Normal People with Lorde - Royals

Do you like grunge? Of course you do. It's awesome. Nirvana. Bush. Mother Love Bone? What was so great about all (okay, some) of these bands? They were just like us. We all wore flannel, had depression, and were millionaires.

They had the veneer of being different from all of those 80's hair metal bands. Guess who else isn't like stuck up celebrities? Lorde:



She knows exactly what normal people do. They live in featureless, colorless apartments with the curtains eternally closed.

Note: this video features two young men apparently living alone. Two young men living alone have never put up curtains, ever. This leads me to believe that the "normal" people depicted in this video killed an elderly couple in a home-invasion-style robbery and have been living in their murder victims' home ever since. Is that what Lorde means by "a different kind of buzz"?

They watch TV:

They apparently don't pay the cable bill and can't get their shit together to buy a digital converter box. Just like murderers.

Normal people stare at basketball hoops:

Do you know what is like basketball? Murder. Just ask an expert.

They beat the shit out of each other until they are spitting blood:

I actually think this might be pretty normal.

Finally, they drown themselves in a pool. They leave no note.

Okay, so maybe Lorde doesn't know that much about normal people. She does, however, know a few things about making a good music video. First of all, there's this:

Why don't more people include the name of their band and the name of the song in the video? Don't they know that no one is watching their video on MTV with all the info in the bottom corner? A music video is an ad so you should make it clear what your ad is for!

Also, a few days ago I mentioned a video where the band was not moving and I hated it. Not this time. Pretty much every time Lorde is on screen she looks like this:

This works perfectly for this song. I would describe the song as "chill" if everyone I went to college with didn't use that word until I lost all feeling in my soul. Instead, I'll say that the song is low energy, but in a good way. No excitement mismatch here.

I'm not a big fan of how the lip syncing works in this video, though. The song is very much divorced from a live performance. It uses approximately 10,000 vocal overdubs all by the same person, and then a tiny bit of drums, so trying to sing in the video doesn't really work. She ends up picking lines to sing seemingly at random while standing there awkwardly at other times.

Why not just have her as one of the normal people murdering people in the video and have no lip syncing whatsoever? Who said you needed lip syncing in a music video? Do you know who didn't lip sync? Jesus! I think that makes my point.

But that's just nitpicking. Lorde is a very relaxed person who thinks the average person is a train riding murderer. I approve of that.

-PTD