Far be it for me to commend bad manners but commend it I must. Seventeen year old Lorde’s recent comment to the Guardian writer Peter Robinson could singlehandedly rejuvenate the generation gap. Of course what Lorde actually said isn’t what any one heard. Here is what Lorde said: “Having the world weighing in on you from all sorts of different perspectives is intense, but the criticism I listen to most is what comes from people the same age as me; they’re the only people I care about liking my music. One consistent thing is that if I like something and nobody likes it, I still like it. If I don’t like something and everyone loves it, I still hate it.”
There are two things she said here.
1. The criticism she listens to MOST is from people her own age.
2. The only people she CARES ABOUT liking her music is people her own age.
When I was seventeen, I certainly felt very much the same way but the sense of the younger generation being in awe of if not classic rock, certainly grunge era would have been anathema to me. Remember no Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977? We regarded the elder statesmen of rock, and of the world, as corrupted people beyond redemption (so did the hippies ), indeed, I still kinda do.
So my sympathies are with Lorde on this one. No, she isn’t as good as she thinks she is (wait till the sophomore album before you start burning bridges, kid) but she has a good feel for modern pop politics and this time she has said something that should be said more often. Long after I’m dead, Lorde will be here, it is her world and as such she gets to share it with her people.
Given the circumstances, what is a rebellious girl to do but take it to us? Insist upon the freedom to be something other than a part of an imaginary youth brigade when there is a real youth brigade to be born.
The problem is that as music movements go, both the psychedelic 60s and the punk 70s were musically revolutionary and Lorde simply isn’t different enough to spearhead much more than a cat calling expedition. When critics judge her music, they are working from a historical template that is simply an antecedent to what Lorde is doing: in no way does she break away, nothing MUSICALLY is bewildering the critics. They get it.
Now, the reply to that is: well, so what? I’m still old and she still doesn’t care what I think . Which isn’t exactly the truth either, I don’t want to get “it depends what “is” is” on you, but you put two qualifiers in her comments. The first is “most” –clearly, in order to listen to 17 year olds MOST, she must listen to older people less than that, which is not not at all. The other qualifier is “Cares”. Again, she is not saying the only person she admires, loves, respects, or matters is young people. Lorde is being precise, she cares, she is emotionally affected by her age group, she doesn’t care, she can’t be hurt, by what older people say.
This isn’t really fighting words but it feels aggressive because we haven’t heard any sort of age warfare in decades. We haven’t been put in our place, and we should be. It is healthy for the young generation to assume their differences, and embrace their difference, from my generation.
I like the concept, I am willing to be on the outside looking in at a 17 year girl (whose “Team” has been streamed over 100 Million times on Spotify), to limit her indulgence of me.
