Introduction
The Relatable Lorde of Glamour:
A Cultural Contradiction of Rejecting and Accepting Popular Culture
“I'm little, but I'm coming for the crown”. The line from the chorus of Lorde’s song “Still Sane” perfectly sums up the trajectory of the singer’s stardom. She came from the suburbs of New Zeland, from the little, and definitely won the crown for queen of the postmodern teenager experience. Our Lorde and savior, the voice of a generation, achieved the status of international pop star not only by expressing today’s youth’s desires, fascination for wealth and materialism, and rejection of popular culture, but also by depicting herself as authentic and real. In spite of attending A-list events and hanging out with other celebrities, Lorde’s honesty and authenticity still allow her to be marked as “one of us”.
The merging of normal and glamour is familiar in the construct of stars’ personae. In Stars, Richard Dyer argues that stardom “combines the spectacular with the every day, the special with the ordinary” (35). He also argues that the relationship between star and audience is built upon the intensification of common features or conflicts experienced by everyone (32). Thus, these relationships are “between stars and specific instabilities, ambiguities and contradictions in the culture”, and can be seen as ways of stars “heroically living out tensions or painfully exposing them” (31). In this way, according to Dyer, star images function within contradictions between ideologies of a culture, which they try to manage, resolve, expose or reject by embodying an alternative position to dominant ideology (34). There are extreme ambiguities and contradictions concerning stars as ordinary and special, so are stars just like you or me or does stardom and glamour transform them into something different?
Lorde manages to maintain a double persona: at the same time that she is a relatable, normal and non-special teenager from the suburbs, “one of us”, she is also a part of the glamorous pop star world. She embodies contradictions of ordinary versus special, unpolished versus glamorous, and rejection versus consumption. On a larger spectrum, Lorde’s star persona sets her apart from the pop culture that she critiques as inauthentic while still working within its boundaries. She depends on pop culture to ultimately make a point about rejecting it and, as a result, Lorde exposes the cultural contradiction of the desire to go against consumer culture while still taking part in it. She exposes the wish to reject popular culture, but still buys into its products, buying into the idea of rejecting mainstream-pop conventions.
