As I wandered down towards Wellington’s waterfront, a southerly at my back, the Most Interesting New Zealander played in my earbuds.
Lorde’s fourth album, Virgin, is a confronting, visceral, clever, catchy 34 minutes. She has located her late 20-something feelings in her body and expressed them through a highly treated musical collage.
At a time when an AI-generated band has attracted a million listens to its generic slop on Spotify, Virgin feels like the opposite of what AI would come up with.
Somehow, this dense, provocative work has debuted at No 1 in the album charts of the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand, and reached the top five in multiple other markets.
Virgin may well change pop music the way her first album, Pure Heroine, did 12 years ago.
And yet, a group of New Zealanders seems implacably dedicated to shouting it down. The comments under every Newstalk ZB Facebook post are crowded with people who have made the time to declare her a talentless failure. Many are convinced that news media are being secretly paid to cover her. A few express the belief that she is an agent of Satan and some say things so vile that I could not repeat them here. Others actually say it out loud: that she is a proxy for another New Zealand woman, Jacinda Ardern, who resigned as prime minister two and a half years ago, but has taken up permanent residence in their minds.
I was in Wellington to properly farewell an old friend, and give my fourth eulogy in nine months. While I was there, another friend, the wonderful disability advocate Hilary Stace, died from a brain injury sustained in a fall. On the same day, I had lunch with a former colleague whose wife suddenly has a very uncertain prognosis. Sometimes you need to go for a walk.
The walk was also a chance to survey Wellington, a city whose woes the rest of the country has heard a lot about. I was staying in Newtown, where the scruffy, slightly mad air did not seem to have greatly changed, but the A4 political posters plastered over a building site did give things an early-80s vibe.
Further along towards the city centre, the Syrian kebab place was displaying a poster for Ray Chung, the hapless mayoral candidate whose allies, Better Wellington, have been prominent in attacks on the current mayor, Tory Whanau. Whanau, coincidentally a woman, has brought on a few of her own troubles, but has also overseen a dramatic jump in investment in the water infrastructure everyone claims to want. She will not stand for the role again, but can expect to be another long-term tenant of angry minds.
The central city had some empty retail spaces, but fewer than, say, Newmarket in Auckland, which really does feel sad. Tākina, the convention centre for which Whanau has been assailed despite it being commissioned years before her election, had a historical exhibition of Disney animation. It was anodyne, more of a corporate brand projection than an exhibition, and cost $30 to enter.
Yet outside, around Waitangi Park and the harbour edge, Wellingtonians crowded, indomitable in their woolly hats. The southerly that had pushed me down the hill landed harshly here, but everyone seemed to treat it as an adventure. It looked and felt like everything you like about the place. The yum cha place on Tory St was full to bursting.
In the days following, the city got some bad news. The Most Interesting New Zealander will not be playing there. The online commenters clamoured to declare it further evidence of her perfidy, or to insist they didn’t care. The real reason is that Wellington lacks a big enough indoor arena for a Lorde crowd. It would be a bold council that suggested spending money on one.
