Broken Glass by Lorde

Mystique is dead/Last year was bad/I let myself get/Sucked in by arithmetic/Felt great to strip/New waist to hip/I hate to admit/Just how much I paid for it

I’m not the biggest Lorde fan. But as a chart-watcher and music-analyst, I’ve always been gagged by the fan fidelity she’s built and the monumental impact and longevity of Pure Heroine and Melodrama (“Ribs,” off the former, hit the Hot 100 for the first time this year — 12 years later!) Any artist whose music remains in the zeitgeist for that long is one who I’m going to pay attention to, even if I don’t connect to the majority of it. (“Glory and Gore” + “White Teeth Teens” go crazy though). So, naturally, I gave her latest release Virgin one listen and one song in particular has slowly climbed it’s way to the Top 5 of my On Repeat (Spotify’s best feature imo) — “Broken Glass.”

I was pulled in by the bouncy, open electro-forward production and added it to Heavy Rotation instantly. But, I wasn’t really listening to it more than once a week until I was at a festival in the woods in PA, doing a lil decompression in my tent, and the song was stuck in my head. I put it on, and suddenly, the entire song clicked—all because I heard one line in the chorus differently: “I spent my summer getting lost in math/Making weight took all I had.” The revelatory songwriting on “Girl So Confusing featuring Lorde” by Charli XCX, one of the best songs of last year (‘Cause for the last couple years/I've been at war with my body/I tried to starve myself thinner/And then I gained all the weight back) definitely helped, but it still took several listens to suddenly put together that every single lyric of this track was about Lorde’s battle with body dysmorphia. I gravitated to" “Broken Glass” for the production, but stayed for the songwriting and storytelling. The record has transformed for me now—clever, powerful and cathartic execution of a heavy topic on upbeat production that completely matches the song’s energy is my shit (Check out “Pluto” by Raveena). And I play “Broken Glass” multiple times a day now as a result.

As a music lover, I yearn so badly for everyone to engage with music like this—give everything a chance, multiple chances. Listen to things in different contexts, in different moods. But I know that’s a pipe dream—this shit takes time that people do not have lol, even if they want to. It’s making me think a lot about why the media landscape is in the fucked up state that it is, and why music criticism is one of the best examples. We aren’t sitting with the music anymore—in large part because we can’t, but also because we are wired not to. I’ve see folks say they didn’t like any song on Lorde’s album — I might have agreed if the brilliance of this song didn’t click after the umpteenth listen 2 months after it came out (and 2 months isn’t even that long?) And now I’m returning to the album (and I love Hammer).

If you are someone who claims to love music, then I believe you have to at least try to make space to sit with it, give music a chance to cultivate, grow on you, blossom. When I think back to my first listen of some of my favorite albums—a lot of them had me like "😐️ ” and not necessarily in a negative way—like when I first listened to SZA’s CTRL or Solange’s When I Get Home. “I simply was like, wait, what did I just listen to? Run that shit back!” That very unsettled, undefined feeling sparked my intrigue to listen again and now they’re two of my all-time favorite albums. And that’s not always the case—some albums or songs have me rewinding during my first listen, or humming melodies hours later. Music and everyone’s experience with it is definitely variable, but we have to make the space for the slow burn. 

This is not at all how the people pushing, funding and profiting off of music think, nor is it how the majority of people are engaging with music especially in online fandom and music + cultural criticism spaces, which I unfortunately spend a lot of time in. Almost all of music criticism, music marketing, and online discourse is rooted in the initial reaction—first week sales, first week projections, first week press, bolstered by pithy reactive characterizations that go viral and genuinely control whether people decide to listen to something or not, and even whether an artist continues pursuing a certain sound. I think this is one of the greatest threats to music lovers: we are missing out on artistic greatness, en masse! And it’s exacerbated by the accessibility of music creation. There is simply too much music and too much content for people to give art the time it needs to blossom. But I’m not here to present an unfixable problem: I’m here with a solution!

The mission of the blog is my contribution to fixing this issue - “helping you cut through the noise and discover great music!” I’m sitting with the music, revisiting lyrics, and listening to as many albums and tracks as I can because I love doing it and always will make the time. Not everyone can do that. I want to reflect my love here and keep you all updated on what I’m finding, with words that center on reflection gained from time, space, and slowness. Consider me your personalized music deliver-er (I bet a VC would invest in this start-up if it was aI pOwerEd)

Slow burn, baby!

^{*If you don’t feel like opening the link: Ariana Grande literally scrapped most of the positions promo she had planned because of the visceral negative reaction from fans about the album, which is insane considering me and my girls were loving it from day 1. But it’s one of her most R&B forward projects to date, so the large swath of fans who prefer electro-pop Ariana (still insane to me that’s the majority of her fanbase btw) were pissed. Of course, years later, the tune has changed—it’s a fan favorite and history’s been rewritten. But we ended up losing out as fans because the girls weren’t SITTING with the art! Listen to Ariana herself talk about it super candidly here on Las Culturistas.} 

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CD Radio is a platform where I muse about the music I’m listening to it and why I love it. In this digitally gluttonous/hyperconsumptive/painfully oversaturated music and media climate, a lot of people are struggling to keep up with music or find good music at all. CD Radio is my answer to that problem— I’m helping you cut through the noise and not just discover but properly experience great music because there’s still so much of it, and not enough space and time to revel in it. Think of me as scraping off the top for you.

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