“People say we’re alike, They say we have the same hair.”
When Charli XCX uttered those words, there could no longer be speculation about who her “diss track” was about: Ella Marija Lana Yelich-O’Connor. Or as we all know her: Lorde. This single lyric brought back an image to the culture that Lorde has long tried and failed to make us forget—her giant mop of hair. In fact, the invocation of Lorde’s hair is a particularly good dig for Charli. Whereas Charli has lately sported her mane like an accessory, Lorde has spent years now perming and dyeing any frizz away. By reminding Lorde of her former status as a girl-who-had-to-know-what-Devacurl-is, Charli brings her to the level of peer; she humbles her. Lorde ignores the hair comparison in the subsequent remix they make together, except she similarly strips down Charli: “Inside the icon is just a young girl from Essex.” Images of both women’s youths are invoked in efforts to heal the “inner child,” but in actuality puncture each woman’s armor of adulthood.
“People say we’re alike, They say we have the same hair” Same, Charli! For as long Lorde has been ascending, my features have been compared with the New Zealand pop artist. Our shared frizzy hair has given my friends leave to congratulate me on my new album or remind me that I have a fallback Halloween costume. And I enjoy playing into these jokes, but the truth is—as Charli explains so well—Sometimes it feels a bit awkward, cuz we don’t have much in common.
The resemblance is an easy one to parrot because most people don’t walk around in public with unkempt wavy hair :). For interviews I’ve always worn my hair up and for dance performances I always borrowed a friend’s straightener. It’s kind of an embarrassing person to be: the White girl standing in the Black styling section of the Walgreens. (Thank you, once again, Black women. I think White women from the Mediterranean would still be lathering olive oil up there if it weren’t for you.) In the swivel chair at Supercuts, there was always a whiff of resentment from the stylist—as if managing all “this” was not a reasonable thing to ask of them. Even lately I’ve been avoiding a haircut because I don’t want to pay the extra fees required to cut wavy hair.
None of these are real problems, just context. I don’t really have a complex about my hair anymore—but I think Lorde does. Hair communicates race, gender, social group, class, and age; so do a lot of things, but hair is different because it is a part of our bodies, or at least attached to them. It is perhaps the most obvious metaphor for the reality that we both can and cannot control how others perceive us. To a pop icon, there is nothing more threatening; they’d prefer to believe one or the other.
Unlike Lorde, Charli has contended with her younger self’s insecurities. Her relationship to her hair is also a bit more complicated–a reminder of the UK’s enduring racism. “[M]y school was full of blonde white girls and I was this half-Indian girl with frizzy hair and different interests. That always made me feel a little bit rejected.” Whereas Charli’s hair is a sign of pride and an identity reclamation, Lorde admits losing her wavy hair was a way to get closer to her audience. “And this time, I was like, 'I want to look the way my friends see me.' I want to feel like I could be any one of the young people who listen to my music.”
In August of 2021, Lorde debuted a blonde wig in the music video for “Mood Ring” in an attempt to match the sunny aura of her third album Solar Power. Then—nearly a year later—dyed her hair blonde for good. There is a time in every brunette’s life where we ask “How blonde can I go?” Fortunately for me, that time was before the age of twenty-one. Unfortunately for Lorde, it was at the time of her quarter-life crisis. I was blonde for about six months; Lorde took a year to recover from blonde-steria. And she was brassy. Toner was MIA. Toner was JLo’s Oscar nomination for Hustlers. Toner was on the that billionaire’s submersible. Toner was the number of times A Little Life appeared on the New York Times list of Best Books of the Twenty-First Century (zero, thank god).
Of course, it becomes obvious quite quickly after you bleach and fry your hair that the answer was no, the answer was always a loud and resounding “No!” but you had to try it anyway; you wanted to see if a different version of yourself was hiding under that mass. That is, until any former identity slips down the drain like purple shampoo. Lorde’s continued thinning out and re-dyeing and re-perming inordinately angers me. I look at the size of the braids in this photo and become scared for my life!!!! Why are we doing this to our beautiful queens!?
So. For nearly a decade, Lorde’s hair has been short, glossy, wavy: editorial. Which I understand on some level—you have to get up and go. It must be important to capitulate to beauty standards to save time for the battles you want to fight. But the de-curly-fication of hair has been commonplace in Hollywood for a while. Julia Roberts. Zendaya…Mia Thermopolis. For Black women in particular, it surely has to do with the unwillingness of stylists to learn and master techniques for curly hair. For White women like Lorde, I wonder what the impetus is. Maybe it’s just to end the constant war with a fifteen pound diffuser that’s dispersing air with lower pressure than a fairy’s fart. Or to ease the neck pain that comes with spending the duration of your showers with your head upside down. Maybe it’s that—even for the rich and glamorous—there is no way to avoid getting your hair caught in your armpit.
But now, curly and wavy hair is back. In addition to Charli XCX, we see Megan Thee Stallion and Chappell Roan making huge hair their staple. Lorde’s refusal to return to her natural tresses is a sign that she maybe rejects backward momentum, or resents that manic teenaged period her hair represents. Lorde’s meteoric rise to fame involved a lot of meanness–lashing out at the industry. Now, she has become “woo woo;” her email dispatches speak of the pleasures of eating fruit.
Lorde’s interests are part of what estranges me from her. Our tastes are superficially compatible. She adores Rachel Cusk (correct), but worships Anias Nin (hm). All of her experiences are mediated through a religious transcendence unfamiliar to me. Like her first time watching the Talking Heads: “spiritual.” Or smoking weed:
“[Smoking] gave me a deeper understanding of sensory pleasure, and allowed me to start to see my world as a possible work of art. I’d go on long walks around the neighbourhood, and began to mythologise (sic) the stuff around me (big empty floodlit rugby fields/bus rides/dark streets/boredom/isolation) into the motifs that would become Pure Heroine.”
Sometimes suspicious of the culture’s recycled stories (Blowing shit up with homemade dynamite), Lorde concedes that mythmaking can elevate even the most mundane life events. Mythology is a word that shows up in her newsletters frequently. The oldest stories are her favorite material—new grudges are just inherited from the ancient ones. (The city's falling for me just like I'm Helen of Troy.) Lately, she speaks like a Jungian. Art—to Lorde—is all archetypes and dynamics. In one email:
“Went to a Mets game, had a blast, thought about the human desire for ritual/ceremony/theatre, and how religion or the monarchy scratch this itch at various times in history, and how elaborately ritualistic and beautiful sports like baseball also hold it down.”
Though this appears to be a free-associative rather than scholarly interest in understanding the world through a quasi-semiotic lens, Lorde’s observations could be a useful prism for processing postmodern life. The ideas of things are always more fun than the things themselves (But when I reach for you/there’s just a supercut).
Her musical persona depends on slipping into these archetypes, using them as protection (You’ll be the class clown/I’ll be the beauty queen). There is no more obvious example of this than her latest antics. At Charli XCX’s show in NYC last week, Lorde made a surprise appearance to sing her verse on Girl, so confusing. Onstage, she was sporting sunglasses and her curly hair again, just like Charli. In matching outfits, they look indistinguishable.
The Gemini–one of our oldest archetypes reborn in the pop universe: Lorde has donned old metaphors again. The meta-commentary of the joint performance is that of their song: that two women in the industry should be allowed to occupy the same space without comparison. On Instagram, Lorde captions the photo of them together “Literature” as if their feud was just a played out narrative, a swelling of the violins (a Melodrama, if you will). And as if their symbiosis is God-given.
In the last slide, we see a curly wig on the floor. I gasped. Lorde didn’t—after all—grow out her hair. The wig could not be a more perfect example of Lorde’s undermining of Charli’s message. Lorde does not want to be made in someone else’s image for long. In erasing herself, her hair, Lorde hopes to become an original. This is on par for a person in debt to writers like Annie Ernaux—who take the pitch of normal conflict and scale it up to high theatricality (A level of emotionality usually only afforded to hormonal high schoolers). Maybe Lorde doesn’t want to look like her teenage self again because it echoes some truth; her project is fundamentally juvenile—she’s a girl who refuses to grow out her roots.
When I was your monkey, I got it all wrong…
Naturally, I’ve been listening to the new Christian Lee Hutson record, Paradise Pop. 10. I say naturally because I don’t ever stop talking (or tweeting) about his music, and often find myself in the middle of proselytizing about him to my friends before I can shut up about it. The songs are sad and often slow, but the relative specificity and ambiguity of the lyrics make them fun to walk around inside of. The lead single “Beauty School” is the most catchy, but I find myself stuck on Skeleton Crew.