On Solar Power, Lorde rejects ideals to find utopia.
artwork by Louise Gagnon.
After four years of breathless anticipation, one might have expected that Lorde’s third album, Solar Power, would have arrived with a bang. However, as you likely know now, it turned out to be more of a whimper, becoming one of the most controversial albums of the year and being forgotten rather quickly. The explanations for this are, in some ways, obvious. Solar Power was a huge left turn for Lorde, moving from the dark electropop of her first two albums to slow, folky guitar music. It’s also all over the place thematically, simultaneously about the struggles of fame, climate change, leaving social media, grief over her dog dying, wellness culture and more. But beyond this, there was one allegation leveled at Solar Power above all, that Lorde was out-of-touch and had become a privileged star attempting to lecture her mostly non-rich audience on the transcendence of beach chilling.
Perhaps it's only inevitable that this critique was leveled at her, given how Lorde was once praised for her “relatability” (as almost every pop star is these days). However, I still find this accusation a rather odd critique to focus on. Almost by definition, to listen to mainstream pop music is to listen to multi-millionaire celebrities, people who are certainly not relatable. So why should we judge a pop star by her “relatability”? After all, Billie Eilish’s 2021 album Happier Than Ever spends a large portion of its runtime, like Solar Power, lamenting about how hard it is to be a pop star. What differentiates Solar Power from other pop-star woe albums that makes its position of privilege such a problem?
The answer, I would claim, is because Lorde has become boring or, even more terrifyingly, basic. Rather than dramatizing youthful suburban life or a tumultuous breakup, Solar Power finds Lorde chilling on the beach, getting stoned, being sad about her dog dying, and, of course, spending more time on the beach. It's all a bit mellow and banal, lacking the drama we expect from blockbuster pop albums. On “Secrets from a Girl (Who’s Seen It All),” a song about loving yourself, a hokey spoken-word monologue implores us to get “familiar” with sadness, and face our “emotional baggage,” so that we can embark on the imminently glamorous task of “watching the sunset.” Really, it's a bit embarrassing, and earnest in a way that isn’t exactly in vogue today.
Other stars, like Eilish, imbue their privileged dramas with glamour and beauty. And though they’re selling – or confessing – trauma, the drama of the confession itself becomes a fantasy, one where the listener can also imagine their own traumas as more meaningful and dramatic, expressed through these larger than life figures whose lives are imbued with super-sized meaning through their fame. In his seminal book on stardom, Heavenly Bodies, Richard Dyer writes of how pop stars function to realize the dream of “autonomous stellar individualism.” In this sense, we want stars to both be “just like us,” serving as mirrors of our own lives, and also be mythical, fantastical individuals, making our own problems into meaningful realizations of some idealized inner self rather than accidents. Through being let into the pop star’s inner self we can live vicariously through them, imagining their lives to be a more meaningful reflection of our own; buy the merch and the album, become a fan who expresses themselves with the image of the star as your online avatar, and you too can imagine yourself as a part of the star’s story.
Lorde (who of course sells her own merch and has her own persona) spends much of Solar Power rejecting this idealized vision of stardom. On “The Path,” she declares herself “not a savior,” and on “California” she rejects Hollywood and star culture as “just a dream.” In her email introducing the song “Mood Ring,” Lorde ties this search for an ideal self to the search for utopia. And though utopia is commonly understood as a hidden paradise or ideal society, “Mood Ring” and Lorde’s rejection of the idealization of stars serves more as a rejection of an individualist utopian ideal. Scholar Tom Moylan describes this ideal in his book, Demand the Impossible, as the reduction of utopia “to the consumption of pleasurable weekends, Christmas dreams, and goods purchased weekly in the pleasure-dome shopping malls of suburbia,” which provide all the satisfaction consumers are supposed to want. Lorde critiques this individualist, consumption-oriented mode of utopia on “Mood Ring.” The character presented in the song is terminally unhappy and looks to wellness culture to solve her woes. The idols of wellness culture sell an ideal through consumerism, claiming that all it takes is another salad or another yoga class to realize your own perfect self. But to attempt to embody an ideal, as any pop star may surely know, is inherently oppressive, as discontent is universal and persistent, infecting both the idealized star and the fantasizing watcher. Thus the protagonist of “Mood Ring” never does find fulfillment, but continues to feel disconnected from her own life, and the ideal she seeks to fulfill.
If seeking the ideal through a search for individual self-fulfillment becomes constricting, then perhaps one can instead wish for a better world. The end of “Mood Ring'' finds Lorde’s narrator doing this, yearning to be “taken to some kind of place” where it will “be alright,” reflecting the more traditional idea of utopia as an ideal, perfect world. This concept is explored further on songs “Fallen Fruit” and “Leader of a New Regime.” On “Fallen Fruit,” Lorde flees the ravages of climate change for some kind of island paradise. But in “Leader of a New Regime,” this island turns out not to be a utopian paradise but a place where “lust and paranoia” still reign supreme. Thus, a greater sense of discontent is articulated, not just with the individual self, but with the world as a whole which can’t be fixed, seemingly rejecting the ideal of utopia as paradise.
What, then, are we left with on Solar Power if utopia as an individual consumer and utopia as paradise and system are both not possible? Do you just hope you’re lucky enough to become a multimillionaire pop star? Perhaps here lies part of people’s dislike of Solar Power – that it can be perceived as critiquing the listener for their fantasies while offering nothing in return. But I would argue that the final track, “Oceanic Feeling,” reveals Lorde’s ultimate message about utopia and ideals. “Oceanic Feeling” finds Lorde back on the beach, dreaming about her past and future. At the very end of the song, Lorde “builds a pyre” using only “the wood brought in by the tide.” Though a simple line, I find it poignant, through how it suggests that the very stuff that surrounds us – the people, nature, the air of daily life – are all we need to make something better and to make ourselves happy. The song also finds Lorde yearning to take off her robe and “step into the choir,” reflecting a move away from the individual towards the collective. Thus, on “Oceanic Feeling,” one can see a vision of utopia based not on false ideals and crushing individual ideation, but on engagement with the world – flaws and all – as the path towards utopia.
At which point, I must admit that I do like Solar Power and that I like it because I too am basic. Fundamentally, like the character in “Mood Ring,” I just want to be able to look back on my life and “know it will be alright.” Solar Power is flawed and a bit messy but it's ultimately earnest in its vision that, despite everything, things can be okay. Solar Power also contains a certain kind of broader vision too. Timothée Parrique, whom Lorde quoted in an article after the release of Solar Power, writes that “the production of utopias is nothing less but the process by which societies dream, and without them, there could be no revolutions.” Solar Power doesn’t really engage in any of this dreaming, but it lightly suggests how we might. Through turning away from oppressive ideals of savior pop-stars and hidden paradises, we can instead turn towards each other and the potential of the world to become something else that would, in actuality, bring us all a bit closer to utopia.
edited by Adam Light, editor of Reviews.