CEREMONY | The Heart Rate: 10 Years of Electra Heart

[holy scheisse 20,327]

2 minutes ago, Cruelty said:

We've made it to the top 10! Who are you supporting? And who do you think is next to go?

Rooting for: teen idle and radioactive 

 

rooting against: primadonna (but I’m sure she’ll be number one )

[Cruelty 5,887]

10 ELECTRA HEART — average 7.85

Highest: 11 x 1 (@DrKindnessKunt1999); 10 x 6 (@CatelynnMarie @GaGaLB @VTV @Poltergeist @ARTPOPe @Lady Gaga 2009)
Lowest: 1 (Admin)

Electra Heart’s title track has quite the history — recorded for Electra Heart (based on a preexisting instrumental by Santa Barbara DJ Betatraxx), finally released in 2013 alongside the music video that killed Electra off for good, and remixed for its official single release in 2014. Basically, it’s ‘Skrillex and the Diamonds’, yet it works much better than you’d expect.

The energy ‘Electra Heart’ brings is massive. It’s almost manic, Marina’s vocals screwed up and spat out onto a battlefield of spiky sawtooths. It feels like a fight to the death. And Margarita Louca’s visual (linked below) enhances the effect massively, as Electra’s life unspools before our eyes. The Homewrecker wrecking herself. The Primadonna devoid of control (‘can we go back?’ Is change possible? Can I undo what I have done?) The Teen Idle finding herself in a place of utter regret. And the Suburban Housewife, breaking her chains in an utter rage, awake to the blindness imposed upon her. Every facet of Electra Heart is screaming out about the pain that love brings, and the restrictions it imposes upon us.

The hook ‘LIGHTS! THEY! BLIND ME!’ is just IMMENSE, as Electra realises the scale of love’s delusions. But it’s a hook that’s wasted on a slightly meandering, oddly structured song. I’m thinking of the unfathomable section where the song packs its bags, we have a little organ sermon interlude, and then we’re back into it. Conceptually I understand it, but talk about killing the momentum — and I’d love a few more lyrics, just to make this feel like more of a song and less of an interlude. It’s a decent send off for Electra, but I’m not too sure it works as a song on its own terms.

Comments

@Galvon The mv version is better

@Poltergeist I was soooo excited since I’ve heard the first live snippets, the production of this song is amazing (but the spotify version has too many repeated moments, feels a bit empty sometimes, I prefer the video version). Definitely my top 3!

@holy scheisse She’s fun and cute

@LovingIsACherryPie I don’t like the production that much, but I think it’s great as the closing track of the album!

[Poltergeist 2,835]

2 minutes ago, Cruelty said:

10 ELECTRA HEART — average 7.85

Highest: 11 x 1 (@DrKindnessKunt1999); 10 x 6 (@CatelynnMarie @GaGaLB @VTV @Poltergeist @ARTPOPe @Lady Gaga 2009)
Lowest: 1 (Admin)

Electra Heart’s title track has quite the history — recorded for Electra Heart (based on a preexisting instrumental by Santa Barbara DJ Betatraxx), finally released in 2013 alongside the music video that killed Electra off for good, and remixed for its official single release in 2014. Basically, it’s ‘Skrillex and the Diamonds’, yet it works much better than you’d expect.

The energy ‘Electra Heart’ brings is massive. It’s almost manic, Marina’s vocals screwed up and spat out onto a battlefield of spiky sawtooths. It feels like a fight to the death. And Margarita Louca’s visual (linked below) enhances the effect massively, as Electra’s life unspools before our eyes. The Homewrecker wrecking herself. The Primadonna devoid of control (‘can we go back?’ Is change possible? Can I undo what I have done?) The Teen Idle finding herself in a place of utter regret. And the Suburban Housewife, breaking her chains in an utter rage, awake to the blindness imposed upon her. Every facet of Electra Heart is screaming out about the pain that love brings, and the restrictions it imposes upon us.

The hook ‘LIGHTS! THEY! BLIND ME!’ is just IMMENSE, as Electra realises the scale of love’s delusions. But it’s a hook that’s wasted on a slightly meandering, oddly structured song. I’m thinking of the unfathomable section where the song packs its bags, we have a little organ sermon interlude, and then we’re back into it. Conceptually I understand it, but talk about killing the momentum — and I’d love a few more lyrics, just to make this feel like more of a song and less of an interlude. It’s a decent send off for Electra, but I’m not too sure it works as a song on its own terms.

Comments

@Galvon The mv version is better

@Poltergeist I was soooo excited since I’ve heard the first live snippets, the production of this song is amazing (but the spotify version has too many repeated moments, feels a bit empty sometimes, I prefer the video version). Definitely my top 3!

@holy scheisse She’s fun and cute

@LovingIsACherryPie I don’t like the production that much, but I think it’s great as the closing track of the album!

At least 7 songs too soon 

[Benji 20,113]

Rumour has it Admin’s 1 key on his keyboard has been worn down after he sent his rates

[Cruelty 5,887]

“I don’t really connect to happy songs, or like, major chords, very much. There have to be like doomsday chords. So I kind of wanted to create like a humorous but dark album about love.”

9 LIVING DEAD — average 7.85

Highest: 11 x 3 (@CatelynnMarie @itsmebuddy @ARTPOPe); 10 x 4 (@Grigio Guy @DrKindnessKunt1999 @Lady Gaga 2009 @LovingIsACherryPie)
Lowest: 2 (Admin)

The first song written for Electra Heart—and to be honest, it shows. The lyric is transparently about Marina’s depression during the first year of making the record, and feels a little one-note compared to the more sophisticated lyricism elsewhere on the album, but Greg Kurstin’s production slaps, especially the utterly exhilarating cascade of drums into the final chorus. Having been performed live since 2010 (!), I also get the sense Marina was fed up of the song by the time the album was released in the USA, so she swapped it out for ‘Sex Yeah’.

‘Living Dead’ hinges on metaphors of dissociation. Marina rues how “I haven’t lived life, I haven’t lived love, just a bird’s eye view from the sky above”, presaging ‘Teen Idle’’s similar complaint about not feeling involved in the world. But at the same time, she confesses “I’m living dead, only alive when I pretend that I have died”, so it’s acknowledging that cutting yourself off from the world can be quite a freeing experience, stepping outside of the constraints that life puts upon us. It also provides safety from having your heart broken again—I adore the couplet ‘Got bubble wrap around my heart, waiting for my life to start’, because the heart is wrapped up and kept safe, but also you have to pop it before you can use it; pain is a precondition to love.

Electra’s problem, then, is that she’s spending time ‘think[ing] of all the men [she] could’ve kissed’. Stripped of her earlier confidence, she’s left waiting for someone else to start her life for her. Why didn’t you just kiss them?! Listening to ‘Living Dead’ for this writeup, I was reminded of my favourite Buffy quote: “The hardest thing in the world is to live in it. Be brave. Live”. It can be so difficult to make sense of the world when you’re stuck in the middle of it, but ‘Living Dead’ is ultimately an unsustainable solution to Electra’s problems of love and identity.

 

Comments

@CatelynnMarie My fave and her best song in her discography. I have never related to a song as much as LD

@itsmebuddy Should’ve been a single and on the US version! My favourite song from the record

@Poltergeist Again a simple, yet memorable chorus, a classical Electra Heart experience

@holy scheisse Repetitive tbh

@LovingIsACherryPie I certainly didn’t expect such a FLAWLESS production in this track. Damn!

[Cruelty 5,887]

“I think the main theme [of Electra Heart] is love, and I suppose the side of love which is really about rejection, and about talking about things you don’t really like to admit in real life… I suppose I’ve written about it in a very particular kind of way, splitting the album into two moods, one which is very hesitant about being seen as a victim. You kind of get this impression of someone who’s quite tough. And then the other half of the album’s quite raw and explicit in its honesty.”

INTERVIEWER: Would you say you’re a heartbreaker?
MARINA: You know what? … I was. Okay, so, this whole Electra Heart thing…

8 HOW TO BE A HEARTBREAKER — average 8.00

Highest: 10 x 8 (@whoresup @itsmebuddy @GaGaLB @juicyjuicy @RAMROD @Zed @Torsoface @Lady Gaga 2009)
Lowest: 1 (@ARTPOPe, Admin)

In which Marina writes Dua Lipa’s ‘New Rules’, five years early. Recorded a little too late to feature on Electra Heart, ‘How to Be a Heartbreaker’ was tacked onto the album later in 2012 and released as its final single. Backed by a serviceable guitar-based pop production, ‘Heartbreaker’ is the Electra Heart album in microcosm—the thrilling rush of falling in love, intermixed with the agonising fear of impending heartbreak; at once brash and inhibited, bluster and bluntness. The song didn’t trouble the charts much in 2012, but has slow-burned its way to legend status and is now certified Platinum in the US and Silver in the UK.

The songs of Electra Heart can teach us a lot about identity, heartbreak, image, romance and power. What this song teaches us… is that there’s nothing wrong with a basic bop! Yes, the production is so 2012 it hurts, but I’ve seen Marina on three separate tours and each time it’s gone OFF, so I suppose a banger never truly ages. The song’s middle 8 makes a bid at profundity by dissolving the ‘heartbreaker’ façade and revealing what lies underneath: a girl so scared of love that she thinks you have to break a heart or someone will break yours. That might be true, but nobody’s coming to a song called ‘How to Be a Heartbreaker’ looking for an intellectual exegesis of the dynamics of romantic relationships. Nope. Simply put, it’s just a great bop.

The song’s music video should also be mentioned, because it’s an absolute scream. Marina said at the time: “I had 100 per cent creative control over this video. I was like OK, let’s get six Calvin Klein models and put them in the shower and I’ll be standing in the middle in PVC”. Are we sure she isn’t a gay man? The Speedo-tastic visual is linked below:

 

Comments

@CatelynnMarie Great song, but entirely overrated

@Poltergeist I’m really glad it brought her more reception. Even though it was released later it feels like it’s always been there since the beginning

@holy scheisse Fun. But another Katy perry reject sounding song

[huttont 4,679]

Power and Control or The State of Dreaming next. 
 

Radioactive soon too bc the fan base doesn’t like this banger for some reason

[Poltergeist 2,835]

I'm really curious what was Admin's best note, and for which song 

[huttont 4,679]

Just now, Cruelty said:

8 HOW TO BE A HEARTBREAKER — average 8.00

Highest: 10 x 8 (@whoresup @itsmebuddy @GaGaLB @juicyjuicy @RAMROD @Zed @Torsoface @Lady Gaga 2009)
Lowest: 1 (@ARTPOPe, Admin)

In which Marina writes Dua Lipa’s ‘New Rules’, five years early. Recorded a little too late to feature on Electra Heart, ‘How to Be a Heartbreaker’ was tacked onto the album later in 2012 and released as its final single. Backed by a serviceable guitar-based pop production, ‘Heartbreaker’ is the Electra Heart album in microcosm—the thrilling rush of falling in love, intermixed with the agonising fear of impending heartbreak; at once brash and inhibited, bluster and bluntness. The song didn’t trouble the charts much in 2012, but has slow-burned its way to legend status and is now certified Platinum in the US and Silver in the UK.

The songs of Electra Heart can teach us a lot about identity, heartbreak, image, romance and power. What this song teaches us… is that there’s nothing wrong with a basic bop! Yes, the production is so 2012 it hurts, but I’ve seen Marina on three separate tours and each time it’s gone OFF, so I suppose a banger never truly ages. The song’s middle 8 makes a bid at profundity by dissolving the ‘heartbreaker’ façade and revealing what lies underneath: a girl so scared of love that she thinks you have to break a heart or someone will break yours. That might be true, but nobody’s coming to a song called ‘How to Be a Heartbreaker’ looking for an intellectual exegesis of the dynamics of romantic relationships. Nope. Simply put, it’s just a great bop.

The song’s music video should also be mentioned, because it’s an absolute scream. Marina said at the time: “I had 100 per cent creative control over this video. I was like OK, let’s get six Calvin Klein models and put them in the shower and I’ll be standing in the middle in PVC”. Are we sure she isn’t a gay man? The Speedo-tastic visual is linked below:

 

Comments

@CatelynnMarie Great song, but entirely overrated

@Poltergeist I’m really glad it brought her more reception. Even though it was released later it feels like it’s always been there since the beginning

@holy scheisse Fun. But another Katy perry reject sounding song

[Cruelty 5,887]

“I could have just done it as Marina Diamandis, but for some reason at the time it was a relationship that had really hurt me and it was comforting to turn it into a fantasy… This is a record about being f*cked over.”

7 THE STATE OF DREAMING — average 8.04

Highest: 11 x 2 (@Born This Way @Galvon); 10 x 3 (@ARTPOPe @DrKindnessKunt1999 @Lady Gaga 2009)
Lowest: 1 (Admin)

Electra Heart finally accepts that she’s living day to day on delusions and dreams. After playing dress-up on songs like ‘Primadonna’ and ‘Homewrecker’, the lyrics sound like a revelation, a wakeup call—and “my life is a play” is equally applicable to Marina Diamandis or Electra Heart, both avoiding facing up to their suffering by pretending to be something they’re not.

The song was inspired by a figure especially known for her sense of image: Marilyn Monroe. Marina realised that millions of girls were living off ‘that one quote’ (the ‘one quote’ is Marilyn’s “I just want to be wonderful”) and ignoring the fact of Marilyn’s really undignified demise. The song is about how people see a beautiful image of a deeply troubled person, an image strong enough to make them believe certain things and behave in a certain way. This denial of true identity is a pivotal theme across Electra Heart, and ‘The State of Dreaming’ is the apotheosis of the album’s fascination with performance and fantasy.

Relistening to ‘The State of Dreaming’ for this megarate, I was surprised to learn that… it’s NOT as sh*t as I thought! The production’s unadventurous, and there are more interesting melodies elsewhere on the record, but I love the dramatic pre-chorus (“my LIFE is a PLAY, is a PLAY-EE, is a PLAY-EE-EE”), and the soaring strings in the chorus really sell the fantasy. The camp-as-tits middle 8 continues to slap and scalp, a decade on. One thing I will say, however, is that it’s borderline hilarious that millions of girls started to float on Electra Heart quotes after this came out. It’s like we collectively learned nothing.

Here is the video, which I have never watched and have no interest in watching now. At the time, Marina took to Twitter to ask “Why are people bitching about the S.O.D video budget? There WASN’T one! I filmed it after a photoshoot in 2 takes”. If that sounds like your kind of thing, a) seek help!, and b) here you are:

 

Comments

@Poltergeist I love the fact that this song is both very happy and sad at the same time due to the lyrics and sound changes

@holy scheisse She’s cute

@LovingIsACherryPie I love the lyrics of this song

[Cruelty 5,887]

"I changed my look so radically. Partly to become someone else and separate myself from being that love-lorn person. Partly because I wanted to see how differently I would be perceived because of it. I was interested in the power of image — it’s what pop stars are built on. And how weak that image simultaneously is.”

6 RADIOACTIVE — average 8.23

Highest: 11 x 1 (@HeavyMetal Halcyon); 10 x 6 (@whoresup @GaGaLB @juicyjuicy @ARTPOPe @holy scheisse @LovingIsACherryPie)
Lowest: 2 (@Grigio Guy)

Although ‘Fear and Loathing’ was released shortly beforehand, ‘Radioactive’ is truly where Electra Heart’s journey began. Casper Balslev’s video sees the newly-blonde Electra dragging a hunk around America; it’s essentially a less well-attended version of the ‘Perfect Illusion’ video. Our first real taste of the album back in 2011, ‘Radioactive’ baffled and bemused critics, who couldn’t understand how the quirky ‘Hermit the Frog’ girl had transformed into Madonna overnight. (This confusion was, of course, Marina’s intention all along).

If you’re going to go for this type of bold reinvention, you have to come roaring out of the gate with a stone-cold classic, and ‘Radioactive’ more than delivers. It’s just the biggest bop; one of her absolute best; a classic 2011 banger. I wouldn’t want a whole album of these Stargate productions, but in moderation it’s a perfect slice of euphoria. Is Electra Heart a scientist? On the evidence of these slightly half-baked metaphors about overwhelming love, probably not, but it’s a bop and that’s really all that matters.

On a personal note, Miss Catherine Zeta cut this song before my Neon Nature Tour date, and borderline ridiculed a fan for suggesting that she would ever perform it again, so… the taste is truly rotted. Anyway, @CatelynnMarie says it best: “Super fun and was a great track to promo the era with. Great video as well!” And since you all asked so nicely, here’s that video!

Comments

@Poltergeist I like it but I feel like it’s quite overrated

@holy scheisse Fun and catchy

@LovingIsACherryPie I love this track soo muchh

 

And guess what, @Poltergeist? This was Admin's highest score. He gave it an 8. But we can't be shady towards his music taste, because I swear he's just looking for an excuse to shut the site down at this stage 

[Poltergeist 2,835]

1 minute ago, Cruelty said:

"I changed my look so radically. Partly to become someone else and separate myself from being that love-lorn person. Partly because I wanted to see how differently I would be perceived because of it. I was interested in the power of image — it’s what pop stars are built on. And how weak that image simultaneously is.”

6 RADIOACTIVE — average 8.23

Highest: 11 x 1 (@HeavyMetal Halcyon); 10 x 6 (@whoresup @GaGaLB @juicyjuicy @ARTPOPe @holy scheisse @LovingIsACherryPie)
Lowest: 2 (@Grigio Guy)

Although ‘Fear and Loathing’ was released shortly beforehand, ‘Radioactive’ is truly where Electra Heart’s journey began. Casper Balslev’s video sees the newly-blonde Electra dragging a hunk around America; it’s essentially a less well-attended version of the ‘Perfect Illusion’ video. Our first real taste of the album back in 2011, ‘Radioactive’ baffled and bemused critics, who couldn’t understand how the quirky ‘Hermit the Frog’ girl had transformed into Madonna overnight. (This confusion was, of course, Marina’s intention all along).

If you’re going to go for this type of bold reinvention, you have to come roaring out of the gate with a stone-cold classic, and ‘Radioactive’ more than delivers. It’s just the biggest bop; one of her absolute best; a classic 2011 banger. I wouldn’t want a whole album of these Stargate productions, but in moderation it’s a perfect slice of euphoria. Is Electra Heart a scientist? On the evidence of these slightly half-baked metaphors about overwhelming love, probably not, but it’s a bop and that’s really all that matters.

On a personal note, Miss Catherine Zeta cut this song before my Neon Nature Tour date, and borderline ridiculed a fan for suggesting that she would ever perform it again, so… the taste is truly rotted. Anyway, @CatelynnMarie says it best: “Super fun and was a great track to promo the era with. Great video as well!” And since you all asked so nicely, here’s that video!

Comments

@Poltergeist I like it but I feel like it’s quite overrated

@holy scheisse Fun and catchy

@LovingIsACherryPie I love this track soo muchh

 

And guess what, @Poltergeist? This was Admin's highest score. He gave it an 8. But we can't be shady towards his music taste, because I swear he's just looking for an excuse to shut the site down at this stage 

Feeling so priviledged to get my answer in one of the main posts! 

[Cruelty 5,887]

And now we have our top 5! Who do you think we're saying goodbye to next?

[Benji 20,113]

Just now, Cruelty said:

And now we have our top 5! Who do you think we're saying goodbye to next?

Teen Idle, I think

[Poltergeist 2,835]

Just now, Cruelty said:

And now we have our top 5! Who do you think we're saying goodbye to next?

I'm betting on Starring Role