Lorde, Billie Eilish, and the Flop Era Myth
It stands to reason that, in a world where every good pop song is a “bop,” others must be flops.
In box office terms, flops and hits are usually pretty easy to differentiate. Simply take the number of millions of dollars required to make a given movie, and subtract it from the millions of dollars generated in ticket sales. Generally, if you’ve made a movie that people want to see, this calculation will show that you’ve turned a profit. Congrats, Kevin Feige! Life is good, you may proceed with Lady Thor in Space or whatever.
But in the music industry, things aren’t so cut and dry. As the streaming era drastically changes the way we engage with new music, buying a physical album in a store is no longer the surest way to support our favorite artists. Social media has even made it so stars can directly tell their fans how to show that support, like when Taylor Swift released her new “Wildest Dreams” recording this week in an attempt to usurp the old version on TikTok. She doesn’t need to tell me twice, as I’ve already gotten into the habit of streaming her new releases on repeat for weeks, sometimes months - which is more or less the norm now for dedicated stans. Mainstream artists today are almost guaranteed to gain huge streaming numbers this way, even if the songs they choose as singles don’t take off on the radio. Which means it’s become incredibly difficult to determine what’s a hit and what’s not, because everything looks like one from the outside in.
So if we can’t really quantify what constitutes a pop music flop, why do there seem to be so many of them right now? Last month, Lorde divided fans with the release of her long-awaited third LP Solar Power, a collection of largely acoustic existential musings that took a hard-left turn away from her past work. While I wasn’t as bothered as some by the breezy optimism of lead single “Solar Power,” I did find myself wondering if she’d been body-swapped: Lorde’s persona has always been one of self-aware vulnerability, but there she was, leading a horde of sun dress-clad dancers onto a beach while describing herself as a “prettier Jesus.” And the cognitive dissonance of this imagery was only exacerbated by the media blitz that followed: there she is, day drinking with Seth Meyers! Guest hosting for James Corden! And did you see how calmly she ate those hot wings?? Ella Yelich-O’Connor, a self-described introvert who hardly bothered with promo when she had a bona fide pop masterpiece on her hands, seems to have gone all-in this time around.
Which brings us to Billie Eilish, another pop phenom struggling to satisfy what has turned out to be an incredibly fickle audience. Happier Than Ever, the follow-up to her ultra-successful, Grammy-winning debut, was released in July after a seemingly endless string of singles that began appearing a full year earlier. It’s a long, unwieldy odyssey of an album, full of new sounds, big ideas, and lofty aspirations that are never fully realized. Is it bad? No, far from it. But, like Solar Power, it has warped fans’ ideas of who their favorite artist actually is, washing away the reliable hitmaker and replacing her with a world-weary, genre-hopping philosopher.
Another thing that these two albums have in common is insanely big shoes to fill. Eilish’s first LP, 2019’s WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, won Album of the Year and swept all the other major Grammy categories, not long after hit single “bad guy” propelled her to international fame. Back in 2013, Lorde also hit it big with an early single, earning multiple Grammys for her game-changing debut “Royals.” Pop music hasn’t sounded the same since “Royals” came out, and it’s hard to imagine that Eilish would have become nearly as popular without it. But after permanently altering an entire genre, does Yelich-O’Connor have a responsibility to continue doing so? What if she is, and we’re just not paying attention?
Critics of Solar Power have conveniently forgotten that Lorde has never been able to match the commercial success of “Royals,” even with music that far surpassed it in quality. Her sophomore LP Melodrama (2017), which could easily be the greatest pop album of the 21st century so far, produced only one top 40 hit (lead single “Green Light”) and no top tens. But every time I listen to Melodrama, each track still bowls me over, and I find myself thinking back to this iconic Eva Hendricks take from Pitchfork: “I think I’m destined to spend the rest of my life screaming from every rooftop that Melodrama is the best album of all time,” the Charly Bliss singer gushed, showing how untouchable this album has become for many of Lorde’s fans and peers. Few today would ever accuse Melodrama of being a flop, even though it technically was. So should we just admit that flop eras are a construct we’ve created, as opposed to something real and quantifiable?
In the highest tiers of pop music, a flop era doesn’t have to be based on actual data, like sales or streaming numbers. Instead, it’s just the general sense that a very well-known artist hasn’t been able to recreate the high of their previous work. In recent years, the artists most vulnerable to this type of criticism have been the maximalist party-pop divas who ruled the early 2010s: Gaga, Kesha, Katy, etc. Poor Lady Gaga experienced the O.G. flop era back in 2013, when her album Artpop failed to make much of an impression on fans or critics (luckily, like a female public figure from the ‘90s, the legacy of Artpop is currently being reassessed). But however unfair it may be, it does make sense that artists who came up in a different era would have trouble connecting with audiences today. After all, whomst among us would listen to a song like Katy Perry’s “Roar” if it came out in 2021? Get out of here with that #girlboss nonsense!
But in the past year, we’ve started hearing flop era rumors about artists who were considered cutting edge only two years ago, not ten. Along with Billie Eilish, the biggest breakthrough acts of 2019 were undoubtedly Lizzo and Lil Nas X, both of whom have responded publicly to those who don’t have faith in their ability to repeat history. Last month, only days after Lizzo released her newest single “Rumors,” she posted an emotional Instagram live about how negative reactions to the song had affected her. Meanwhile, Lil Nas X spends much of his newly released debut album MONTERO discussing the pressure of topping his past success (“I ain’t fall off, I just ain’t release my new shit” he declares on bombastic single “INDUSTRY BABY”). When performers have to vigorously defend their abilities and artistic choices at every turn, what does that say about us, the fans?
Maybe just that our attention spans have shrunk. Because there are beautiful albums hidden in the dead weight of both Solar Power and Happier Than Ever, if we’d only take the time to look. For an album that has been labeled as boring and underproduced, Solar Power is actually stacked with an incredibly exciting first half, full of cheekily psychedelic folk-rock that spills some serious tea about Lorde’s rocky experience of fame (tldr: she’s sick of L.A., the paps give her nightmares, she stole a fork from the Met Gala). She indulges herself a bit too much in the second half, relying too heavily on her talent for high-concept lyricism, but songs like “Big Star” and “Oceanic Feeling” could be album standouts if they didn’t feel so sparse and unmoored.
Eilish, on the other hand, has the opposite problem. Happier Than Ever leans so hard into a more layered, experimental production style that it sometimes forgets to make sure these songs have genuine substance, beyond just sounding extremely cool. Unlike Solar Power, this album hits its stride more towards the end, where sobering ballads like “Your Power” and “Male Fantasy” linger bittersweetly amongst pulsating electronic anthems. The perfectly timed transition between two of the best closing tracks, “NDA” and “Therefore I Am,” could probably wake me up from a coma. But if Billie had played it this smart on the rest of the album, would the public’s perception of Happier Than Ever really be that much different? Given the excruciating, destructive weight of the expectations that have been placed on this record’s shoulders, probably not.
Ultimately, the reaction to some of this year’s biggest releases begs us to ask ourselves what we really want from pop stars today. Do we want them to keep growing and evolving, trying new things but sometimes missing the mark? Or do we want them to stay more or less the same, always pleasing audiences but never really taking risks? The latter would be more comforting, but also a shame, because it doesn’t leave any room for artists to take a leap of faith on something truly revelatory. Besides, there’s always a chance that history will be kinder to Lorde and Billie’s recent work than we’ve been thus far, in our scramble to slap a scarlet letter on anything that doesn’t smash streaming records or debut at number one.
But by any reasonable standard, Solar Power and Happier Than Ever are still extremely successful albums. They’re boasting eye-popping numbers on streaming services, starting conversations amongst fans, and already spawning spinoffs and concert specials. For me, listening to Solar Power was even a bit of a wake-up call, as I’ve been joking for many years that I don’t have any problems that couldn’t be solved by a new Lorde album. Turns out, that kind of discourse often makes it back to the artists themselves, and - surprise! - they internalize it. So, just as Billie Eilish snarled “I’m the bad guy” on her breakout hit, Lorde playfully taunts her stans in the opening track of Solar Power: “Now if you’re looking for a savior, that’s not me/You need someone to take your pain for you? Well, that’s not me.” It might be time for us to take her at her word.
[Audrey Davis is a Los Angeles-based writer, improviser, and singer-songwriter. She makes music as Elle Toro.]