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Charli XCX / Lorde: “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” Track Review | Pitchfork

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It’s always a little performance when you write about someone else. The late writer Janet Malcolm once famously staked out an argument that, on a certain level, a journalist writing about another subject is “morally indefensible.” Malcolm’s opening thesis in her 1989 essay The Journalist and the Murderer relates more to big New Yorker profiles, but I think the same is true for any kind of public writing, be it on Substack or in song. Even within the most generous and objective writing: Confidences are betrayed; context is omitted; nuances are overlooked. I wonder if songwriters who write surreptitiously about exes and frenemies and haters feel this, too, that for all the righteous “Dear John” kiss-offs and blind items cautiously annotated in Genius, they feel there is something inherently untruthful about putting another person in their music without giving them space to respond. TRENDING NOW Thundercat Breaks Down His Favorite Bass Lines Earlier this morning, Charli XCX posted a scree

Save this story Save this story It’s always a little performance when you write about someone else. The late writer Janet Malcolm once famously staked out an argument that, on a certain level, a journalist writing about another subject is “morally indefensible.” Malcolm’s opening thesis in her 1989 essay The Journalist and the Murderer relates more to big New Yorker profiles, but I think the same is true for any kind of public writing, be it on Substack or in song. Even within the most generous and objective writing: Confidences are betrayed; context is omitted; nuances are overlooked. I wonde

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