Watching Coachella via Youtube has quickly become an annual event for me. This started when Tupac graced the stage in hologram form, combining the technology used for the actual hologram with the technology that allowed me to lay in bed and watch Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg perform. From Aotearoa, I saw these legends bring out a future legend in Kendrick Lamar and this year I was there again, this time on a couch watching Lamar control the masses with his kung-fu Kenny demeanor. 

Kendrick Lamar is good enough for me. Lamar and Schoolboy Q is a bonus, but my viewing experience for Coachella 2017 was blown into a completely different realm by a couple of kiwis. Thanks to technology and the alignment of the stars, I was able to watch Steven Adams play in the NBA Playoffs, then watch Lorde do what Lamar would soon do in controllin' the masses. 

As someone who is 'pop' as they come while diverging into her own 'anti-pop' lane at the same time, Lorde demands your attention and it's hard not to know the basic information about her or resist the urge to hum along to her songs. Hum, if you don't know the words, and by now even the staunchest farmer dude in Taranaki must be able to sing along to 'Royals'. That's where my infatuation with Lorde halted. I write mainly about hip hop and absorb hip hop culture more than any other musical genre, so a combination of not being overly interested in what mainstream radio plays and a lack of time to really dig into Lorde's music meant that I wasn't overly fussed. The fact that she was a kiwi doing dem big tings certainly wasn't lost on me though.

Once it dawned on me that Adams and Lorde graced the world stage within hours of each other, thus gracing my day with a splash of serendipity, things changed. At the Niche Cache, we have come to put our athletes who perform on such a level like Adams or Lydia Ko on a fairly lofty pedastool, not only because of their sporting prowess, in fact more so because of the way they conduct themselves as people. They do their job in competition, yet they hold themselves with a down to Earth nature that all kiwis can take great pride in and as representatives of Aotearoa, we really can't ask for much more.

Musically, we have Lorde. Adams isn't the best basketball player in the world but he's in that environment, so Ko is perhaps the best comparison. Lorde can genuinely lay claim to a top-five spot in the world's biggest musical acts and, like our athletes, Lorde's musical capabilities are the foundation that has put her in such a position. We tend to forget that Lorde was the young phenom and a nice piece from Rolling Stone magazine highlighted how Lorde had been signed to a major record label as a 12-year-old. That doesn't happen just because you sung a catchy tune to the right person, you need to somehow show that you can grow into a formidable international act who is capable of earning that record label a lot of money, over a long period.
Somehow. I'm not sure how any young teenager can do that, but Lorde did. Compare that to Ko who burst on to the international sporting stage as a teenager after emerging as a phenom herself. Despite their youth, both are already masters of their craft and still have so much to learn.

What I have come to love about Lorde is precisely why I'm guessing her target audience in Aotearoa instantly fell in love with her. Lorde is as down to Earth as a top-five musical act on Earth can be and she is able to bypass the weird shenanigans of Hollywood by poking fun at herself, or celebrating weirdness. You could say that Lorde has watched footage of Adams' glorious media scrums, or that Adams took a leaf out of Lorde's book, or that they quite simply hail from Aotearoa and act as such.

Part of this, perhaps all of this, involves owning who you are. When Lorde cracks one of her dry (positively dry, not 'you're dry bro') jokes, you know that she is being genuine and when Lorde's doing anything that Americans might view as crazy, we know that Lorde is just being her kiwi self. Of course Lorde knows no better, because we as kiwis know no better than to be ourselves and when this enhances the total package, we've the recipe for kiwi conquerors.

The Rolling Stone profile took me back to the moment when a homie told me about Lorde, my introduction to Lorde. I was given her music and when I enquired about who she was, my homie told me "she's a 15-year-old from Auckland but no one knows who she is". Lorde's first release of music, including 'Royals' didn't come with a picture of her and this mystery surrounding the creator of such music was awesome. Immediately I was intrigued and looking back on this, I've nestled on a spot of awe as this teenager completely flipped the industry norm on its head.

In the wider scheme of things, this was the first example of Lorde doing it her way and the first of many such examples. Pop music doesn't really allow for such individuality and as the Rolling Stone piece highlighted, teenage artists that find themselves in a similar position usually follow a manicured path of monotony. There's a blueprint to a teenage artist's career, from how they release music to how their songs sound, right down to following the general radio formula that plagues so much radio music. 

Lorde is pop music, let's not get that twisted, although Lorde has twisted pop music as all great artists do. As pop music generally moves towards hip hop, Lorde has done everything differently and with her music incorporating a variety of themes and sounds, you immediately know when a Lorde song is playing. Or you can tell when an artists has been influenced by Lorde. 

Not only leading by influencing music and pop culture, Lorde is a voice for young folk commonly known as millennials and her songs are filled with angst towards society's norms and lean towards somewhat of an uprising of young folk who are vastly different to what older folk view us as. I'm not the greatest fan of older folk in general as they have not only created a world in which the majority of our problems are nothing less than greed or stupidity, they also tend to blame us millennials for much of these problems when we're just trying to survive in the shit-storm they created. 

Lorde is about as pure a voice as you can get for millennials and 'Royals' is the anthem for that vibe, filling the void left by silly older folk with an overall message of love. Not necessarily the love that Lorde had, lost or is looking for but just love in general ya' know? Loving yourself, loving how creative you are, loving that you don't need to be how they want you to be, loving that in 2017 we have so many tools available to us to really change this mess that we've been put in. Lorde isn't out there preaching and nor should she be, she is a creative force and negativity or the rock-bottom that it feels as though we are hitting as humans on planet Earth, produces the finest creativity possible.

Pressure builds diamonds, after rain comes the sunshine, you gotta experience the lows to saviour the highs and all of that. I'd like to think that the creativity and general message of the Niche Cache falls into that as well, yet we're not exactly on the same scale as Lorde and while I'm not saying that Lorde is the great saviour; she is a massive, unique artist who has fell into a default leadership position of millennials and she's from where I'm from. Where you're from, Aotearoa.

I feel this way after listening to 'Pure Heroine' on repeat in anticipation of her new album 'Melodrama' and the most enjoyable aspect of that listening experience was settling on my own perception of the album. I had kinda been influenced to think that Lorde's tunes were of the lovey-dovey variety but soon found myself hugely inspired by Lorde, as her vibe and message reflect mine. Maybe I'd feel that any way, yet that Lorde is from Aotearoa certainly played a factor in this as there's a connection there, I could immediately connect with how or why she viewed something as she did. Because she's from where I'm from.

Lorde isn't exactly from where I'm from. Lorde is from Auckland's North Shore and I'm from Papatoetoe in South Auckland, which is about as opposite an environment as you can get. That only enhanced my connection though as creativity transcends socio-economic status, your ethnicity, your family situation. Creativity is creativity, being unique doesn't depend on how much money you have and that connection was powerful, it may set y'all free as well.

We've watched Lorde come out of nowhere and take the world by storm, then we've seen her deal with that and like me, you may have come to share your own connection with Lorde's music. 'Pure Heroine' was the voice of a creative force who had no expectations, no limits, nothing. Now we wait to see how Lorde has grown and what she has done with that creative force, how the personal development of a young kiwi translate into a musical form.

Paying such attention to a vast number of musical acts leads you down a path of have absolutely no expectations about a second, third or fourth album. Fools expect the second album to sound like the first, which completely ignores the creative process stemming from personal experience, or how the artist is feeling at that time. I'll find some interest how Lorde's music sounds, however my anticipation centres around what Lorde will say and how our kiwi sister has grown in the years between these albums.