Lorde - Perfect places

When we are on our teens we do believe firmly that we have a message and that our generation is going to make a deep impact in the world. When we grow older we realize how much naïvety we carry in our youth discourses and hopes that really don't stand a chance in the world, and we see the following generation as trivial and lost. The gen Z and their blogger celebrities and lyrics that claim that their worst problem in life is that "Haters gonna hate hate hate", is looked by now-adult millennials as the peak of vain and ego-centered culture, we are ready to jump and claim that our future is doomed in their hands, just the way that Gen-X talked about us and our reality-show obsession.

But every once in a while, a young prophet is ready that remind us that there's a deep side of being a teenager. At 19, Lorde is ready to throw serious questions and to constantly defy our expectations on her. In Perfect Places she uses her witty lyricism to describe the disenchant of her generation and her dying idols: Bowie is death, Hilary Clinton lost to a man who could "barely speak in meaningful fluent sentences"; is there room for hope in a historic moment where headlines threaten every day on WWIII and the new arise of nazi groups?

If the world is not to be a perfect place, then we should try to fake that perfection behind loud music, people gathered and heavy drinks. But the ideal of a Friday night being the only moment to be fully ourselves, rarely delivers: music disappointed us, we had more drinks than we should and made an embarrassment of ourselves, our lover of the night is far from being Ryan Gosling or Emma Watson. But yet, next Friday we're again lost in that promise of having "the best night of our life".

And if we can't succeed on a Friday night, how are we supposed to succeed on a career or in a relationship or in being adults? This notion of the existence of perfect places, boasted by Instagram posts where everything looks designed to be in the big screen, is the one that keeps bringing us down, by thinking that we are a total failure. Lorde dares to ask: "What the fuck are perfect places anyway?" It's only when we realize that they don't exist is when we start making the most of us, and our imperfection self, and our imperfect skills, and our imperfect fun, and our imperfect nights out.