#93

#93. Lorde - Green Light (#6, 2017)

13th of 2017

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Talk about a lucky break for Lorde. I almost completely dogged a good chunk of her discography by continuously leaving her just outside the top 100, the pitchforks could easily have come for me if I also had this one a little bit lower. I'd never do that though, would I? (This is a very niche reference that's not important if you don't know it, but those who do had already thought of it and I need to placate that feeling. Otherwise I try to keep my in-jokes either subtle or inclusive). It's mostly the luck of the discography because I'm not sure there are many Lorde songs I'd put above this if I had free rein. Rather fond of that other Hunger Games song she did, and because we need another update, I can say that "Fallen Fruit" has now stood the test of nearly a year and I'm very invested in it.

"Green Light" is a very important release as it's Lorde's second lead single. The one that's here to test if she was just a fancy fling of 2013 that's otherwise too left field to really connect, or if we're looking at a generational star starting to spread their wings. The results were fairly inconclusive. One thing's certain, it's that she chose the worst possible week to release it in the UK. It was the same week Ed Sheeran released "÷", so right away that's 13 new debuts above her at #28. Such as the magnitude of this release, that it was something that couldn't be salvaged by just holding up, as the whole album's stubborn persistence kept her underpowered for all of the time it was in the limelight. Who knows how much more attention she'd get if it really was the biggest thing out at the time. That's an underrated commodity because we just can't measure it. As was established with "Magnets" (#116), she did much better in the antipodes. Another #1 hit in her home country, while she can lay claim to actually having the highest debut in Australia that week, so there's much less in the way of what could've been. The song held up pretty well to be a very respectable hit in those two countries, but the rest of the world just couldn't quite do it.

The peculiar thing about this is that if you look out for opinions online, this is a very beloved single. This wasn't a controversial left-turn, it was the opening move to an album that very much did solidify Lorde in all those positive ways I previously indicated. She wasn't just a singles artist with a quickly cobbled together album, she was making magic on both the album & single format. I've always found this disconnect interesting with pop music because it's not the same as the avant garde music that gets acclaim, this is popular music made to be a hit that's getting a big tick of approval.

I actually feel like the tides are turning with this. Though TikTok still feels suspiciously astroturfed to me at times, it's one that feels like it gets more personal approval through mass inundation of options. That's always going to make it feel like there's a greater chance to get more strongly attached to something than if you're just perking up at your favourites on the radio with the knowledge they're just going to be overplayed to death in the long run. With that in mind, I feel like there's been a shift for a lot of 'beloved on the internet' pop music to finally get a good run in the charts. The problem is that if you flash back to many other earlier times in the world of popular music, you're working with a large, ominous majority. It's a majority that's reasonably open to new ideas, but is slow to make the change, and will often congregate around a handful of popular sounds of the moment. It's kind of interesting because I don't think most people even think about it, they're just reacting to what they gravitate to and the numbers just show similar ideas working together until everyone gets sick of them.

So while it's easy to listen to "Green Light" and think that it sounds like pop music, and it is, it also doesn't really sound like pop music in 2017. The piano's a good start, but it really needs to be sharper, maybe add some light guitar and a drop is a near necessity. When you look at what was hitting big on the charts just before "Green Light" came out, it feels like you need to go in whole on the current tastefully pleasant dance music, or go so aggressively against it that you placate everyone who isn't interested in that. Lorde doesn't really offer a full alternative to this which is why I feel she landed in a weird spot where the song has a relatively smaller but very passionate audience. I don't want to knock that either. It's possible to find a middle ground where you validate niche online popularity without also dismissing everything else as co-worker music.

I wouldn't call "Green Light" a failure by any stretch, but it does feel like it's the point that solidified Lorde's position in popular music for most people. She wasn't really going to have another "Royals" (#134), but she's going to stick around for those who are along for the ride, and that's typically been sizeable enough for her to make serious dents on the chart. The experience is slipping a little but Lorde's last lead single still went to #1 in her home country, and top 10 in Australia. That feels so out of line with what's going on in the charts that it's worth celebrating, and it's hard to not feel like songs like "Green Light" sowed that seed.

What makes it interesting for me also is that it's one of the most successful examples of what feels like a 'Dazzle them with the premiere' kind of songs. There are many of these cases where an artist returns and you really have no idea what you're going to get, but then you find it to be an odyssey of sorts, where there's often a surprise later on and you haven't just figured it all out after one verse and a chorus. "Flash Delirium" by MGMT is one of these songs, "The Last Man On Earth" by Wolf Alice is another. There are perhaps a couple of songs I could describe this way that are still to come on this list. It's something I generally find quite exciting. It's satisfying that feeling in the back of your head when you're thinking that there are still minutes to go on your first listen and still surprises to come. It doesn't always pan out, but in the best cases, you're just left scratching your head and thinking that the artist has really stepped up and who knows what else they've got coming later. Maybe "Green Light" is a little too structurally conventional to really pass that, but I just think of every development in the song. The sudden start, the gaps Lorde leaves to let the song breathe, and when the verses pick up some new melodies along the way, all leading up to the realisation of why the song's called "Green Light" and how readily you can feel assured that that's the moment. It makes me wonder if Lorde could have really turned it into a smash if she had a bigger fanbase going into it. I think of Olivia Rodrigo whose second album lead single "vampire" features very similar tropes and ideas to "Green Light", but a bolder structure. That song turned out to be a very big hit regardless, which could just as easily be a sign of Olivia Rodrigo's popularity and momentum, but also maybe lends some credence to the idea that songs with this sort of theatricality just have more of a chance to be the proudly big hit songs that they seem to announce themselves as.