Has the internet sucked all the fun out of the physical world, or has it merely concentrated it in Washington Square Park? New York University’s de facto campus green has long served as an open-air salon for bohemians and drug dealers, but since the coronavirus pandemic, it’s buzzed with new energy—the energy of content creation. TikTokers patrol the park’s paths, ambushing passersby to ask for interviews. Video-game streamers lead fans around “like a Pied Piper.” Timothée Chalamet went there to check out his own look-alike competition. The veil between the online and offline realms feels thin as Zoomers socialize in their Zoomer way: playful, anarchic, yet always aware of the camera.
互联网是否从物理世界中吸收了所有乐趣，还是仅将其集中在华盛顿广场公园？纽约大学的事实上，格林长期以来一直是波希米亚人和毒贩的露天沙龙，但是自冠状病毒大流行以来，它充满了新的能量，这是内容创造的能量。蒂克托克（Tiktokers）巡逻公园的道路，伏击路人要求采访。视频游戏流媒体带领粉丝们围绕着“像吹笛者”。TimothéeChalamet去那里检查了自己的外观比赛。随着Zoomers以Zoomer的方式进行社交方式，在线和离线领域之间的面纱感觉很薄：嬉戏，无政府状态，但总是意识到相机。
Lorde is there too. The 28-year-old pop eccentric claims to have been hanging out in Washington Square Park “every day” of late. In April, she caused a commotion there by blasting her new single to a crowd of fans while filming a guerrilla-style music video. Her propulsive fourth album, Virgin, is set amid the heat-radiating pavement of the park and its downtown-Manhattan surroundings. The exemplary voice for a generation beset by digitally induced isolation, Lorde is making a bold effort to celebrate the visceral by singing of flesh, spit, sweat, blood, and cigarette smoke. But the rush she wants to deliver is diluted by another modern problem: self-consciousness verging on self-obsession.
洛德也在那里。这位28岁的流行歌声声称最近每天都在华盛顿广场公园闲逛。4月，她在拍摄游击队风格的音乐录影带时向一群粉丝爆炸了她的新单曲，引起了骚动。她推进的第四张专辑Virgin在公园及其曼哈顿市中心周围环境的热门人行道上展出。洛德（Lorde）通过数字诱发的孤立感被一代人所困扰的典型声音，努力通过唱歌，吐肉，汗水，血液和香烟烟来庆祝内心。但是，她想提供的匆忙被另一个现代问题所淹没：自我痴迷的自我意识。
Lorde changed the world when she was just a 16-year-old New Zealander uploading music to SoundCloud. Her 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, used hissed confessions, minimalistic beats, and a writerly sense of narrative to refute its era’s abundance of body-over-brain EDM and hip-hop. Many of her listeners were kids in the very same situation that Lorde sang about: stuck in a bedroom in their anonymous town, alienated from the high life advertised on their screens. The influence of that album—and its smoldering 2017 follow-up, Melodrama—still shapes the work of Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and even Taylor Swift. The point of post-Lorde pop isn’t to get faceless crowds grooving mindlessly. It’s to make each individual fan feel like their life is a movie.
洛尔德（Lorde）只是一个16岁的新西兰人（Nekealander）上传音乐时改变了世界。她的2013年首次亮相纯女主人公使用了嘶嘶的自白，简约的节奏和作家的叙事感来驳斥其时代丰富的脑部EDM和嘻哈音乐。她的许多听众都是洛德（Lorde）唱过的同样情况的孩子：卡在匿名小镇的卧室里，与屏幕上广告宣传的高生活相疏远。这张专辑的影响力以及其闷热的2017年后续曲目（Melodrama）都塑造了Billie Eilish，Olivia Rodrigo甚至Taylor Swift的作品。后流行音乐的目的不是要使人群不知所措。这是为了让每个粉丝都感觉自己的生活是一部电影。
Lorde then disoriented her audience with 2021’s Solar Power, a warm sigh of an album from a star enjoying some well-deserved relaxation. Its strummy songs about fleeing Hollywood to get high on a New Zealand beach contained some of the most beautiful craftsmanship of her career. But fans who’d always related to her started to feel left out of the story she was telling: Lorde was slowing down and leaning out at a time of life, her early 20s, when people tend to speed up and lean in. For many listeners, traits that had been essential to her art all along—overwroughtness, sentimentality, affectation—stopped seeming so cute.
然后，洛德（Lorde）用2021年的太阳能迷失了方向，这是一张明星的专辑温暖，享受了当之无愧的放松。它关于逃离好莱坞在新西兰海滩上高高的曲折歌曲包含了她职业生涯中一些最美丽的工艺。但是，总是与她有关的粉丝开始感到她所讲的故事：洛尔德在生活的时代，她20多岁的时候就放慢脚步，俯身倾斜，当时人们倾向于加快和倾斜。对于许多听众来说，对于她的艺术而言，这对她的艺术至关重要，而她的艺术一直是不断的，情感，情感，情感 - stoppep的可爱。
Virgin is, as its name suggests, a purposeful regression, a return to youthful possibility. The sound is electronic and rhythmically driven; the singing trembles with desire and confusion. But Virgin also reflects where Lorde finds herself in her late 20s, and where pop finds itself in the mid-2020s. Following the example of Charli XCX’s Brat and its avant-garde influences, the producer Jim-E Stack has fashioned fun beats out of distorted noise. Lorde sings about a transitional period of womanhood marked by pregnancy tests, gender-identity explorations, body-image issues, crises of confidence, and a shattering breakup with her partner of seven years.
顾名思义，维珍是有目的的回归，是回归年轻的可能性。声音是电子和节奏驱动的。歌唱充满了欲望和混乱。但是维尔京还反映了洛尔德在20多岁时找到自己的地方，而流行音乐在2020年代中期发现了自己的位置。遵循Charli XCX的Brat及其前卫的影响，制片人Jim-E Stack出于失真的噪音而制作了有趣的节奏。洛尔德（Lorde）唱着以怀孕测试，性别认同探索，身体形象的问题，信心危机以及与七年的伴侣的破碎分手的那样，以妊娠试验，性别身份探索，身体形象的问题，身体形象的问题，身体形象的问题，身体形象的危机以及七年来的破坏。
The action is as spiritual as it is physical: “I might have been born again,” she sings on the opener. The ensuing songs are laden with so many religious references that one wonders if she’s joined an unconventional church in which singing about kinky sex and party drugs is a sacrament. More likely, Lorde is just trying to lend enchantment to her 21st-century yuppie routine. The titanium water bottle she carries around is, she’s said in interviews, a “talisman.” Her smartphone is, per one lyric, “liquid crystal.” As she pumps iron and meditates on heartbreak, she seems to imagine her younger self looking down like an “angel.” She confesses to having treated her ex like God—but now, it’s clear, Lorde’s lord is Lorde.
动作是精神上的，它是身体上的：“我可能已经重生了，”她在揭幕战上唱歌。随后的歌曲充满了许多宗教参考，以至于她想知道她是否加入了一座非常规教堂，在其中唱歌关于淫性和派对毒品的唱歌是圣礼。更有可能，洛德（Lorde）只是试图使她的21世纪Yuppie常规融为一体。她在采访中说，她随身携带的钛水瓶是“塔利斯曼人”。她的智能手机是一个歌词，“液晶”。当她抽铁并冥想心碎时，她似乎想象自己的年轻自我像“天使”一样看着。她承认像上帝一样对待她的前任，但现在很明显，洛德的主是洛德。
The album’s best moments transmit the magic she’s singing about. The bleary garage beat of “Shapeshifter” creates a sense of twilight intrigue building to dawn-breaking revelation. On “If She Could See Me Now,” rigid-feeling verses melt satisfyingly into swaying choruses. When Lorde’s voice merges with waves of reverb on the gut-punch closer, “David,” you might check to see if the music is coming from outside, not inside, your headphones. Throughout, she uses conversational cadences to steer through hairpin emotional turns without making anyone dizzy.
专辑的最佳时刻传播了她唱歌的魔力。“ Shapeshifter”的Bleary车库拍打着暮光之城建筑物，以使破裂的启示。在“如果她现在能见到我”上，僵化的经文令人满意地融化为摇摆合唱。当洛德（Lorde）的声音与肠子紧密的“大卫”（David）的混响融合在一起时，您可能会检查音乐是否来自外面而不是里面的音乐。在整个过程中，她都使用对话节奏来转向发夹的情感转弯，而不会让任何人头晕目眩。
Read: The haunting of modern pop music
阅读：现代流行音乐的困扰
Too often, though, Virgin’s thrill is muddled or muted. In part, blame Stack’s production: The trappings of sonic radicalism and aggression—industrial guitars that hum like broken TVs, percussion that pounds from all directions—belie what’s essentially smooth, streamable fare. Now-tired 2010 fads that Lorde pioneered, including bittersweet tropical-pop textures and moaning vocal snippets, are everywhere. Moments of genuine surprise and extremity are rare. An album that presents itself as stark and liberated feels too much like a product of creative compromise.
不过，经常，维珍的刺激被混乱或静音。在某种程度上，责备Stack的作品：声音激进主义和侵略性的陷阱 - 像损坏的电视一样嗡嗡作响的工业吉他，从各个方向猛增的打击乐器 - 基本上是平稳，可流式传播的票价。洛德（Lorde）率先开创的2010年时尚，包括苦乐参半的热带流行纹理和mo吟的声带片段，无处不在。真正的惊喜和四肢的时刻很少见。一张以鲜明和解放的方式展示自己的专辑，感觉就像是创造性折衷的产物。
Against this backdrop, Lorde’s insularity starts to wear on the listener. This album about exciting city life is really about Lorde finding herself wherever she goes—in the aura reader on Canal Street, in the shirt her hookup is wearing, in the endorphin epiphany she has at the gym. She sings of ego death and punching mirrors, but only as part of a process of ever-more-granular inward inspection that’s intense but ultimately circular. Whatever’s happening in the broader world is written off as “painted faces” babbling about “current affairs.” As the album cover indicates, Virgin is an X-ray that highlights what’s not there.
在这种背景下，洛尔德的孤立性开始在听众身上磨损。这张关于令人兴奋的城市生活的专辑实际上是关于洛尔德在运河街上的Aura读者中找到自己的意思。她唱着自我死亡和拳镜，但这仅是作为持续不断的内向检查过程的一部分，该过程是激烈的，但最终是循环的。在更广阔的世界中发生的任何事情都会被注销，因为“彩绘面孔”对“时事”。正如专辑封面所指示的那样，Virgin是一款X射线，突出了不存在的X射线。
So much of recent pop music is like this—hyperspecifically self-involved—precisely because of Lorde’s influence. But Virgin suggests this once-exciting approach is starting to become redundant and rote, reflecting a culture in which introspection has supplanted any sense of common purpose, and no one can tell the difference between living life and performing it. In Lorde’s early days, she sang a lot about “we,” a generational cohort beating back alienation together. Virgin is all “I”—but a breakthrough awaits when she or one of her talented contemporaries turns their lens outward.
最近的流行音乐如此之多，这是如此 - 特别是因为洛尔德的影响而显而易见。但是维尔京表明这种曾经引起人们兴奋的方法开始变得多余和死记硬背，反映了一种内省所取代任何共同目的的文化，没有人能说出生活生活和表演生活之间的区别。在洛尔德（Lorde）的早期，她唱了很多关于“我们”的人，这是一个世代相传的人群一起撤离疏远。处女都是“我”，但是当她或她的一位才华横溢的同时代人将镜头向外旋转时，这是一个突破。
