Do artists need 'lore'?

Taylor Swift has too much, Dua Lipa has too little

“There are no finger holes” was how New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica described the new Dua Lipa album, Radical Optimism, in a recent episode of his excellent podcast Popcast. It’s exactly how I felt listening to RA: like 28-year-old Lipa’s public persona, the music is shiny, smooth, unknowable. Describing how Radical Optimism felt like a critical flop despite becoming her highest charting album (The Times gave it two stars, describing it as polished but with little character), Caramanica argued that in today’s pop landscape, you have to sell a meta-narrative. 

Case in point: Taylor Swift, who has cannily (and increasingly) merged her music and personal life to stoke insatiable curiosity from fans. She has not only created a meta-narrative (the lyrics of the Tortured Poets Department could be printed and bound as memoir) but an entire multiverse: her output is categorised into 10 distinct ‘eras’, each with its own set of characters, outfits, merch and, crucially, lore.

Dua Lipa ‘has no lore’ is how the Los Angeles Times headlined their review of the album. Writer Mikael Wood asked: “In this era of the endlessly annotated “The Tortured Poets Department” — not to mention the downright scholarly “Cowboy Carter” — can a pop album succeed without functioning as a referendum on fame or as a work of musicology? Is it enough just to deliver a bunch of loosely connected bangers and bops?”

Considering the recent success of stars such as Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan, I would argue that the answer is no. Unlike Lipa’s impersonal excellence, all three of these women have made their personalities - gutsy, cheeky, sarcastic, self-aware – integral to their music. As Caramanica suggests on Popcast, to reveal your personality is to reveal imperfection; imperfection allows for finger holes. And importantly, in our internet age of candour, relatability and irony, viral content has to be ‘memeable’. 

It is surely this savvy understanding of virality that inspired Carpenter to cast her own boyfriend (and actor) Barry Keoghan in her latest music video, Please Please Please – a tongue-in-cheek song about not letting a bad boyfriend cramp your style. Fans are now invested in the relationship as if it belonged to one of their friends – they will scour forthcoming songs, videos, Instagram posts and more for ‘easter eggs’ about Keoghan long after they break up (if they ever do). As Swift has shown, it's that level of emotional investment that makes pop stars rich. 

In fact it could be argued that ‘lore’ is what made Carpenter’s music career. Rumours about a potential feud between her and Olivia Rodrigo swirled around the internet following the release of Rodrigo’s hit Drivers License in 2021. A verse was perceived to be about the fact that her ex, Disney co-star Joshua Bassett, was rumoured to be seeing Carpenter: “And you’re probably with that blonde girl / Who always made me doubt / She’s so much older than me / She’s everything I’m insecure about.”

Two weeks later, Carpenter released Skin, which included the line: “Maybe you didn’t mean it/ Maybe ‘blonde’ was the only rhyme.” And also, perhaps referencing the name of Rodrigo’s song: “Don’t drive yourself insane.” Maybe it was fan-fabricated Reddit drama, but Skin debuted at no48 on the Billboard 100. Carpenter may have got there on artistic merit alone, but there’s no denying the drama helped. It wouldn’t surprise me if Carpenter’s lyrical easter eggs and fast turnaround time had been calculated to leverage Rodrigo’s existing fanbase.

Carpenter, it seems, is a highly astute modern pop star. As Caramanica said, to go viral today your content needs to be memeable, as Carpenter surely considered while filming Please, Please, Please, which has led to thousands of images of her and Keoghan alongside quotes about bad boyfriends plastering Twitter and TikTok. Her self-awareness, too, has become a compelling part of her USP.  In a send up of celebrity vanity, one scene from the video sees Carpenter collect her belongings from an officer after having spent the night in prison: just a pair of sunglasses and a lipstick, which she brazenly applies as the officer tries to give her instructions. More memes, more finger holes.

Lipa, to be fair to her, endeared herself to fans after recreating her much-ridiculed ‘lazy’ dance routine on Jimmy Fallon in 2022, revealing warmth the lyrics on Radical Optimism could have benefited from. While the album is good, and Lipa is undeniably talented, it brings to mind the Guardian’s analysis of Lipa’s new Disney documentary Camden: slick but neutered, Lipa’s contributions delivered with “an unsettling, cheesy smile.”

Yet I also feel protective over Lipa’s right to deliver bangers without lore. As I have written about here before, journalism’s first-person industrial complex is often exploitative of young women, many who will reveal their most intimate thoughts and compromising personal struggles in exchange for a byline and £300. Why should female artists have to mine their personal lives to sell more records? It should be enough to make good music, as Billie Eilish proved with relatively loreless Hit Me Hard and Soft. Besides it’s not as if reviewers ask the same of men: Harry Styles and Ed Sheeran frequently earn critical acclaim despite dropping very few breadcrumbs about their personal lives.

And, to be fair, Lipa doesn’t need it either: Future Nostalgia, an album of gleaming disco bangers in which Lipa’s only discernible character trait was that she wanted us all to dance, earned rave reviews and propelled her to superstardom. Perhaps the issue with Radical Optimism was that the songs were just a little less banging. It’s worth noting, too, that Carpenter’s juggernaut hit Espresso, which became ‘the song of the summer’ within a week of release, has no lore either. It’s just incredibly catchy.

And while Lipa may not code her songs with easter eggs about past breakups for her fans to crack, she is, arguably, much more of an open book than Taylor when it comes to more compromising issues. She is unafraid to be publicly political – she is one of the few celebrities to have openly called for a ceasefire in Gaza – and, through her book club and podcast, visibly interacts with culture and world affairs. Whereas, as one Redditer put it: “Taylor seems to be shielding herself from the real world as much as possible to the point that she has curated The World (Taylor’s Version).”

Ultimately, though, ‘lore’ is not specific to Taylor. She came from country music, known for its personal, often domestic, lyrics – Kacey Musgraves recently wrote a divorce album. And, beyond country, lore has always been integral to music. Rap as a genre is highly self-referential: heavy sampling and word play nods to influences, eras and feuds. The entire Drake/Kendrick beef was built upon lore.

Artists of all genres and genders have always known that drama sells: lest we forget Justin Timberlake shamelessly marketed his entire debut album Justified via his breakup with Britney Spears. Cry Me a River featured a Britney lookalike, and he paraded the interview circuit dropping breadcrumbs about taking her virginity and alleging she cheated on him.

Besides, at the end of the day, no amount of lore is going to make a bad song sing.

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