Lorde - Royals

A Very Important Essay About Pop Music, Class Warfare, and Being 16

Here’s how it went down: In 2013, a 16-year-old girl from New Zealand (a country that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map if you gave them three tries and a GPS) released a song that essentially said, “Hey, you know all that stuff you like in pop music? The Cristal and the Maybachs and the diamonds on timepieces? Yeah, I don’t have any of that and I’m doing fine, thanks.” And then that song became the biggest thing in the entire world.

This should not have worked.

In 2013, pop music was DOMINATED by excess. Miley Cyrus was swinging naked on a wrecking ball. Katy Perry was shooting whipped cream out of her tits. Jay-Z and Kanye had just spent an entire album explaining how they were in Paris (the city, not the hotel heiress, though honestly, both would’ve been on brand). The whole machinery of Top 40 radio was built on aspiration — making you want things you didn’t have, making you feel like if you just bought the right vodka or wore the right jeans, you could be part of that world too.

Enter Ella Yelich-O’Connor (Lorde’s actual name, and yes, it sounds like someone you’d meet at a poetry reading in Brooklyn who would tell you about her favorite kombucha flavors) with a song built on a bass line that sounds like a heartbeat played through a broken speaker and lyrics about how she’s never seen a diamond in the flesh and she’s perfectly okay with that situation.

The audacity.

Let’s Talk About That Production for a Second

First of all, Joel Little — the producer who made this track —deserves some kind of award for minimalism. There’s like four sounds in the entire song: that bass, some finger snaps that sound like they’re happening in an empty warehouse, Lorde’s voice, and some subtle synth work that creeps in like fog. That’s it. In 2013, when every other pop song sounded like it was produced by throwing every instrument in the world into a blender set to “chaos mode,” Lorde and Joel made a song that had more empty space than sound.

It’s the musical equivalent of Marie Kondo showing up at your house and throwing away everything except three things that spark joy. Except in this case, those three things took over the world.

The production makes you LISTEN to the words. There’s nowhere to hide. When the beat drops out during the chorus and it’s just Lorde singing about being a different kind of royalty, you can hear every inflection, every bit of attitude. It’s confrontational in the quietest possible way. That’s said, there will always be bonafide shitheads that literally do not get it (See Born in the U.S.A., War Pigs, Every Breath You Take, et al).

The Class Thing

Here’s what Royals is actually about, and why it connected with literally millions of people: It’s about feeling outside of something. Not in a sad, lonely way — more in a “I see you playing your game and I don’t want to play” way.

Lorde grew up in Devonport, New Zealand, which is a suburb of Auckland. She took the bus to school. She had a normal life. And she turned on the radio and heard song after song about private jets and bottles of Champagne that cost more than her family’s car, and she was like, “This is cool and all, but it has nothing to do with my life or the lives of anyone I know.”

And the thing is, it had nothing to do with most people’s lives. Most people in America in 2013 were still recovering from the recession. They weren’t buying Grey Goose and didn’t own tigers on gold leashes. They were hoping their car would last another year. But pop music kept selling them this fantasy, and Lorde showed up and said, “What if we just... didn’t?”

This was revolutionary. Not in a “storm the Bastille” way, but in an “actually, when you think about it, this is kind of weird” way. She reframed the entire conversation. Suddenly, not being able to afford luxury goods wasn’t something to be ashamed of - it was actually kind of freeing. You could be a different kind of royalty, the kind that comes from being yourself and being okay with what you have.

The Age Thing Matters Here

Lorde was SIXTEEN when this came out. This is crucial, because only a 16-year-old could have the perfect combination of confidence and naivety to call out the entire pop music industrial complex like this. Adults get too careful. They start thinking about market demographics and radio programmers and whether their take is “too edgy.” Sixteen-year-olds just say what they think and deal with the consequences later.

And her voice — that deep, almost haunting voice that sounds like it should belong to someone who’s been singing in blues clubs for thirty years — made it impossible to dismiss her as just some kid. When Lorde sang about how we’ll never be royals, it didn’t sound like a complaint. It sounded like a declaration of independence.

What Royals Did to Pop Music

After Royals hit, you couldn’t just make the same kind of songs anymore. Or you could, but now there was an alternative universe where someone might call you out for it. The song created space for Billie Eilish to show up a few years later, whispering over trap beats about being the bad guy. It paved the way for every artist who wanted to be successful without pretending to be someone they weren’t.

It proved that teenagers weren’t just buying whatever adults decided to sell them anymore. They were thinking critically about the messages in their music. They wanted authenticity, or at least something that felt more authentic than another song about bottle service at the club.

The National Geographic Thing

Here’s my favorite part of the Royals origin story: Lorde has said she got inspiration for the song from a photograph in National Geographic of a baseball player who had Royals written on his jersey. She’d never heard of the Kansas City Royals. She just saw the word and started thinking about what royalty meant, and then she wrote a song about it.

A baseball team accidentally inspired one of the biggest pop songs of the 2010s. The Kansas City Royals — who at the time were not good at baseball — inadvertently contributed to music history. This is the kind of beautiful chaos that makes life interesting.

Why It Still Matters

Twelve years later (yes, I know…), Royals still sounds fresh. It doesn’t sound dated the way most 2013 songs do. You could play it today, and it would fit right in with whatever’s on the radio, except it would probably be the most interesting thing on the radio.

The song reminded us that pop music doesn’t have to be about escapism. It can be about reality. It can be about looking at the world you’re actually living in and finding something worth celebrating there. You don’t need gold teeth or Grey Goose to matter.

Lorde took everything pop music told us we were supposed to want and said, “Nah, I’m good.” And then the whole world agreed with her. That’s royalty.