Whenever my close and personal friend, Lorde, sends me an email directly to my inbox, I feel my heart flutter with joy. It is so kind of her to send me a snippet of her life that feels so personal, so intimate, and casual, as if she’s cut out a page of her journal and mailed it straight to me. The selfies, the little anecdotes about what she’s been up to… You could easily forget that she’d sent it out to thousands of other people as well.
Lorde, also known as Ella, (whom you may know from being an international superstar and one of New Zealand’s 10 celebrities), has never been a conventional social media user. She has 9.7 million followers, but only three posts. A girl after my own heart, she ran an anonymous account rating and reviewing onion rings from around the world, until people found out it was her. RIP Forever in our Hearts, @onionringsworldwide. She’s quit social media in the past, and also moved away to the middle of Antarctica, which to be honest, are experiences that feel completely interchangeable.
So it seems fitting that she has chosen emails as her way of communicating with her fans. Emails are cool again now I guess, in the same way that people are buying Lizzo cassette tapes and wearing ‘wired headphones’ in a ‘vintage’ way (this hurt me to type.) They feel more personal and somehow more real, and with no way to like/share/comment on them, they feel less like a marketing ploy, and more like a form of genuine self expression.
This is resonating with people who are turning towards being ‘authentic’ online. Last year we saw a rise in the ideology of “Making Instagram Casual Again,” with carousels filled with blurry pictures, no-makeup selfies and messy rooms. This echoes the way that original Instagram users would take a live gram of their cup of coffee, slap a hideous filter on it, and be stoked with three likes at the end of the day. We are all craving a simpler time.
This idea has also been reinforced by the debut of BeReal, an app that “asks users to post unfiltered photos of themselves once a day” (read: Snapchat but less embarrassing), which aims to stop highly curated photos and instead focuses on a ‘slice of life’ approach. To me, Lorde’s emails are just a facet of this idea, and a simple and clever way to be authentic online.
Opening the emails is reminiscent of buying a CD for the first time and opening the lyric book, all glossy and new, to find a note from the singer themselves. Signed “Sincerely and fearlessly, Taylor,” (Taylor Swift) or “You’ll love it - if you don’t fuck you, MC” (Miley Cyrus), or in the case of Lorde’s emails, “Lots and lots of love, E xxxxxxxxx”.
When they ding into my inbox, I like to imagine I am talking to a friend of a friend. (Because I literally am, this is New Zealand. The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Law should be renamed the Two Degrees of Ella). I like to imagine she is a coworker in an office. She is someone I could run into at the water cooler.
Subconsciously, I hear the dial up ringtone every time I open these emails, because I have pavlov-dogged myself into hearing it every time I open a “fun email,” like I did back in the early 2000s. Back when the only emails I got were from my friend Nicola and had clipart in them, alongside detailed instructions about where to meet up on Club Penguin.
Lorde’s emails truly do deserve the title of being “fun emails”. She talks about books that she’s read, puts in links to podcasts she enjoyed, and adds pictures of cool plants she’s seen. She sends links to gifts she’s going to buy her family for Christmas, as well as pictures from shows, of her fans’ signs and tattoos, of meals she enjoyed. She includes recipes and memes and thoughts and feelings about her personal life. They are (of course) beautifully written, like reading a book of poetry made specifically for you.
She uses the word ‘you’ generously to make it feel like she’s talking to you and you alone. She writes things like “I missed u and I have looooads to catch you up on,” and “I’ve owed you a letter for ages now,” which truly touch my heart. Parasocial relationship girlies unite!
She takes us backstage, both literally and figuratively, often talking about things other celebrities usually take for granted. She says that seeing how much her fans adore her can feel like “someone else’s life”, and she writes, “I’m struck by how truly odd the notion of having a security guard is, still like something out of a movie to me.”
Each newsletter reminds me of her song Still Sane, released in 2013, where she sings, “I still like hotels, but I think that'll change / Still like hotels and my new-found fame / Hey, promise I can stay good.” These newsletters to me are proof that Lorde is ‘staying good’; she shows appreciation for her life and her fans, while still being the glittery, clever, down to earth person she has always been.
For many celebrities, every piece of content that they produce feels meticulously and elaborately curated. Every photo, every outfit, every video clip and interaction is the product of extreme planning (You just got Krissed!). In comparison to this, Lorde’s emails are in a league of their own. She shares unfiltered photographs, personal thoughts and feelings, and her everyday experiences, and seems to forge a connection with her fans based on shared interests. In 2022, this is refreshing. This is the kind of celebrity that people are gravitating towards.
Recently, my friends and I hosted a Powerpoint Zoom night. Uniting from Wellington, Tauranga and London, we made small presentations about what we’d been up to, with pictures of funny things that had happened, and updates on our lives. Lorde’s emails provide the exact same experience as this, and perhaps this is why they feel so real to us: She speaks to her fans the way any two best friends would catch up while being separated by distance. Together, we are passing the Bechdel test, sharing in the interesting and delicious parts of life (except for the single, teeny tiny flaw that the conversation is entirely one-sided, and we only reply in our heads.)
In the age of social media where it is becoming harder and harder to draw the line between real and fake, filtered and unfiltered, truth and clickbait, Lorde is an oasis. Celebrity is a unique phenomenon that presents the opportunity to connect with people or to hover above them on some untouchable level. Lorde feels true and approachable, while being glamorous at the same time: perfectly walking the tightrope of fame and fandom.
