If Lorde is seen by some as one of pop music’s great mystics, she is also a master of decreation — or unmaking her persona and herself. Midway through her performance at the Chicago stop of her “Ultrasound” world tour, she paused the show and asked for the arena lights to be turned on so that she could get a look at the audience.
“It’s you who’s made these songs live the way they do,” she said, the bright lights acting as an equalizer of sorts: robbed of its shadow, her face was suddenly just like those in the audience. For that moment, Lorde was Ella Yelich-O’Connor, or as close to her real-life self as her onstage presence would allow. “It’s nothing to do with me, it’s everything to do with you.”
The crowd roared. It was one moment among many of deconstruction, reconstruction and transformation that characterize Lorde’s work. The set covered all four albums in her oeuvre — she played “Royals,” her 2013 breakthrough hit and seemingly a natural encore, second — but focused primarily on her latest, “Virgin.” She conducted wardrobe changes in view of the audience, removing individual pieces of clothing during and in between songs. She pushed down her jeans to reveal black Calvin Klein underwear and took off her shoes for “Current Affairs”; before “GRWM” she hitched up her dark blue shirt and gyrated inches away from a camera, broadcasting her sweaty stomach to the arena on the screen behind her. For “Man of the Year,” arguably the show’s climax, the singer applied silver tape to her chest, singing shirtless with jeans and a silver chain, embodying the vision she had had of herself and her gender identity while creating “Virgin.”
These small-scale outfit changes, paired with an intricate and precise lighting design that, at times, bathed the arena in blue light, seemed to reveal Lorde’s desire to bare everything, to be so transparent as to be see through. The cover of “Virgin” features an X-ray image of a pelvis with an IUD, a zipper and belt buckle; on the album, Lorde sings about troubled relationships and intimacy, struggles with body image and becoming “someone more like myself.” All throughout “Virgin” (and, indeed, her previous albums) is a reaching for purity — of self, of place, of experience. But wrapped around that purity are layers — layers she spoke about during the show.
“You want to taste the strange taste of life, you want sweet and sour, bitter,” she said to the audience. “You understand that by peeling away the layers something very truthful and beautiful is there to be found.”
The process of peeling those layers, though, can be disorienting, particularly in a world where attempting to map the nebulousness of self is often interrupted and fragmented by the screen. If “Virgin” is a distilled and compact work, then the concert visually complimented and enhanced it, splitting Lorde and her two grey-clad dancers into frenetic arrangements of image and video — both for entertainment value, certainly, but also as a kind of commentary on digital subjectivity. At one point, one of the dancers held a camera and microphone in front of Lorde, walking in front of her like a pseudo-paparazzo, the omnipresent sea of phone cameras below also capturing every move.
Lorde then broke the fourth wall for her penultimate song, “David,” a haunting meditation on a past relationship. Shrouded in a jacket seemingly made of light panels, she descended from the stage into the crowd, which split to make a path for her.
“Why do we run to the ones we do?” she sang, reaching the opposite end of the arena as the song neared its roaring, pulsing finale. “I don’t belong to anyone.”
With that, the lights turned off. Lorde re-emerged in a blue sweatshirt, still opposite the stage, a single light beam crossing the arena above her, to play “Ribs,” from her first album, “Pure Heroine.” As the song ended, she reached up to the beam and caught it with her hand. In the last few seconds her palm glowed red, and then the light disappeared.
