On Thursday, Lorde dropped the music video for “Man Of The Year,” the second single from her upcoming fourth album Virgin, featuring the singer, a chair, and a roomful of dirt familiar to fans of artist Walter De Maria.
Described by Lorde as the track she’s “proudest of” on the new album, “Man Of The Year” is a taut ballad about the rough road to self-acceptance. In the accompanying video, the singer removes her T-shirt and binds her breasts with tape. The 28-year-old New Zealander told the Australian radio show Triple J that the track’s title was inspired by attending GQ’s 2023 Man of the Year event and experiencing her notion of gender expression “broaden and shift and bust out of me in this way that was really amazing to me and also really scary and emotional.”
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The tape becomes a means of liberation as she leaps, crawls, and cavorts through the dirt pile in a mad modern dance. Following the release of the video, social media users were quick to point out the visual similarities to Walter De Maria’s installation New York Earth Room, which is currently managed by the Dia Art Foundation.
The work debuted in 1977 at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, near Houston Street in Manhattan, and consisted in that iteration of a field of powdery earth. There were no signs about where not to step, just the gallery, the dirt—a mix of peat and bark—and the microorganisms teeming within its ad hoc ecosystem. (The work reportedly grew edible mushrooms, while briefly available for purchase.)
After the gallery’s namesake founder, Heiner Friedrich, helped found the Dia Art Foundation, New York Earth Room was presented to the public as a permanent installation in SoHo in 1980. Per the foundation’s website, the early Dia team scaled up the Earth Room, increasing its total weight to 280,000 pounds and raising its depth to roughly two feet.
In its current iteration, you cannot actually step on the dirt, and indeed, the Lorde video was not filmed in the De Maria installation but is merely an homage to it.
On her website, Lorde said that, with her new song, she was “TRYING TO MAKE IT SOUND LIKE A FONTANA, LIKE PAINTING BITTEN BY A MAN, LIKE THE NEW YORK EARTH ROOM. THE SOUND OF MY REBIRTH.”
