As the title states, I'm not done talking about Lorde just yet, but I didn't want to weigh down my other post by wandering off topic.
Starting where we left off in my previous post, in my eyes Royals is like a glaring red mark on what is otherwise a pretty stellar track record. It seems especially so when you consider that Lorde has covered similar topics multiple times, and she did it better, and without being racist or otherwise offensive.
The most obvious comparison is the song Team, her third single to be released. This song is what Royals wanted to be: a song about how Lorde and her friends don't care that they're poor, because they make the best of it and have fun anyway. Hell, she even mentions how she's tired of a mainstream trend in this one as well, but this time around her representative line is one that's ubiquitous in anything you could label as 'club' or 'party' music - the phrase 'throw your hands in the air' doesn't really specify any genre or group of artists. "I'm kind of over being told to throw my hands up in the air" has a similarly nonchalant tone, but this one comes across as much more ambivalent and breezy, as opposed to the more sneering and condescending 'we're not caught up in your love affair'. I have no trouble imagining a playful shrug as she throws out the words, "so there".
White Teeth Teens is another that I thought of. I feel like I can't bring up this song without bringing up The Love Club, from the eponymous EP (which is no longer available, to my knowledge, but the song in on the deluxe version of the album). This is only because these two songs are really similar; I'd almost say eerily so if they weren't by the same artist. White Teeth Teens could almost be seen as a remake or retelling of The Love Club - it has the same themes and a similar story, but, in my opinion, is much more fluid and coherent as a narrative. The Love Club kind of jumps around with telling what's happened to Lorde, while White Teeth Teens happens in chronological order and has discernible settings and scenes.
Like Royals, White Teeth Teens concerns Lorde and rich folks, but whereas Royals flippantly insults the way you choose to spend your money in its quest to show how much Lorde doesn't care about said rich folks, White Teeth Teens sits you down and describes a series of events with the aforementioned clique - basically, it shows instead of telling. There is also a change in premise that works to this song's advantage - Lorde is with them, which lends to her credibility as a narrator. Royals!Lorde doesn't seem like the kind of person who's ever had a conversation with a rich person, let alone befriended one. White Teeth Teen!Lorde is relaying this info to you first hand, and therefore it feels more genuine.
This song is also subtle. While it's obvious that she's in a clique (something that happens in like 70% of her songs that include more than one other character), Lorde never comes right out and says that it's a clique of rich kids. You're trusted to glean this information from the language she uses to talk about them. She refers to the leader of the clique as the Empress, for example. The fact that they're even called the White Teeth Teens speaks to this: their teeth are so white that they glow, which means that they aren't just using whitening strips and good brushing techniques; they're getting them professionally done, something it costs good money to do.
Lastly, and this is one of my favorite parts, this song has the nerve to have a plot twist in the form of a reveal. After taking you on a journey through a night with these kids as they drink and preen and seemingly wreak some havoc, Lorde pulls the listener aside and informs you that she's not actually a White Teeth Teen. And it really is constructed that way - listen for yourself. At about 2:17 in, her voice starts singing "and everything worked out so good/I wear the robe like no one could" repeatedly, and over this Lorde starts talking directly to the listener, using the word 'you' for the first time, saying that she has 'something big' to tell us. She then goes on to say that she never really fit in with them because it's 'in the blood'.
This is something that comes up in Royals too, and one of the reasons I related the two - they share the idea that this isn't something you can really come into, instead having to inherit it. Lorde could never truly be a White Teeth Teen - or a Royal, for that matter - because she doesn't come from the same crop. However, the hip-hop indicators in Royals render this point nonsensical, since a large number of black rappers (including Jay Z and 50 Cent, two of the ones she most closely implicated) came from close to nothing before they got big. In White Teeth Teens it makes a lot more sense, because she's not just talking about being born into money, but also being raised in an entirely different culture from ones that those of us less fortunate are.
These last few lines manage to throw a new trope onto the song that cast the rest of it into an entirely different light. Suddenly, Lorde's reliability as a narrator is called into question. She says straight up that she 'tried to join, but never did', so what events is she relating in the verses? Are they from when she tried to join? Or did she make it all up? She's still a liar either way - in the former because she uses the word 'us' in the chorus, which tricks you into thinking she's one of them, and in the latter because she made the whole thing up. It's hard to settle on either of these, though, because of that constantly repeating line playing in the background. Is that a statement of denial now, because she never got in? It doesn't seem that way, judging by the mood of the song, but it could definitely be read that way in both cases. Did it only exist to cement the idea of Lorde being a White Teeth Teen in our heads before she pulled the rug out from under us? Was she tricking us this entire time? The possibilites pile up the more you examine it.
That being said, the explanation that came to me while listening is that Lorde is lying, just not to us. She's in the clique, but she lacks the pedigree, and is pretending to be something she's not. I think this neatly explains a lot of aspects of the song - why it's in first person, the use of we in relation to the clique, etc. This idea came to me because of the admission. Like I said above, it seems to be done in the form of an aside, but with the two theories I posited above, that doesn't make much sense. If you look at it this way, however, it's like that because she's telling us a secret - the biggest of her secrets in fact. It even explains the lines she's speaking over: they're there because they represent the facade, that she belongs (i wear the robe like no one could), and this is being projected toward the rest of the clique while she breaks the fourth wall to speak to us, hence while it's in the background. The return of the chorus after this is her putting the fourth wall back up and resuming her place, her secret safe with us, and from the rest of the crew.
It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if Royals was included on the full album outside for any reason besides its popularity. It really has no place amongst stuff like this and Buzzcut Season and Ribs; it just falls flat in comparison. Why listen to something that's implicit in the oppression of a marginalized people when you can listen to a layered story like this?
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