Lorde Just Waxed Poetic About Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s Private Tapes…
“I found it to be so beautiful. And maybe it’s fucked up that I watched it, but I saw two people that were so in love with each other, and there was this purity," Lorde told Rolling Stone. Um.
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Lorde’s (né Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor) forthcoming album, Virgin, is due next month, so you know what that means? A Rolling Stone cover story, baby! In the magazine’s latest issue, the 28-year-old singer-songwriter chatted about her new music: “There’s going to be a lot of people who don’t think I’m a good girl anymore, a good woman. It’s over.”; gender identity: “I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man”; and a particularly fucked up relationship pattern: “I was always choosing someone to be God.”
Now, I like Lorde. And for the most part, I liked the conversation. But there’s a certain part of the interview that sincerely gave me pause. According to Lorde, she found solace in MDMA therapy to cope with life’s bends (an eating disorder, stage fright, etc.) from 2022 to 2024. Again, I get it. Yet, after one session, she felt an urge to watch the storied, internet-distributed “sex tape” of Pamela Anderson and her then-husband, Tommy Lee, on their honeymoon…
“I found it to be so beautiful. And maybe it’s fucked up that I watched it, but I saw two people that were so in love with each other, and there was this purity,” Lorde said. “They were jumping off this big boat.…They were like children. They were so free. And I just was like, ‘Whoa. Being this free comes with danger.’” Like the danger of having one’s most intimate moments stolen and manufactured into a tidy little tape that would make its thief $77 million in under a year and subject an innocent woman to decades of dehumanization? Is she trying to be an edge-Lorde now???
First, can you imagine leaving MDMA therapy and immediately queuing up an infamous celebrity sex tape only to admit to doing so on the record? Second, how very strange to then use this anecdote as a springboard to launch into a soliloquy about the consequences of exercising personal freedom, which is exactly what Lorde did.
“It feels worse to keep it all bolted down,” she said of her outlook on taking risks. “But God, of course, I’ve had many moments in the last couple years where I’m like, ‘If I could just have a nice normal life where you don’t elicit any strong reactions from anyone.’ But that’s not my path.”
Frankly, the admission is getting a side-eye from me. Anderson has spoken very candidly about how the tape quite literally ruined her life for a time. If you’re still watching a tape that you know caused people pain to gain an unoriginal analysis about your own, try a different therapy.
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