It goes like this.

In January 2014, Lorde won her two first Grammy Awards for the song “Royals”.

It’s honestly a tough one to comprehend. At the start of 2013, nobody on /mu/ had ever heard of her, and they’ve been a place that’ve pushed ideas before. Controversial experimental hip-hop band Death Grips personally interacted with /mu/ to build hype for their album NO LOVE DEEP WEB. When the album finally released, it had over 34 million tracked downloads on BitTorrent. One year before Lorde became a sort of pop-music queen, it was entirely possible to amble onto /mu/, pretend to be her, and succeed.

Soon after the Grammy win, /mu/ users notice this thread in their archive.

The reaction in /mu/ was mixed. Some said it was a viral-marketing plant, claiming Pure Heroine was pushed agressively to /mu/ and pointing to some similar-looking posts that seemed a little heavy on marketing speak, others pointed to a certain plausaibilty that it could’ve genuinely happened.

For me, the moment I genuinely was convinced it was Lorde for a second came around when someone pointed out that the exact same image was used by this post, which was verifably:

From New Zealand. From someone closely involved with the music industry. A big fan of Phil Elverum/Mount Eerie.

Does this odd photoshopped cunnilingus cat even seem like something Lorde would post on 4chan, twice? I feel like I need to make some apologies here.

Now, this was obviously a bit of a mistake. Firstly, I don’t think Lorde is the type of person to use 4chan’s colloquialism of calling everyone a “fag”. Secondly, Lorde never actually listed Mount Eerie as an influence anywhere, and being a fan of both I just have only my over-active imagination to blame. Thirdly, does she even live in Dunedin? I don’t know. It was a little bit silly.

It didn’t stop me at the time.

On Twitter, I updated my uncaring followers about this bizarre incident that Lorde would have risen from /mu/tant to Grammy Award Winner in the space of a year.

I actually just liked stories like this. I’d seen similar posts online by James Blake, Avicii and even Drake’s posts in a Canadian hip-hop forum.

Anyway. I had an interesting story about Lorde, and one that I wanted to spread around and find out more about. You see, I was pretty moved by the idea that a musician I admired might’ve had a similar process of finding music and inspiration to what I do. /mu/ was a defining factor in my own music taste, from when I first wandered on there in 2009 — looking for the leak of a Muse album — to the present day. The thought that an international star rose from a place like that was kind of captivating to me. It’s similar to how Reddit reacted to her AMA session: she showed a strong understanding of the internet and all the people on it and the culture that surrounds it.

I was into Reddit too; I frequently get my new music from corners like /r/hiphopheads and /r/futurebeats. I wasn’t as massively into the default /r/music sub-reddit; it was a little too busy, a little too hard to use as a spot to find something new. But I figured I’d do something with this story.