FEATURE:
Groovelines
Lorde - Royals
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RELEASED in June 2013…
I have missed the tenth anniversary of Lorde’s single, Royals. In fact, it was Lorde’s debut single. The New Zealand-born artist released her debut album, Pure Heroine, on 27th September, 2013. Written by Ella Yelich-O'Connor (Lorde) and Joel Little, it went to number one in many countries around the world – including the U.S. and U.K. Inspiring artists (in terms of the sound and tone of Royals) such as BANKS, Billie Eilish, Clairo, Halsey, Mallrat, and Olivia Rodrigo, Royals has a huge legacy. I am covering the song now, not only because it is seen as one of the best debut singles ever. Royals debuted in the U.K. at number one on 28th October, 2013. Celebrating the tenth anniversary of that track scaling the U.K. charts is important. Lorde became the youngest solo artist to score a U.K. number one single since Billie Piper's 1998 song, Because We Want To. It was an amazing introduction to this incredible artist. There are a few features that I want to get to. They give us an insight into a remarkable track. First, here is some background regarding the genesis of Royals – and how it proves that quickly-written songs can be the most successful and resonant:
“Lorde wrote the song in 2012 at her house, which only took half an hour. Herself and Joel Little worked on Royals at Little's Golden Age Studio in Golden Age Studios in Morningside, Auckland NZ. Within a week they had finished the song.
The first idea for the song came to Lorde after she read an article published by National Geographic with a picture of Kansas City Royals baseball player George Brett signing baseballs, with his team's name emblazoned across his shirt. She said "It was just that word. It was really cool." Historic aristocrats were also an inspiration for the song. She also explained the lyric "We're driving Cadillacs in our dreams" was something she read in a diary she received at the age of 12. Lorde further revealed that she took inspiration from hip-hop-influenced artists during the writing process, yet criticized their "bullshit" reference to "expensive" alcohol and cars.
"I was definitely poking fun at a lot of things that people take to be normal. I was listening to a lot of hip-hop and I kind of started to realise that to be cool in hip-hop, you have to have that sort of car and drink that sort of vodka and have that sort of watch, and I was like, "I've literally never seen one of those watches in my entire life." (- Lorde about the lyrics)
The song was produced by using the software Pro Tools. A Spin writer described the song as being "artpop". Written in the key of D Mixolydian, it is followed by the chord progression I-vii-IV (D – c – G). The song has a moderate tempo of 85 beats per minute (Andante). "Royals" is instrumented by finger snaps and bass. On the song, Lorde performs with a mezzo-soprano vocal range, spanning from F♯3 to F#5. Lyrically, Lorde sings about the luxurious lifestyle of contemporary artists”.
There has been some critique and scrutiny as to whether Royals is offensive, or its lyrics can be seen as racist. As Royals talks about wealth and extravagant lifestyles, some lyrics maybe pertaining to Hip-Hop and excess were called out by writer Bayetti Flores. Rather than home in on a criticism that is unwarranted and untrue, I wanted to highlight the positives. This feature, published in September, discusses how Lorde’s debut album, Pure Heroine, calibrated and refreshed Pop music with songs like Royals critiquing and examining Pop music and the lifestyles of artists, it was a shot in the arm:
“Even if you haven’t heard “Royals” in years, it’s likely that just seeing the title has caused its slinky, subdued groove to worm its way back into your mind. There’s not much to the song’s arrangement – finger snaps, a hip-hop beat, a wobbling bass after the first chorus – but it’s enough to get stuck in your head, and it doesn’t distract from Lorde herself, whose deep vocals and sly, self-assured delivery made her one of the most immediately compelling singers since Adele. Clearly, Lorde was onto something, and “Royals” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks.
The love club
“Royals” was almost a year old when it hit the airwaves. When it was recorded, the ground hadn’t even been broken for Pure Heroine. After a few false starts with other songwriters, Lorde began working with fellow-Aucklander Joel Little, who’d had some success down under as a member of pop-punk band Goodnight Nurse, in December 2011.
Over a three-week period in 2012, the two finished “Royals” and four other songs for Lorde’s debut EP, The Love Club, which was uploaded to SoundCloud later that year. The EP was a success, it was downloaded 60,000 times with virtually no promotion, spurring Lorde’s label to release it commercially. While Lorde and Little were keen to release another EP, it wasn’t long before what they were working on grew into a full-length album”.
Rather than Lorde’s lyrics about excess and flash cars being about Rap and, therefore, racist, it is actually about growing up in a country like New Zealand, where the media covers and celebrates American wealth and dominance. That anti-imperialist stance that Royals takes was highlighted by Buzzfeed in 2013:
“Royals" is a song about growing up in New Zealand immersed in American cultural imperialism. The core of the song is alienation, sure, but the lyrics about pop culture are far more ambivalent than they are angry and strident. This is part of why it has resonated with so many people — Lorde isn't saying that she doesn't like this music, only that she sees a disconnect between the hyper-consumerist fantasy at the core of contemporary pop and the actual lives of anyone she knows. "I've always listened to a lot of rap," she recently told New York Magazine. "It's all, look at this car that cost me so much money, look at this Champagne. It's super fun. It's also some bullshit. When I was going out with my friends, we would raid someone's freezer at her parents' house because we didn't have enough money to get dinner. So it seems really strange that we're playing A$AP Rocky."
If you grow up in the United States, it can be very easy to have no perspective on living in a culture dominated by art and media from another country. Some music from around the world seeps into mainstream American culture, but it's never dominant, and music from abroad is made with the understanding that you have to cater to the American market to be a big star. Americans are used to the rest of the world bending over backwards to blend in with their culture, and think nothing of foreign stars from ABBA and Björk to Shakira and Phoenix singing in their second language to appeal to the English-speaking world. Americans are almost never asked to adapt, and very rarely have to feel as though their culture is being infiltrated by the value systems of foreign nations.
This context may get lost a bit when "Royals" is played in the United States, but it clicks with American listeners because this sort of cultural imperialism happens within the U.S. too. The "culture wars" that have informed the past few decades of American politics are rooted in a belief that the values of media produced and promoted almost exclusively by companies based in New York and California are disconnected from the majority of the country. On a more personal level, it's just easy to look at mainstream culture and feel disenfranchised, that no one is speaking for you.
"Royals" may be ambivalent about music, but it's openly defiant when it comes to class and this sort of imperialism. It may well be the most leftist song to become a major hit in years, at least in that it's focused on rejecting wealth and privilege, and questioning capitalist ideas that encourage people from lower classes to buy into a system that is mostly rigged against them. Lorde's song takes pride in not coming from money, and asks the listener to give some thought to why they want to buy into a glamorous fantasy. If it seems like Lorde is being especially rough on rap, but it's mainly just because she's a fan, and it's the genre that is most invested in this fantasy. There are a lot of valid reasons why African-American culture in particular is invested in these material fantasies, but that's not really what Lorde is talking about here. She's mainly interested in the unintended cultural consequences of those values on the other side of the globe, and perhaps pushing Americans to consider for a moment that their pop culture is not happening in a vacuum”.
Maybe it is worth coming back to critique and scrutiny of the lyrics. The fact that the then-teenager Lorde wrote this song so quickly - and yet it has been poured over and is this complex and compelling thing goes to show what an amazing songwriter she is. Someone who definitely hit a nerve when it was released in 2013. The fact is Royals didn’t translate in all overseas territories too well. As it got to number one around the world, it was clear that the buying public loved the song and connected with its messages. The Guardian, writing in 2013, argued how Royals deserves a more nuanced investigation:
“Those are a few possible ways of hearing it, anyway. Another is that it’s a privileged white woman belittling black cultural aspiration. At least, that was the take of Verónica Bayetti Flores on feministing.com, who caused something of a minor international pop cultural incident with her analysis, under the unambiguous headline ‘Wow, That Lorde Song Royals is Racist’. It goes on to ask: “why not take to task the bankers and old-money folks who actually have a hand in perpetuating and increasing wealth inequality? I’m gonna take a guess: racism.”
Predictably, because Lorde is ridiculously popular, the post became an excuse for commenters to beat up on the writer, a venting space for a bunch of New Zealanders to defend their countrywoman.
It’s funny (read: embarrassing) that whenever anything gets written about New Zealand anywhere on the internet, we as a nation all dutifully congregate to refute, apologise or agree wholeheartedly with what’s being said. Click-hungry web editors take note: as a small, self-conscious set of islands with high internet penetration, we’re easily manipulated. Praise or pillory us and the clicks will roll in for days like the waves at Raglan.
Many of the guests from the bottom of the world arrived at feministing bearing well-argued responses, often pointing out that the song’s very next line ridiculed white cultural excess. Other visitors behaved a little strangely, making the post’s author’s point seem more valid in their attempts to refute it. “Wayne” summed up one vein of the sentiment:
If this woman that did the review, would have opened her ears a little more, than she would have realized what Lorde was referring too, and that is the over popular culture in music today. Bling, Pimped out rides, half naked artist on stage and in video’s, as well as showing off their money to the point, that they look like a big damn joke.
Basically what Wayne is saying is that, even if Royals isn’t racist, he sure is, and thoroughly enjoys the way listening to it reinforces his prejudices. This is a bit of a shame. Because Royals deserves a more nuanced critique.
Fortunately, the Wayne-type response was balanced out by the biting response of New Zealand satire site The Civilian, which went digging for other racist elements in Royals. These included discovering that the line "let me live that fantasy" really meant that “Lorde desperately wants to live out her fantasy of owning black slaves”.
I will get to reviews. INQUIRER.net had this to say when they reviewed Royals upon its release. It is amazing that an artist so young wrote a song like Royals. Both catchy and singalong but also deep and challenging, it is no wonder that we are still discussing the track a decade down the line. This majestic and emphatic introduction to the wonderful Lorde:
“Lorde, whose real name is Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O’Connor, is a 17-year-old singer-songwriter from New Zealand. She is starting to quickly establish her own identity with music aficionados spanning every age group with her meaningful and well-crafted lyrics that speak directly from the heart of who she is as an artist. That right there explains a lot to me why there are so many teens now moving away from listening to artists like Miley Cyrus to more thought-provoking and sensible music that Lorde has to offer.
The lyrics of her single “Royals” isn’t all about nonsensical themes that really do nothing to help broaden the tastes of listeners. Her song is surprisingly simple and sincere which provides a window to her humble beginnings and her own aspirations while growing up.
We can take for example in the pre-chorus: ” But every song’s like gold teeth, grey goose, trippin’ in the bathroom blood stains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room, we don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams. But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece. Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash. We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair. “To even listen to lyrics as poignant as these isn’t exactly the “norm” these days.
Switching to other aspects of “Royals”, I would say there was really a conscious effort to keep things to a minimum as much as possible when it came to its instrumentation. And almost everything else about this single is minimalistic in its approach too—from the simple backing drum beat to even the finger snapping in the chorus section.
The best part about “Royals” is Lorde’s voice quality—low-pitched and husky—which is truly reminiscent of the late Amy Winehouse.
Normally, the production serves as a “boost” to make the song better in heightening the listeners’ experience. But in this case, if that method had been applied at all in the engineering of “Royals” in the recording studio, it would not have fit and most likely, it would have even worked the other way around because her voice would only have been drowned out. I say this because no amount of multi-layered sounds in the background was needed so that listeners could have a better appreciation of Lorde’s vocal work.
It really proves an old phrase “less is more.”
Everything I have mentioned and enumerated above leads me to believe we have a “counter-culture” artist who just so happens to have struck a chord with mainstream listeners looking for something different this time.
There will always be a huge chunk of music aficionados who are in search for new artists that would challenge their own definition as to what music sounds good to them. And this is where Lorde fits the bill perfectly.
Her voice alone speaks for itself”.
I will round off with a round up by Wikipedia. They collated reviews for the mighty Royals. A modern classic that has been covered by everyone from Selena Gomez, Jack White, and Bruce Springsteen, there is no doubt that this song has huge pull, power and importance. Something so many other artists wanted to add their stamp to. The sign of a true classic:
“Royals" received widespread acclaim from music critics. Lewis Corner from Digital Spy awarded the track a five rating and lauded its "addictive hook that thrives on its simplicity". The Guardian's Duncan Grieve was impressed by the song's "direct response" to excess and wealth. The Boston Globe writer James Reed selected "Royals" as the highlight of the album Pure Heroine. Rita Houston of NPR praised its melody, "heartfelt" songwriting, and Lorde's "rhythmic" vocals that combine to create a "polished little gem of a song". Jon Hadusek from Consequence of Sound also named the track the album's standout, singling out its "self-reflexive" lyrics and "catchy" production. PopMatters writer Scott Interrante felt that the song's sound was "distinct and fresh", while The New York Times's Jon Pareles highlighted its clever message, describing it as a "class-conscious critique of pop-culture materialism".
The lyrical content of the song was scrutinised after Feministing blogger Véronica Bayetti Flores called it "racist". She felt that "gold teeth, Cristal, and Maybachs" were direct references to items used by mainstream black artists. This prompted responses from several media publications, including The Washington Times, Complex, and Vice, who disagreed with Flores's comments. Journalist Lynda Brendish wrote that the song also critiques other stereotypes associated with affluent, high-profile personalities, such as rock musicians, socialites, and Russian oligarchs.[57] In contrast, Spin writer Brandon Soderberg argued that the inclusion of "Royals" on urban radio was an attempt by the music industry to whitewash traditionally black radio stations”.
Because 28th October was when Royals went to the top of the charts in the U.K., I wanted to mark and celebrate that anniversary with a closer look and dissection. If some misconstrued the lyrics and were misinterpreted, since it is seen as what it is: a teenager in New Zealand reacting to all the wealth and excess of American/western culture that was everywhere. Maybe some of the excess that musicians were used to. Quite gaudy and tacky. Perhaps a little cool too. I think everyone has a slightly different take on the lyrics. Whatever your impression, there is no doubting the fact that Royals is…
A supreme, all-conquering work of wonder.