Concert review: Lorde @ Tower Theater
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Lorde is "cool" not because she flaunts her fame.
[3/8] “Did you just die? I just died.”
This was exclaimed not by Lorde — despite her zombie twitches that passed as badass dance moves — but by one of the hundreds of ecstatic teens in in the audience of her sold-out show at the Tower Theater on Saturday.
Lorde is “cool” not because she flaunts her fame. Rather, she criticizes the celebrity lifestyle and tired tropes of pop music; “I’m kind of over getting told to throw my hands up in the air” would be a laughable line, except that its simplicity points out something that everyone else should have realized by now. Lorde is a pop star for the misfits who, yeah, drink and smoke, but don’t glamorize it — after all, they do it because there’s nothing else to do in their “cities you’ll never see onscreen.” Hence, girls her age who “died” when she seizure-danced, and then again when she told a sweeping story of the night she realized that she would never have the mind of a kid again.
Ending her set with Pure Heroine closer “A World Alone” was fitting, the last lines, “People are talking — let ’em talk,” echoing the album’s (and evening’s) theme of championing authenticity in a teen paradise obsessed with the selfie. Not everyone got the message, though. As the rest of the crowd screamed their allegiance amidst the fading lights, one girl next to me had her head down, her face lit by a screen. She was scrolling through Instagram.
