* Lorde's uniqueness makes her a pop standout

 
Lorde may never be a royal, but these days, she’s living like one.

The 17-year-old singer, anointed to the lofty position of pop’s newest princess thanks to her astute hit song, “Royals,” is surrounded by the materialistic things she rails against in her No. 1 smash. She has drivers, she’s catered to and says she could get “crazy bottle service” if she so desired.

“The irony is not lost on me,” she said in a recent interview. Yet just because she’s surrounded by excess doesn’t mean she indulges — or is even interested in — it.

“Every time I go out, it’s with my mom and my band and my manager and all these adults who are looking over me pretty much, so it’s pretty tame to be honest,” she said.

“I definitely don’t feel like I’m living in a particularly extravagant sort of way — which I think is good because I think for me, personally, if I was thrown into that kind of thing, I wouldn’t know how to deal with it,” she said. “I think it’s good to kind of keep on keeping on — just do what you have normally done and sort things into a stride.”

It will be hard for Lorde, born Ella Yellich O’Connnor, to keep on living a normal life if her stratospheric trajectory stays on point. In just a few months, she’s gone from being a New Zealand teen with an EP and an impressive following on SoundCloud to a four-time Grammy nominee (including nominations for top categories record and song of the year) with commercial success and plenty of critical raves.

“Royals,” which has sold close to 4 million tracks, was at the top spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for nine weeks, and Rolling Stone named the song as the second best single of the year. Lorde was named Spotify’s most viral new artist, and NPR recently compared her to Nirvana — a pretty heady comparison for someone who’s still in high school.

But Lorde is miles apart from the typical teen artist — or pop star. Her debut, “Pure Heroine,” touches on what she describes as teen life: relationship drama, school, party life and suburban living. But it hardly comes off that way. With the help of her collaborator, Joel Little, Lorde fashioned a moody, lyrically rich album told in a far more mature way than most teens would ever describe.

“When you consider how little life experience anyone who is 16 could possibly have, and then you listen to these lyrics, you go, ‘Wow, how do you know?’ She wrote these songs when she was 15,” said Jason Flom, head of Lava Records, which signed her to a major label contract. “She’s a once in a lifetime type of artist.”

“Royals” is nominated for best pop solo performance and “Pure Heroine” is up for best pop vocal album at the Grammys.

Lorde, who says she started writing music when she was 12, downplays the hype (she calls “Royals” an “obvious” song) and talk about being wise beyond her years.

“Is that an odd thing?” she asks. “I’ve always written and read and that’s been a part of me that’s superimportant. And it’s a really good outlet for me to be able to say whatever I’m thinking and whatever it is that I’m trying to process. So, I don’t think it’s too weird. And I also think people my age these days … with the Internet, you know, you can be making beats out of your bedroom and be a superstar.”

While plenty of people are making beats out of their bedroom, few are taking it to the superstar level. Flom says that’s why he signed her and agreed to let her continue to work with Little instead of enlisting established hit producers.

“Stars to me (are) when they walk into a room, they take up all the oxygen,” said Flom. “She’s the opposite of many of today’s pop stars. … There’s something about her that she’s not like other people.”

That’s part of her appeal. In a music world where the majority of female pop stars seem to be competing for who can wear the least, Lorde stands out with her understated, almost modest, attire; the wildest thing about her is her long, flowing locks of auburn hair.

She’s garnered a reputation for being outspoken. She was quoted as calling DJ/producer David Guetta “gross,” has made disparaging comments about Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus, and complained that Taylor Swift seemed “too perfect” (though the pair were recently spotted hanging out together).
“No one’s ever going to tell her what to say,” said Flom. “It’s not going to happen. And when she says things, it comes from a place of honesty … I don’t think anyone can get mad at her for that.”

Perhaps weary of such headlines, Lorde was uncharacteristically mum and declined to clarify those comments in this interview. (A publicist was prepared to end the conversation if it veered into tabloid territory.) She blamed others for trying to position her as the “anti-other things that are happening right now.”

But the self-proclaimed feminist seems to make that declaration on her own.

“My kind of interest in making music was born out of this desire to hear something that I hadn’t yet heard,” she said. “I guess it was never really going to be interesting for me to do something that had been done a lot of times. Because, yeah, I wanted to make something that I thought was fresh and felt kind of new.”

* To say China is a nation of copiers is only half-true

John Howkins is the author of ‘The Creative Economy’ 
Beijing and Shanghai are like New York and Chicago in the 1890s: excitable, rumbustious and slightly crazy. Fortunes are made and lost quickly. Local government officials are deeply involved in property and business. The families and companies that succeed become the new aristocracy.

The Europeans looked at emerging America and found it slightly vulgar. They did not like the way art mixed with business. I suspect many feel the same about China. They say Chinese creativity is an oxymoron. They believe the country lacks the west’s bravura and risk-taking. They dismiss it as a nation of copiers.

But walk the streets, or check the output figures, and you see Chinese creativity on the march. Once reliant on low-cost manufacturing, China is now catching attention for its art, design, digital media and fashion.
 

I estimate that 10 times more fashion stores opened in Shanghai than in New York last year. BK Design, a womenswear shop in Wuxi city, Jiangsu province, could hold its own in Brooklyn. The most expensive fashion store to open in London last year – at a cost of £30m – was China’s Bosideng.

Tencent – the Hong Kong-listed company that is one of China’s top three internet groups – is ingenious in catering to China’s 600m netizens, twice as many as live in America. Sales at Jack Ma’s online retailer Alibaba exceed those of Amazon and eBay combined. Mr Ma is planning an initial public offering in New York; the valuation is likely to exceed that of Facebook, partly because Alibaba offers a wider range of mobile services.

A surprising fact about China’s creative industries is the extent of private initiatives. Those fashion stores are all private. Most creative start-ups receive less state support than their equivalents in the west.

The complaint that the Chinese are a nation of copiers is half-true. They are astonishing copiers. They copy for the same reasons and with the same skill as did the British, Germans, French and Americans when they industrialised. Copying is often the best way to learn. In the 20th century, Europe and America went on to produce the greatest art, literature and design, and China may well do the same this century.

Yet anyone who uses Tencent’s WeChat messaging app or sees the Pritzker Prize-winning Wang Shu’s Art Academy in Hangzhou and says everything is copied is just not looking. It is true the Chinese tend to copy more than the west thinks polite or legal. One Chongqing company allegedly copied a whole complex by architect Zaha Hadid. This is reprehensible – but again, the west should remember its own history. Architects from London to Washington happily copied Palladio.

In my experience, while Beijing imposes shackles in some sectors, creativity and innovation are as highly valued in China as elsewhere. But the west’s scepticism means opportunities are being missed. Beijing knows it must import new thinking to manage the biggest building boom in history. Prime Minister Li Keqiang says the way China manages its cities will determine both quality of life and economic resilience. China needs masterplanners, urban transport specialists, “smart city” designers, landscape architects, low-energy engineers and interior designers. The west has a good record here. But last month’s meeting on creative cities led by Mr Li and Europe’s José Manuel Barroso was disappointingly short of Europeans with new ideas.

It is the same in film. James Cameron, the film director who used motion capture to make Avatar, is working with a new studio complex in the city of Tianjin, outside Beijing, on his next movie. I have asked several western motion-capture companies if they are interested in China; none has made the move.

The companies that move in successfully have four principles. They focus on areas where they have a clear advantage. They open an office – preferably a big one, since the Chinese are impressed by size. They know how to mix their own skills with local talent.

And they visit as much as possible because business in China is based on personal relationships, just like the US in the 1890s. Like America, China is experimenting with individual freedoms, the role of the state, the nature of risk and the kind of society that results. It is a conversation worth having, and working together in a creative business is the best place to start.

* Elon Musk: A serial entrepreneur on a mission

Whether it be reaching for the stars or changing people’s attitudes to electric cars, in 2013 the South African-born serial entrepreneur and visionary showed he was doing more than anyone in Silicon Valley to demonstrate how technology can revolutionize the way we live our lives. No wonder people are calling him the next Steve Jobs.

Picking a fight with the automotive industry is not something to be taken lightly. Yet the continuing success of Tesla, a tiny company that has been in existence for less than 10 years, is already outperforming Porsche, Cadillac and BMW in its native California and with over 40,000 sales of its Model S Executive electric cars and counting.

What’s more, sales are no longer confined to North America. In 2013, the company and its cars crossed the Atlantic and are arriving in Europe. The first deliveries of to customers in Norway, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland began in August and a special right-hand-drive version for eager UK customers has just been announced.

The company has also pledged that by 2014 a pan-European Tesla supercharging network will be in place so that owners will be able to recharge their cars’ batteries free of charge during long journeys throughout the continent.

This is a massive cross-border, potentially hugely bureaucratic undertaking, yet if anyone can make it happen, one suspects Elon Musk can.

Charismatic, driven and extremely intelligent — he taught himself to code aged 12 and holds degrees in economics and physics — according to movie director Jon Favreau, Musk was the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal of Tony Stark in the “Iron Man” films.

But character traits and qualifications alone are not enough to force consumers to change existing habits — especially when it comes to something like buying a car – and especially when the Tesla alternative is born of a company that has only ever built two road-going vehicles.

But Musk is on a mission, as he demonstrated this year. “Our goal when we created Tesla a decade ago was the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible,” he says in his latest blog post.

And to do that, he’s even prepared to license and build his electric powertrains for other car companies, including Mercedes and Toyota. Anything that will raise the money needed for Tesla to roll out an affordable (i.e., $30,000) electric car that the average consumer can afford and, more importantly, will want to own.

According to Chris Anderson, erstwhile editor of Wired and current curator of TED conferences, Tesla has already cornered the market in desirability: “I think people who drive Teslas are getting religious in the same way that people got religious when they first used Macs, or experienced multi-touch. It’s going to change everything. He’s [Elon Musk] going to seduce us into an energy sustainable future.”

But this is what Musk does for a living. No one used or trusted the internet for making financial transactions until PayPal – a company he co-founded – came along. And, until Tesla redefined the concept, no one saw electric cars as exclusive, exciting or fun to drive.

And Musk’s ambitions don’t stop with electric vehicles or even with this particular planet. When he sold PayPal to eBay, he used the proceeds to start Space X, a company that builds rockets and currently has several NASA contracts for transporting supplies and equipment to the international Space Station. In 2009 it became the first privately funded company to put a satellite in Earth orbit. But the upper atmosphere is not enough and Musk has his sights set on Mars.

Then there’s his solar energy business, SolarCity, which is aimed at halting global warming through easier access to solar cells and his current sci-fi scheme, the Hyperloop, a sub-sonic public transport system unveiled this past August that would enable commuters to travel between Greater Los Angeles area and the San Francisco Bay Area (a distance of 350 miles or 560 km) in less than 40 minutes. Estimated to cost some $6 billion to go from an incredible idea to an equally incredible reality, Musk has offered to make the project ‘open source’ so that anyone could conceivably adapt and modify – just like computer code.

Such boundless business energy and technological enthusiasm, coupled with an impressive success rate, no matter what the challenge, has led Fortune to declare Musk its businessperson of 2013 but also, via an accompanying profile piece, to compare him to Steve Jobs. “When you look at the incredible range of his endeavors and search for recent comparisons in the business world, only one emerges: Steve Jobs. Most business innovations involve only incremental improvement. And of those entrepreneurs lucky enough to succeed with bigger ideas, the large majority then stick to their industry sector for expansion and consolidation. Jobs and Musk are in a category all their own.”

So what’s next for Musk? Potentially building a submersible car that performs as well under the water as it does on land. Musk recently confirmed that his was the winning bid for the James Bond submarine car from the 1977 film, “The Spy Who Loved Me.” In a statement issued to Jalopnik in October, he said: “It was amazing as a little kid in South Africa to watch James Bond in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ drive his Lotus Esprit off a pier, press a button and have it transform into a submarine underwater. I was disappointed to learn that it can’t actually transform. What I’m going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real.”