Article by Marzia Picciano | Photo by Cesare Veronesi (Verona 2022)
My personal love for Lorde (born in New Zealand, to be pedantic, Ella Marija Lani Yelich-ÒConnor, just to underline the Croatian mix) was born rather late compared to the global exploit that accompanied her from Royalsbut I did everything to be on par with the very excited fans of the first hour for the live of Milan of July 23. Maybe it's because for a long time I classified her – mistake – as a potential Gen Z far from my world, even though as a semi-thirty year old she is exactly in the middle, or rather in the gap between one generation and another, without stopping to listen to her carefully.
Now, today, of figures relating to what someone defined me, very appropriately I must say, as corporate white musicthere are plenty of them; everyone has their pop fetish. Yet in my mind Lorde immediately became the most authentic and distant, ideally, from the brazenly pink or sequined pop, perceiving in her lyrics as in her musical research a progressive attempt, finally free of political rhetoric, to get to the essence, in the sense of bones, and shadow, as she managed – in my humble opinion – to do perfectly in Virginthe latest album with an emblematic name, as electronic as it is dark, as if they wanted to cast a thriller shadow on the carousel of youth.
Lorde she is first of all a very fascinated human being, a diaphanous beauty that releases a sensitivity that cannot be avoided, last night she was exactly as I expected in her latest digivolution, the semi-androgynous and very pure one of Man Of The Year. I did not shy away from this opportunity, in the certainty that in some way, indeed very often, the genre – absentmindedly identified as – mainstream and light offers deeper hooks than many challenging readings (perhaps because it interprets the always beautiful concept of being shot in the face like compressed air better than others?). Even if all this means inhaling all the dirt of the Parco della Musica or spending more than half an hour in the shower to cleanse it of sweat, together with the mosquitoes that died in attempted suicide attacks.
Yet yesterday Lorde was particularly fascinated by the place, by the moon, and probably also by the Linate planes that gradually took off on the festival stage. Ultimately, it was all very right. As was the modern and highly cultured songwriting of Joan Thiele who rearranges a song by Piero Umiliani as Tramonto, opening to our heroine of feeling at all costs.
I found more space for content, and zero symbolic seasoning, on that unadorned stage with a mobile composition; more possibility of unraveling the emotional load that I had been carrying with me all day amidst screens that alternately project electrocardiograms or his face, distorted and vivisected in all possible perspectives, cameramen exalted as much as the dancers and members of the band, than in certain masterful guitar playing that should satisfy the heart and mind only for their perfection.
No, Lorde is not perfect, her show probably isn't either, but it is chaotic, extremely physical (an hour and a half of cardio between jumping and climbing on the stage boxes, crowned by an almost cathartic hug to the staff on stage), essential and liminal, between a psychological extreme and the actual need to incite a decidedly loyal and aligned, and equally physical, audience. No surprise that ours starts smoking a cigarette during the cover halfway through Girls, So Confusingwhich he shares with his “alter ego” (if we can say so for the ironic genesis of the piece) Charlie xcx.
THE'Ultrasound Tour after all, it is a bit like this manifesto of the senseless search of our alien New Zealander for a background that is real, concrete, and in any case raw, as if it could not be otherwise: at the base, in the core, there is no atomic nucleus perfectly smoothed by a constant and imperceptible physical motion, but a desolate land, made of holes and craters to be accepted in its own impurity. The most secret and unspeakable parts of us, written down, on a base, sung and skipped.
All passing through Pure Heroine to Melodramatherefore from a revisited R'n'b to the dance songwriting curated, obviously, by Antonoff (skipping for the Milan date the already much miscast, in the setlist, Solar Power), up to the desecration of reality, of parties, excesses, betrayals and various alcoholisms in which Lorde went through a decade of hormonal development on a bike to get to tell us: You met me at a really strange time in my life.
I want to ruin all my credibility by saying that ultimately Lorde is the Gen Z version of Robyn, the fluid, almost slippery one, both sexually and emotionally, the one who can dance alone on the end of a relationship but doesn't give up on desire, exactly as she does in Green Light. The one that ends up dyed blue and remains in bikinis at the end of the show.
There is no nostalgia (that is a prerogative of millennials and above), but a sense of bewilderment and unease that never turns into fear, and which anchors me and the liquid mass of boys and girls in sequins and micro tops with every piece. It is not the exhilarating, colorful Netflix series that satisfies our compressed chakras, but a brutal slap in the face at the end of a less than lucid evening.
It's a bit like waking up and understanding that summer songs, she says, have to be a certain way, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't contain a bit of gravity, in the sense of the force that knocks us down and hits our faces on the floor. It is not exhibitionism, but the distorted search for a tactile element that tells us that we are in the here and now.
In the infinite whole of Quest with which we identify our passage into this world, Lorde is the character I choose to send forward, yes, to do the dirty work, the one we can also be ashamed of, but which I would not be able to translate into anything beautiful. And ultimately, that's all very well.
LORDE – The setlist of the Milan concert
Intro – Synth
Royals (short)
What Was That
Broken Glass
Perfect Places
Shapeshifter
BuzzcutSeason
Favorite Daughter
The Louvre
Current Affairs
Liability
Hammer
Supercut
Team
Man of the Year
Girl, so confusing (Charli xcx cover)
Green Light
David
Ribs
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
