Lorde has shared that the experiencing of binding her chest for the ‘Man of the Year’ music video helped her ‘come into some understanding about myself’, amid her wider grapple with gender.
In the run up to the release of her fourth studio album, Virgin, Lorde released several singles, one of which was the quickly-viral hit “Man of the Year”. In the music video for the song, the Kiwi star binds her chest, and on “Hammer”, sings: “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man.“
Speaking to Dazed as part of September’s cover issue, Lorde has shared that amid a wider reassessment of her own relationship with gender, she found that binding her chest (the act of flattening one’s breasts) helped her feel “pure”.
“Something really happened for me when I taped my chest for the first time. I came into some understanding about myself, and felt a very pure version of myself present,” she told the publication.
Lorde, who continues to use she/ her pronouns, added that those feelings started “bubbling up” in 2023, as she was starting to write the aforementioned track.
“I’d really been feeling this stuff bubble up and talking about it a lot in therapy. We started writing the song, and I saw this TV performance of it [in my mind’s eye], and it wasn’t even finished. And in the performance I saw myself in jeans, no shirt. And I thought about how I would actually do that on TV. It wasn’t a bra.
“I had this roll of tape and grabbed it, put my jeans on, taped up, and saw myself – and was like, “Fuck, that’s me.” Suddenly, I could see it. It was scary.”
She added: “And I didn’t even know I wanted that to be me. But now I feel so beautiful in both ways. I feel vulnerable and calm. It really tripped me out.”
Speaking to Le Monde at the start of the month, Lorde, whose real name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, said: “I never felt like a woman until I was 26, I remember the day. My mother was sort of androgynous and showed me a lot of David Bowie, Grace Jones.
“I understood that was a source of power and I saw how dangerous it sometimes was to be a woman. So, I decided that if I’m going to be a woman, I want to be exactly the kind of woman that I need to be. Part of that is sometimes being a man.”
In recent months, Lorde has opened up about feeling “in the middle, gender wise”, telling Rolling Stone magazine: “I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.”
Chappell Roan also asked her whether she was non-binary, and she replied that she was “really resistant to boxing it up”.
Speaking to Dazed, Lorde clarified that Chappell asked in a very “sweet” way.
Lorde begins a North American in Austin, Texas, on 17 September, before heading to the UK in November.
Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
The post Lorde says binding chest for Man of the Year music video helped her feel ‘pure’: ‘F**k, that’s me’ appeared first on PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news.