Being a “Pop Princess Ally” Hasn’t Done S*** For Me

Lorde, fanaticism, and the Mitski sleeper cell lurking beneath the Gowanus Canal

The New Yorker, June 24, 2024 Cover

If you forced me to pick my favorite musician, I’d do the usual grumbling and groaning (the “what’s your favorite” question always portends a conversational dead end), and then, with a glint in my eye, I’d say: Lorde.

Here is how I came to enjoy the music of Lorde: 

At the beginning of high school, one of my best friends wouldn’t shut up about this teenaged singer from New Zealand. I didn’t think much of it until my senior year, when I started dating a girl who really liked Lorde. I resisted until her second album came out, in 2017, and by the end of that summer—the last summer, not coincidentally, I was really together with the girl—I’d gotten hooked on a few songs. Her and I split up, right after that (college), and so of course I spent my entire freshman fall devoting myself to Lorde’s nascent discography. I began associating the music not just with the relationship but with the beginning of college, so that by my first winter break its meaning had morphed into a truly potent nostalgic elixir. I’ve enjoyed Lorde’s music ever since; it’s been fun to follow an artist closely, connect with friends and strangers about it, and, of course, the music itself still brings me comfort, even as its associations shift continually over time.

As far as I can see, I’ve painted a pretty mundane portrait here: I came to like the music of Lorde by means of the same idiosyncratic mixture of social context, circumstance, and content through which, as far as I can tell, basically everyone comes to like a particular artist. There’s nothing special going on here.

Except: Lorde makes girl music, and I am not a girl. So—as I’m reminded nearly every time the topic arises—I have some explaining to do.

I’ve stopped explaining. Because most of the time I do, I find myself having to defend my taste on two fronts, depending on the conversation partner. Either:

1. I’m talking about Lorde to a straight guy, or guys, who judge me because they think my listening habits are emasculating (the kind of guys who’ve learned to say “pussy” with their eyebrows)

Or

2. I’m talking about Lorde to a group (often of girls, but not always) who don’t believe me; they think I’m being performative, or just mentioning her to gain social cachet

I can handle group one: the wannabe machos who think there’s “correct” male tastes to have. I’ve lived in the midst of such men for over a quarter century now. I can’t say I’m totally immune from their powers, but I know their ways. They will not be impacting Lorde’s standing in my Spotify Wrapped list this year.

I’m more perplexed by group number two, a coalition which seems to believe that men writ large have been swept away by some fever whose symptoms include surreptitiously raving to Mitski in Ridgewood while mass ordering Phoebe Bridgers skeleton onesies off Etsy to decorate our otherwise sparse studio apartments. This group seems to assume I’m reaping benefits, gaining social currency, getting laid, because my favorite artist is a highly acclaimed pop princess.

I am here to report, ladies and gentleman, that the alleged, um, benefits I’ve supposedly accrued with my Lorde fandom are…highly overstated. I’m not sure, in other words, what exactly my Lorde allegiance has won for me that devotion to any other artist or band wouldn’t have conferred upon me instead.

Because—and, trust me, this brings me no joy to report—my pop princess allyship has gotten me absolutely nowhere. I mean, really, nowhere. Liking a popular female artist has conferred the same benefits upon me (making friends, having community, going to concerts) as if I’d been obsessed with Radiohead or gotten super into the Kings of Leon.

I’m not a monk, of course, passively listening to Lorde, injecting myself only with lyrics, melody, and chords. I am keenly aware of how profoundly one’s social environment shapes our tastes, from what music we like to who we’re attracted to. I’ve certainly, particularly in college, had moments where I’ve leaned into the “guy obsessed with Lorde” persona a little too hard. As many have observed, performative poptimism is a thing, and it’s bad for music criticism and the industry as a whole.¹ I’ve seen the late millennial picture portrayed by that New Yorker cover rolling through Park Slope once or twice. 

But if I’m honestly assessing, say, the romantic outcomes spurred off my music taste, I genuinely can’t think of a time when it’s come in handy, other than it sort of being seen as a quirky, mildly endearing quality when it’s discovered well after the point where it would have actually mattered in the first place. If anything, this discourse has gotten so out of hand that it’s endogenously conjured a duplicitous specter of a male character lurking in the black mayonnaise of the Gowanus Canal with righteous Lana del Rey takes, so that when I say I like Lorde, at least in New York, in the context of one of those shitty conversations about my favorite things, the girl is as likely to think I’m being disingenuous—just saying it to get laid—as she is to find it some charming, girly pop stamp of approval. Same goes if I interject in an Olivia Rodrigo versus Sabrina Carpenter conversation,² or bring up Billie Eilish’s evolution, or, God forbid, criticize a bonus track off of the re-released 1989. These conversations, layered as they are within this meta discursive maze of intentionality and devotion and identity, are increasingly exhausting, entirely unmoored from anything resembling the music itself. Far from benefiting from whatever pop princess ally sticker I’ve slapped onto myself, the tedium of navigating such a tangled web discourages me, more than not, from mentioning it at all.

Mostly, though, it’s simply a non-factor. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places; I admit that I’m not running in the exact crowd where this kind of guy is most likely to proliferate. But I’m roaming the streets of New York City professionally, every day, operating in basically every nook and cranny where you might expect to find this sort of person, everywhere, and I have never, not once, seen the oft-maligned row of young, mustachioed dudes with baggy pants ostentatiously reading Ferrante and Rooney and hooks back to back to back at a cafe, or overheard a guy bumping Chappel Roan suspiciously loud through his AirPods while working the McCarren Park pull-up bar. Maybe this dude exists. Maybe I’m just so delighted to see any guy my age reading anything at all in public that I willfully gaze past whatever book’s actually in his hands. Maybe I can’t see him because it’s me.

But I suspect this character looms larger in our collective imagination than actually exists in real life because of the larger trend, gender be damned, of people relating to the world primarily through their favorite cultural objects. I realize now that the handful of times I leaned too hard on the “guy who likes Lorde” persona failed to produce meaningful relationships not because I presented as “guy who likes Lorde,” but because being someone who leans too hard on any persona is unattractive. Taste cannot compensate for character, and fandom is not equivalent to a value system. I really wish we’d stop conflating the two, and in general start giving less of a shit about policing the sorts of stuff people are into.

Look, none of this is any great burden; it certainly hasn’t stopped me from listening to Lorde, and the actual content (the music) is what I care about most. But it does frustrate me. I want to like what I like and be a part of a community that likes the same stuff; to get to know art and people better through work we mutually enjoy. This seems to me the most basic outcome we seek in turning to any kind of art. But both in my own head and out loud, I too often catch myself reflexively defending my choices before I even get around to analyzing them. The result is a less robust dialogue about art, on its own terms, and the same, tired meta-conversation about why we consume what we do in place of more profound conversations about the works themselves. Painted on the road, red and chrome, discourse disintegrating.

1. The clip seems to be down, but over the summer New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica responded to a Swift-skeptical podcaster’s challenge about the Taylor Swift song “Dear John” not by addressing the song’s validity on its own terms but by calling it a “top 10 Taylor Swift song.”

2. “Espresso” is terrible.