5/21/2023 0 Comments Lorde melodrama zip share![]() The heartbreak seeps pungently through her lyrics. I recognize the facade of carefree, magical behavior, of pretending that this young life of ours is inconsequential and marvelous in its sense of invincibility, and I recognize, also, what is hidden right behind all of that. I can see what’s happening as it happens to her. The aura of slowly-thickening malaise about her routine state of existence– the parties, sex, fame, and all that usual popstar jazz– is both achingly beautiful and unnervingly relatable. Lorde’s voice harbors a kind of inimitable, simultaneous listlessness, lethargy, and power that I can’t quite name or place. I can’t pretend that the majority of my high school and middle school years haven’t been spent feeling, indeed, like a “liability.” “I do my best to meet her demands. I can’t get to a painless dreamscape far away from all of my self-doubt. I can’t say that I haven’t asked myself that a good amount of times, feeling like a distant clump of motionless matter, worn out, heavy with the realization that nothing’s going to somehow make my youth more romantic or pleasant. “What the f- are perfect places anyways,” she wonders. In “Perfect Places,” her voice is raw and almost like granite, uncertain of this self-assuredness she’s been feigning for so long. Like it or not, Lorde reckons with the fact that this is her life, and she feels it, feels all of it, and she can’t somehow grow detached from her own emotions. Indifference to the chaos may be what I want, what the repressible, cold-eyed, unaffected template in me may want, but I can’t have it. Lorde reassured me, not that life isn’t s-–y and underwhelming and fraught with unending longing, but instead that she recognizes it, too, and how I can’t help but sometimes be swayed by it all to feel it. When I listened to “Melodrama” for the first time, I didn’t feel quite so alone in that. ![]() My feelings are everywhere, all the time. ![]() I can’t belong in this, as much as 15-year-old me might have wanted to, I can’t stick around to see the spiritless chapter of this nighttime ritual. I don’t know how to not notice it, but they all seem immune to the ordinances of daytime life, instead breathing in pink smoke and curling arms around warm necks. Night after night, slathered in shiny, hungry eyes and gingerly-applied mascara, the sticky, metal smell of beer on a carpet just cleaned by the housekeeper. I am unnerved by its accuracy, unwound by the simplified singularity of its meaning, how it can encompass the burning, electric floor of my teenage life so easily, in nine letters. Melodrama is a word that encapsulates adolescent existence in Los Angeles. ![]()
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