July 2014
"Call all the ladies out, they're in their finery
a hundred jewels on throats, a hundred jewels between teeth
Now bring my boys in, their skin in craters like the moon
the moon we love like a brother, while he glows through the room."
I was driving home one day listening to Lorde in the car and I began thinking about the meaning of this song "Team." What I've observed in this consumerism-based society that constantly tries to satisfy instant pleasure is that meanings or purposes of songs or movies or other forms of postmodern cheap culture are irrelevant, insignificant, and most of the time, nonexistant: when I google analysis of a popular song, all I get is a measly video or poorly-written sentence about how Royals is about the superficiality of wealth. But I believe Lorde is poetry: it demands to be contemplated. That is my goal in this post.
I thought about this first verse for about ten minutes and I realized a lot about it. The first thing that struck me was that the only thing she says about her boys is that they have "skin in craters like the moon" and my initial thought was that she means they smoke. Smoking often times causes cavities in the skin. But Lorde thinks smoking is admirable because she likens the smokers to the moon, which they "love like a brother."
Likewise, the ladies are described as decorated in "finery" and "jewels." But I noticed here that Lorde doesn't describe the ladies with the same admiration with which she does the boys. Words like "throat" evoke grotesque images. I don't get the vibe that Lorde believes that these ladies are truly beautiful when she says quite bluntly that they have jewels in between their teeth.* The boys are ugly but in a good way, and the ladies are pretty but in a bad way.
Then I started thinking about the connotations of the words. Even the simplest words give some meaning: for example, she calls the ladies "the" ladies and the boys "my" boys. This implies that she is on the side of the boys and is detached from the ladies. Also, she requests to "call all the ladies out" but to "bring [the] boys in." The setting is unknown, but wherever this takes place, she wants the ladies to leave and be replaced by the boys. One last obvious thing that perhaps should have been said first: the words with which Lorde references the demographics of people she is describing carry a clue. Lorde picks the word "ladies" to describe the first group, which has a formal connotation attached to it, as opposed to "girls" or even "women." Likewise, "boys" has the opposite--a quite casual meaning in comparison to "men," "lads" or "gentlemen."
What I have gathered so far is that she belongs to the group of boys who aren't pretty on the outside but are on the inside, and repudiates the idea of the ladies who may be beautiful on the outside but are bad on the inside. I don't know what the entire song's purpose is exactly, but I am one verse closer to finding it.
*This is when we assume that she means teeth as in the teeth in the mouth, but this is just one definition of teeth: the other is a projecting pointy object on an instrument such as a tool or a comb. This could very well have a double meaning, as Lorde references weapons and other morbid ideas in her writing (Glory and Gore is a perfect example). So naturally Lorde could have meant that the ladies have instruments of battle that are sugar-coated with "jewels." Or one could take a step further and say that these teeth and jewels are a metaphor for their corruption that is masked by beauty. They are beautiful on the outside but evil on the inside.