LORDE’S AGE DOES the heavy lifting for any critic looking to undermine the work. There’s nothing easier than taking a teenage artist and kneecapping his or her production as too teenage; Adolescence is one of the most insulated and impenetrable eras of a person’s life. Lorde’s music is not like that—it’s accessible and broadly targeted in its consideration of class differences—and yet you still see, time and again, reviewers returning to her age as a sort of excuse to dismiss the album. The way they do it is fascinating: There’s an assumption that the work must be a product of corporate groupthink, because how could such a young person possibly have any agency? And so, we see in multiple cases her music compared to that of Lana Del Rey, a favorite target for critics of “inauthenticity,” despite the absolute dissimilarity of their music on both thematic and tonal levels. (Del Rey’s Born to Die was a melodramatic, slow-sweeping take on massacred Americana, and Pure Heroine is a party record with classist undertones. I don’t know.) ... Slate took a pretty effective shot at this tendency, urging people to stop assuming young women are inauthentic just because they’re young women.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 21:16:57 +0000
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