【译】叉婊Pitchfork评 Lorde 2013年专辑《Pure Heroine》（纯粹女英雄）

In the current pop firmament, Lorde is a black hole. That's the message you get from the defiantly low-concept video for her single "Tennis Court", in which the 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter (real name: Ella Yelich-O'Connor) stares right at you—her taunting, onyx pupils burning a hole through the computer screen—for a hypnotic and somewhat uncomfortable three and a half minutes. (It's an anti-video in the tradition of the Replacements' "Bastards of Young", and, fittingly, her moody cover of "Swingin Party" has been making the rounds.) In a moment when too many new artists seem afraid to offend or go off script, Lorde is an exciting contradiction: an aspiring pop star who's had a major-label development deal since age 12 (she was discovered at a local talent show) but has retained a seemingly genuine iconoclastic streak. The other day she spoke too truthfully in an interview and accidentally insulted Taylor Swift; Katy Perry asked her to tour with her and—politely but firmly—she said no. With the global smash "Royals" (the first song in 17 years by a female solo artist to top Billboard’s alternative chart) she made her name by sneering at everything else on the radio ("We don't care/ We aren't caught up in your love affair"). The message is clear: Lorde has introduced herself to the world as someone who gives very few fucks. Twenty seconds into her debut album, Pure Heroine, she's already announced that she's bored. Twice.

在当今的流行音乐世界里，Lorde是一个黑洞般的存在。这在轻蔑性的《Tennis Court》浅概念音乐视频得以体现，视频里16岁的新西兰创作歌手（原名：Ella Yelich-O'Connor）直视盯着你——她的嘲讽，黑玛瑙的瞳孔把你电脑屏幕烧出洞似的——带来的催眠感和不适感长达3分半钟（一支沿袭换牌乐队（The Replacements） "Bastards of Young"传统的破旧立新的音乐视频，她也继续情绪化地翻唱了该乐队的《Swingin Party》）。当今太多的年轻艺术家畏惧得罪他人或打破传统，Lorde则是一个令人兴奋的矛盾体：一名有抱负的流行歌手，自12岁起就与大唱片公司签约(她是在本地的一场才艺表演中被发掘的)，但打破传统似乎是流淌在她血液里的天性。不久前，她在一次采访说话过于露骨，无意间辱骂了Taylor Swift；Katy Perry邀请她共同巡演，她礼貌但坚定地拒绝了。随着全球大热单曲《Royals》的发行（这是17年来首位登顶公告牌另类排行榜的solo女歌手单曲），她因嘲讽电台上所有其他单曲而一举成名("We don't care/ We aren't caught up in your love affair")。Lorde将她在世界舞台上塑造为一个一切事物都不在乎的人。专辑《Pure Heroine》拉开序幕的前20秒中，她已两次表示自己厌倦至极。

Lorde's voice occasionally takes the form of a wide-eyed, Feist-y coo, but much more often it's a low, clenched growl; like everything else about her, it has an air of "wise beyond her years." "I didn't start writing songs until I was 13," she said in a recent interview, almost apologetically, but then quickly accounted for the lost time, "Before that, I wrote short fiction." Now that she's a wizened 16, Lorde, who wrote all the lyrics on Pure Heroine and co-wrote the music, has fashioned herself a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Her songs capture the drama and debauched regality of being a teenager: their subjects include online gossip, empty bottles, queen bees, and young people who already feel old. "I'm kinda older than I was when I rebelled without a care," she sings with a languid sigh on the bleacher-stomping single "Team". Or is she saying "revelled"? It's hard to tell the two words apart, and maybe that's the point.

尽管Lorde的声音偶尔会呈现出瞪大眼睛，Feist式的呢喃效果，但更多时候是低沉的、握紧拳头的咆哮；就像她的其他方面一样，蕴含着一种“超越年龄的智慧”。“我从13岁开始写歌，”她在最近的一段采访中几乎带着歉意地说道，但她很快解释了失去的时间，“在那之前，我写短篇小说。”如今，她是名满脸皱纹的16岁少女，为《Pure Heroine》写完所有的歌词，也参与音乐的创作过程，把自己塑造成一个记者，代表小资挥霍无度的后数字时代青年文化和工薪阶层郊区无聊生活。她的歌曲捕捉到了戏剧性和青春期沉迷酒色的特权：它们的主题包括网上八卦、空瓶子、社交女王和已经觉得自己年老力衰的年轻人。"I'm kinda older than I was when I rebelled without a care," 她在体育馆露天看台沉重地边走边疲惫呆滞地在《Team》中唱道。等等，她说的是“狂欢作乐（revel）”吗？很难分清两者的区别，也许这就是妙处所在。

That carefully cultivated ambiguity is precisely what makes Pure Heroine work. "Royals" walks the line between rebelling against and reveling in the trappings of power, luxury, and excess of contemporary pop. The arrangement is economical—just a few finger snaps and a barely-there beat caught in the gravitational pull of Lorde's charisma—but overall, "Royals" gets to have it both ways. Lorde says she wrote it thinking of how she and her friends would listen to A$AP Rocky rapping about couture while they rummaged through a particular friends' well-stocked kitchen, too broke (or too lazy) to spend money on dinner. And that’s a crucial subtlety: "Royals" doesn't critique hip-hop culture so much as express a disconnect that many of the people who love it (Lorde included: "I've always listened to a lot of rap") feel when listening to songs about luxury culture. Whether she's singing about her schoolyard peers or the world's most famous pop stars (who, as she admits on "Tennis Court", have just become her new peers) Lorde achieves a tricky balancing act of exposing irony and even hypocrisy without coming off as preachy or moralistic, simply because—thanks to Pure Heroine's constant use of the royal "we"—she's usually implicating herself in the very contradictions she's exposing.

正是这种精心培养的模糊性使得《Pure Heroine》大获成功。《Royals》游走于对权力、奢华的反叛和陶醉和无节制的当代流行乐之间。整首歌的编曲非常精炼——只是简单的响指声和几乎不存在的节奏便让你陷入Lorde散发的魅力中。——但总的说，《Royals》是两全其美的。Lorde提到写这首歌时，她脑海中映入眼帘的是自己和朋友们一边听着A$AP Rocky说唱着高级定制时装的话题，一边在一个特殊朋友库存充足的厨房里翻找东西，因为太穷(或太懒)而没钱吃晚饭。这是一个至关重要的微妙之处:《Royals》并没有批评嘻哈文化，而是表达了许多热爱嘻哈文化的人(包括Lorde在内：“我总是听很多说唱音乐”)听关于奢侈品文化的歌曲时会感到明显脱节。无论是唱校园里的同龄人，还是世界上最名声大噪的流行巨星(正如她在《Tennis Court》中承认的那样，这些明星刚成为她的新朋友)。Lorde巧妙地平衡了讽刺和伪善，而又不显得啰嗦或说教。——多亏《Pure Heroine》不断使用高贵的“我们”这一词——她经常使自己卷入她所发现的矛盾中。

More fully realized than her debut EP The Love Club, Pure Heroine is a fluid collection of throbbing, moody, menacingly anesthetized pop that sometimes sounds like St. Vincent’s "Champagne Year" mixed into whatever’s in the punch at Abel Tesfaye’s house. Still, a lot of its best production ideas and lyrical motifs repeat in such a way that it sometimes feels like you’re listening to 10 versions of the same song. Current single "Team" has a memorable chorus, but most of its lyrics ("I'm kinda over being told to throw my hands up in the air"; "We live in cities you never see on screen/ Not very pretty but we sure know how to run things") feel like scrapped lines from the "Royals" session. "Glory and Gore", too, rehashes the same bloody/regal/teen imagery, but its greater crime is the way Lorde overstuffs the verses with so many words that it weighs down the melody. And yet, there’s something endearing about Pure Heroine’s more unfiltered impulses—though she’s had a  record contract nearly a quarter of her life, you get the sense Lorde is still being given a lot of room to breathe and hone her own particular songwriting voice. These tracks all feel like they were written by a very precocious teenager, and that’s a big part of their charm.

《Pure Heroine》比她的首张EP《The Love Club》更能充分地体现此概念。《Pure Heroine》是一部流动的专辑，记录悸动、喜怒无常、恐惧、麻木的情绪。有时候听起来像 St. Vincent的"Champagne Year"与Abel Tesfaye（The Weeknd本名）的混音。尽管如此，专辑的许多最好的制作理念和抒情主题以这种方式重复着，有时感觉就像你在听同一首歌的10个版本。尽管最新单曲《Team》有一段更抓耳的副歌，但问题主要还是它的歌词("I'm kinda over being told to throw my hands up in the air"; "We live in cities you never see on screen/ Not very pretty but we sure know how to run things") 感觉是《Royals》弃用的歌词。《Glory and Gore》也是一样的问题，缺乏新意地再次使用同样的血腥/帝王/少年概念，但更大的问题在于Lorde过多地填塞了歌词，使旋律变得沉重。然而，《Pure Heroine》更讨人喜欢的还是未经压抑的冲动感——尽管Lorde生命中四分之一的时间都会在唱片合约中度过，但你可以感受到她仍有很大的潜力，并磨练出自己自成一派的歌曲创作风格。这些歌曲都感觉像是由一个非常早熟的青少年谱写的，这是歌曲魅力的很大一部分成因。

Pure Heroine is a decidedly post-internet album. Some of that has to do with its genre-agnostic blend of influences (in her live show Lorde has been covering both Kanye West and the Replacements, and her music is being marketed to a generation of people who in no way find that weird), but it’s mostly a comment on a certain kind of sensibility of self-presentation in the characters it deftly depicts. "It’s a new art form, showing people how little we care," she boasts on "Tennis Court". As the song goes on, though, cracks in the facade begin to show. "We're so happy even when we're smiling out of fear,” she admits, but at least “it looks alright in the pictures."

《Pure Heroine》无疑是一张后互联网时代的专辑。尽管这与它受到各种混杂流派的影响有关（Lorde在现场翻唱过Kanye West 和换牌乐队（the Replacements）的歌，她的音乐面向的是一代认为这不足为奇的听众），但更重要的原因是它主要是对表达对一种展现自我敏感性的看法。 "It’s a new art form, showing people how little we care," 她在《Tennis Court》中吹擂道，然而，随着歌曲的推进，装点门面的裂缝开始显现。"We're so happy even when we're smiling out of fear,” 她坦言，但至少 “it looks alright in the pictures."

What’s fueling Pure Heroine is a tension between the tweet and the truth, the cumulative effect of the little digital fictions we craft for ourselves daily. But "Ribs" is the best song that this very promising songwriter has written so far because—even at the risk of seeming uncool— it gradually allows the walls to crumble. "It feels so crazy, getting old," she sighs at the beginning, in a smoky pantomime of maturity and detachment—sort of like a sepia-toned Instagram filter applied to her voice. Soon, though, the beat ramps up and the song turns into an impressionistic swirl of memories: "The drink you spilled all over me/ 'Lover’s Spit' left on repeat." She gets so caught up in the feeling that she lets herself blurt something truly vulnerable: "I've never felt more alone/ It feels so scary, getting old." Lorde’s music is quietly wise to a particular modern irony: Beneath every #DGAF there’s a person who secretly gives a fuck about something, and behind every anti-pop song there’s a singer who—just like everybody else—knows what it’s like to feel happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.

《Pure Heroine》的驱动力是推文和真相之间的压力，是我们日常为自己编造的电子小说的累积效应。但《Ribs》是这位前途似锦的歌手目前写出的最好的歌 因为——冒着外表不炫酷的风险——它逐步打破藩篱"It feels so crazy, getting old,"她在歌曲开头叹气道，一出成熟与超然的烟雾哑剧——有点像Instagram上给她的声音配上的深褐色滤镜。但很快，节奏加快，歌曲变为印象主义的记忆漩涡"The drink you spilled all over me/ 'Lover’s Spit' left on repeat." 她如此沉迷于这种感觉，以至于她让自己脱口而出一些真正脆弱的东西："I've never felt more alone/ It feels so scary, getting old." Lorde的音乐巧妙地诠释了一种特殊的现代讽刺：在每一个标签#DGAF的背后，都有一个偷偷地在乎这件事的人；在每一首反流行歌曲的背后，都有一个歌手——就像其他人一样——知晓同时感到快乐、自由、困惑和孤独的感觉。