It's always a small return when you write for someone else. The late author Janet Malcolm once made an argument that, at a certain level, a journalist who writes about another subject is “morally indefensible.” Malcolm's opening thesis in her 1989 essay The Journalist and the Murderer it is more related to the big New Yorker profile, but I think the same goes for any kind of public writing, whether on Substack or song. Even in the most generous and objective writing: Confidences are betrayed. the context is omitted. nuances are overlooked. I wonder if the songwriters who secretly write about exes, freaks, and haters feel it too, that for all the kisses and blind “Dear John” stuff carefully commented on Genius, they feel there's something inherently inauthentic about putting another person in the their music without giving them room to respond.
Earlier this morning, Charli XCX posted a screenshot of Lorde's full verse on the “girl, so confusing” remix, one of several BRAT songs that should be remixed so far. The gray background implied that Lorde sent her entire verse to Charli, to which Charli responded in true Hessian fashion: “Fucking hell.” The original song was Charlie's attempt to bridge the gap between someone and untangle just a few of the many feelings she had for him (“Sometimes I think you may hate me/Sometimes I think I might hate you.”) Of course, there were the obligatory guesses about the subject of the song, but if you have that talented and successful friend who feels just emotionally inaccessible, you won't have to guess whether the song was actually about Lorde. Yet here we are with the remix, scent for pop detectives, a couples therapy session played out in disarmingly honest fashion with a little mutual winking.
Just by reading Lorde's block of text in the screenshot, you can see that she's on a different level, one that was definitely not available to her at her previous summer retreat, Solar power. She deftly taps into the meter of the verse — the short-short-long-long-short-long beat, kind of like Nicki Minaj on “Come on a Cone” — to offer a note about her insecurities to soften her own . . Lorde sings with a bit of digitized filigree about her fears, her body and the traumatic phrases that have stuck with her for years. She backs herself off a bit — “She believed my projection/Now I totally get it” — before rightfully saying that the duo will drive the internet crazy if they team up. Is it a performative relaxation of the many faces of art and celebrity, or two people genuinely clearing the air? Incredibly, it is both. It somehow pulls off what the most cynical reality-show pop music does, while overcoming it through subtle and vibrant songwriting. As Lorde says, they're two sides of the same coin, and they've made for an unusual moment in this doctored, tabloid pop age.
