the American Dream by encompassing all of these four elements: she is ordinary for being from New Zealand’s First-World-excluded suburbs, for not following traditional conventions of music or beauty, for being just like us; she was rewarded two Grammy Awards for her talent; she was lucky with the launch of her career, as it was a result of her first EP going viral; and she worked really hard, as she started writing her songs when she was 12 years old, but only launched them at 16 (Daytona Beach News).
As pointed out by Vogue.com film and TV critic Nathan Heller’s article “Lorde: The Music Phenomenon of the Year”, her debut album, Pure Heroine, is very much about the experience of being young and living under the shadows of the modern First World. In her song “Team”, Lorde sings “We live in cities / You’ll never see on-screen / Not very pretty, but we sure know how to run things” emphasizing her upbringing in a little and excluded world to which no one paid attention. It points to that fact that she knows how it is to be a nobody in our social media attention-needy world, making her relatable to today’s youth.
In the VEVO LIFT UK video interview “World According to Lorde”, from early on in her career, Lorde established herself as a normal person and a common and relatable teenager. Interviews like this strengthen the link between her and her young audience as she describes herself in ways that a lot of “real world” teenagers would. Unlike top celebrities, but similar to most people, in this video Lorde talks about getting star-struck, enjoying McDonald’s breakfast, and seeing herself as “not that cool”.
In discussing her debut EP for Interview Magazine, Lorde also said:
“Around the middle of last year I started listening to a lot of rap, like Nicki Minaj and Drake, as well as pop singers like Lana Del Rey. They all sing about such opulence, stuff that just didn't relate to me—or anyone that I knew. I began thinking, ‘How are we listening to this? It's completely irrelevant.’ I basically just wrote what we were all thinking.” (Fleming)
In this quote, Lorde points to the fact that in her lyrics she is writing about not only her personal experience and feelings towards popular music, but also everyone else’s. “I basically just wrote what we were all thinking” refers to how her, touching on her desire to reject consumerism and the forced luxury of popular culture, is universal. This also goes back to what Dyer argued, that stars have a connection with their fans by sharing, exposing or representing some central common conflict or feeling experienced by everyone. Here Lorde is representing her fans’ feelings along with her own.
Emphasizing her representation of a larger group of people, of a generation, is how she sings “We will never be royals” in the song “Royals” (Heller). By saying “we”, Lorde is positioning herself on the same level as her listeners. She is not only writing from her perspective, but she is also writing from other teenagers’ perspectives as she invites them to be a part of this collective message. In her use of “we”, Lorde then becomes the voice of a generation, a voice for today’s youth.
The themes that Lorde talks about are also very ordinary, common and relatable. Interviewed for Vogue.com, she confessed that after having the experience of traveling and visiting the biggest cities in the world, she realized how much she appreciated where she had grown up and started asking herself questions like “Do I want to grow up? Do I want to leave the suburbs?” (Heller). This coming-of-age theme also creates a relatable connection between her and her audience/fanbase. Because everyone goes through this search for identity when growing up, her teenage audience is able to relate to her, to see themselves in her, and to be represented by her.
