Home » Latest » Celebrity » The Dark Side Of Lorde That Nobody Wants To Talk About

The Dark Side Of Lorde That Nobody Wants To Talk About

8

29 0 Celebrity

7.8

SaveSavedRemoved 2

Lorde built her career on being the anti-pop-star — and that image came with a price.

The New Zealand singer broke through at 16 with “Royals,” a song that mocked luxury rap culture and turned her into an instant voice-of-a-generation figure. But the same bluntness that made her a critical darling also dragged her into feuds, backlash, and at least one apology tour that nobody saw coming.

Nicki Swift’s video essay “The Dark Side Of Lorde That Nobody Wants To Talk About” runs through the receipts: the pop star she called out for being “anti-feminist,” the hip-hop icons she dismissed as “irrelevant,” and the Instagram caption that made her the target of a genuine controversy in April 2018.

• Lorde publicly criticized Selena Gomez’s “Come & Get It” as anti-feminist over lyrics like “when you’re ready come and get it from me,” prompting Gomez to fire back that tearing down other women isn’t feminism.
• In a late-2013 Interview magazine sit-down, a 17-year-old Lorde called the lifestyles depicted by Drake, Nicki Minaj, and Lana Del Rey “completely irrelevant,” sparking backlash from hip-hop fans and renewed scrutiny of the racial subtext in “Royals.”
• In April 2018, Lorde posted an Instagram photo of a running bath captioned “And iiii will always love you” — a Whitney Houston reference that read as tone-deaf given Houston’s 2012 drowning death, forcing a quick deletion and apology.

The Feminist Icon Who Kept Feuding With Women

Lorde spent her early career positioning herself as the un-manufactured alternative to mainstream pop — which made it awkward when she started publicly picking apart other women’s music. Her attack on Selena Gomez’s “Come & Get It” zeroed in on the song’s lyrics portraying a woman waiting to be “gotten,” which Lorde framed as regressive messaging dressed up as a love song.

Gomez didn’t let it slide. She responded that criticizing another woman’s art in the name of feminism defeats the purpose, a line that got repeated across entertainment coverage for months afterward. Lorde also took an early shot at Taylor Swift, dismissing Swift’s polished, always-camera-ready public image as unattainable “bulls***” — a comment that read as a direct challenge to the biggest pop star on the planet at the time.

“When you’re ready come and get it from me” — the Selena Gomez lyric Lorde called anti-feminist, and the line that kicked off one of pop’s most-discussed peer feuds.

The Swift beef didn’t last. The two eventually patched things up and became visible friends, a reconciliation arc that echoes plenty of other pop-star rivalries that cooled once the cameras stopped rolling — the kind of turnaround chronicled in Celebs Who Started Out Friends And Ended Up Enemies, just running in reverse.

The Interview Comment That Hip-Hop Fans Never Forgot

Lorde’s most polarizing moment predates most of her feuds. In a late-2013 interview with Interview magazine, the then-17-year-old was asked about the luxury imagery dominating rap and pop radio and responded by singling out Drake, Nicki Minaj, and Lana Del Rey by name, questioning why anyone listened to music built around wealth she considered “completely irrelevant” to average listeners.

The comment landed badly with hip-hop fans who saw a teenage newcomer dismissing an entire genre’s aesthetic without acknowledging what that imagery actually represents — a reclaiming of success in a culture that historically denied it. Writers like Veronica Bayetti Flores extended that critique to “Royals” itself, arguing the song’s takedown of gold teeth, Cristal, and Maybachs skated close to punching down at black artists rather than critiquing wealth in the abstract.

The Whitney Houston Post That Forced an Apology

The clearest single controversy came in April 2018, years after the feuds had mostly faded. Lorde posted an Instagram photo of a running bathtub with the caption “And iiii will always love you,” a direct nod to Whitney Houston’s signature ballad.

The problem was immediate and obvious to anyone paying attention: Houston died in 2012 after accidentally drowning in a hotel bathtub. The internet did not let it pass quietly, and Lorde deleted the post within hours, admitting publicly that she hadn’t connected the caption to the circumstances of Houston’s death before hitting publish.

It’s the kind of unforced error that turns up again and again in pop music’s history of stars misjudging how a joke or reference will land once it’s public — the same pattern that runs through Musicians That Are Nothing Like They Seem, where the gap between a carefully built image and a single bad post ends up defining the news cycle.

Lorde never addressed the Whitney Houston post again beyond that initial apology, and the moment mostly faded from her catalog of controversies by early 2019 — overtaken, as always, by whatever she was releasing next.