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A photo of Lorde
Lorde: ‘do me and yourselves a favour, and don’t underestimate my skill.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian
Lorde: ‘do me and yourselves a favour, and don’t underestimate my skill.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

Have faith in Lorde: she knows what she's doing

This article is more than 8 years old
Elle Hunt

Lorde’s decision to split from the manager who turned her ‘from schoolgirl to superstar’ has prompted patronising questions about her judgment. But her success has always been her own

A good subtweet should be oblique enough to obfuscate the identity of the person to whom it refers, but perfectly pointed and precisely timed as to make it easy enough for others to guess.

The trick is in maintaining plausible deniability. For example, it’s entirely possible that teenage pop star Lorde hasn’t read Eamonn Forde’s comment piece in which he questions her decision to drop her manager; that it’s just a coincidence she tweeted: “men ... don’t underestimate my skill” after it had been shared around online.

hey, men - do me and yourselves a favour, and don't underestimate my skill

— Lorde (@lordemusic) May 20, 2015

yes, i'm a young lass, but i'm also making the best decisions for me each day. #stayeducated 💅

— Lorde (@lordemusic) May 20, 2015

But I wouldn’t put it past her. If Lorde’s made one thing clear over the course of her brief but burning-bright career thus far, it’s that she knows what she’s doing: when she slipped some songs on to Soundcloud with no fanfare or marketing, despite having been signed to a development contract with Universal since she was 13; when she passed up government funding because of the “negative power” its agency’s logo held for her generation; when she tweeted at Diplo about his “tiny penis” in defence of Taylor Swift. (That one doesn’t count as a subtweet because she mentioned him directly – in case you were wondering.)

By all accounts Lorde, now 18, is unusually involved in the line-by-line minutiae of her music and brand. Yet Forde warns nothing good can come of her departures from Scott Maclachlan, the A&R executive who “discovered” her – insofar as talent has to be outed – performing at her school’s talent show as a child.

“It is still not clear why they split, but the omens are never good when something like this happens,” he writes glumly, the tea-leaves having settled before him. “Something hugely important is lost when a good manager is fired.”

Forde draws a long bow from the Beatles to the Spice Girls to make his point that bands’ changing management leads – sometimes years later, but eventually! – to their splitting up or selling fewer albums (or, in the case of Jessie J, selling biscuits). It might take decades, but it’ll catch up with them in the end, he warns, as though splitting up or selling fewer albums weren’t the guaranteed fates in store for all bands. As though the inevitable can be staved off with an oil painting of their first manager, locked in the tour bus.

It’s a grim worldview that chalks up musical success, creative or commercial, to an A&R man earning his bonus behind the scenes. Even from a business perspective, surely it’s better to believe in the prodigy – if only because it’s an easier story to sell.

Of course Lorde’s subtweets might not have been targeted at this Guardian article. There’s no shortage of speculation over her split from Maclachlan, much of it adopting a faux-concerned tone she was quick to pick up on: “yes, i’m a young lass, but i’m also making the best decisions for me each day”.

Her gender and her age – coupled with her self-assuredness – are both reasons Lorde attracts perhaps more than her fair share of scrutiny, including from “truthers” who maintain she’s at least in her 20s. The fact that she is from New Zealand is another.

Full disclosure: I’m also from New Zealand and, though I have not met Lorde, we have friends in common: she is in my boyfriend’s rival pub quiz team. Though, in a nation of 4.5m, that applies to just about everyone.

It’s hard to articulate what her success has meant to a generation of young New Zealanders coming of age with a global identity informed by Flight of the Conchords and Lord of the Rings, and only in part because there’s a reasonable chance of her, or our mutual friends, reading it.

It can be that kind of claustrophobic place, where any success at home is undermined by the size of the population. You’re dismissed as being “New Zealand famous” if you don’t strive for recognition further afield, and you’ve “forgotten your roots” if you achieve it.

Cast in her own light: Lorde performs Royals at the 2013 Grammy nominations concert. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

It wasn’t that long ago that Lorde was an unknown Devonport teenager spun on George FM and other local radio stations. She’s since reached such dizzying heights of fame that her achievements are unquestionable – and we’re pleased to claim that we knew her back when she was just Ella Yelich-O’Connor of Takapuna Grammar.

To quote Duncan Greive, the first journalist to cover Lorde’s success: “Part of you thinks this could be an enormous hit, then another part of you is like, ‘This is New Zealand dude, this just doesn’t happen’ ... There’s broad satisfaction and a national sense of happiness that this thing has happened to our little country.”

New Zealand is better known for our sheep-to-human ratio – now 7:1, thanks for asking – than for being an intellectual or creative powerhouse. That there’s this articulate, thoughtful teenager out there calling out sexism and quoting Carver and swinging on Taylor Swift’s foot makes up for the fact our elected statesman is best known for pulling women’s ponytails. If it weren’t deemed unconstitutional, we could (and probably will) do worse than to put her on the new flag.

It’s disingenuous to suggest Lorde attained this fame alone; even the taste and talent with which she’s been able to achieve it seems in large part due to her upbringing. But though a team of people, Maclachlan among them, has contributed, their role seems to have been less defining than is often the case with pop stars. “With her, we could do whatever we liked,” Greive quotes a Universal exec saying of Lana Del Rey.

What Maclachlan did bring to the table was his outsider’s perspective, without which Lorde might not have sprung out from the rest of the poppies as fast and as confidently as she did. An Englishman who’d emigrated to New Zealand, he was confident enough in what he saw to know it would play out globally.

Now that she’s “the world’s greatest pop star”, there’s an expectation on Lorde to deliver with her second album – that, Forde maintains, will prove whether she was right to part from Maclachlan. I don’t think it will do anything of the sort. Even looking past the implication that her success to date could be undermined by an subpar sophomore effort, management is just one strand of Lorde’s story. Her own judgment and direction have played a far greater role. To paraphrase Drake, one of her inspirations: we didn’t make her who she is, we just found her like this.

As the girlfriend of a member of her rival pub quiz team, I don’t claim to speak for Lorde. But given that her usual response to speculation over her age or her celebrity or her career decisions is to let ’em talk, when she explicitly warns us not to underestimate her, we should listen.

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