An Itch for the Transcendental: What Lorde’s ‘Perfect Places’ Reveals About Our Postmodern Angst
The core of Lorde’s 2017 song Perfect Places is captured by the closing verse of the song.
“All the nights spent off our faces / Trying to find these perfect places / What the fuck are perfect places anyway?”
Lorde describes a longing for something true, a higher place, amidst the party and drinking culture of Aotearoa New Zealand. This lucid confession is a potent example of the cultural search for the transcendental—the sense that there is a generation searching for some substantial meaning even though they are situated in a postmodern condition which has rejected universal conceptions of truth. If modernity is marked by the belief that absolute certainty and universal truth can be attained through rational thought and scientific method, postmodernity is a loss of faith in such grand narratives.
However, there is a paradox to postmodernism’s sentiment—a rejection of all forms of authority, yet there still lingers an itch for the transcendental—as expressed by postmodern author Julian Barnes, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” This suspicious and unbelieving condition is haunted, and always has been. Belief is contested in this age, but almost as soon as unbelief becomes an option, unbelievers begin to have doubts and to wonder if there isn’t something ‘more.’ There is concern over the shape of a world so flattened by disenchantment. Postmodernity braces itself for a life without truths, standards, and ideals. To this end, there is no true way to narrate one’s own identity in the postmodern incredulity, and thus, whether sober or drunk, the haunting question remains the same: “What the fuck are perfect places?”
“All of the things we’re taking / ‘Cause we are young and we’re ashamed / Send us to perfect places / All of our heroes fading / Now I can’t stand to be alone / Let’s go to perfect places.”
These lyrics speak of transience and the loss of idols worth believing in. Lorde concludes that the burden of this reality is too heavy to bear and seeks to find ‘perfect places’ instead. The burden and paradox of the postmodern condition is that it restores the fullness of choice and responsibility while at the same time deconstructing the comfort of the universal guidance that modernity once promised. Time and space have been compressed and flattened. Time lacks the density of history; it has been accelerated in a post-industrial age where goods and service are available twenty four hours a day due to the internet. Similarly space is compressed—the internet makes distance of no consequence. This mode of experience is conducive to consumerism, and conservation becomes increasingly less popular. In a culture where goods are disposable and services are instantaneous, things of value become obscured and difficult to preserve. To be postmodern is to be a nomad. Nomads do not dwell, but only pass through.
“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”
This feeling of transience and uncertainty, and the search for the transcendental, which can be situated in the postmodern condition, is perhaps summed up best by Lorde’s own commentary:
“and all last summer, i couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone i knew or saw was searching for something – trying to transcend the news and the screaming pavements, drinking that one drink hoping it’d get them someplace higher.”
The gospel, which is set in hope for the future—always moving and looking forward to the promise of God—offers critiques to the transient and meaningless cries of Perfect Places. Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14). The gospel corrects the idolisation of drinking as a means of transcending daily life in search for ‘something higher.’ The gospel offers a critique, and indeed another path forward, in the empty search for ‘perfect places’ which, at the end of the song, concludes that such a place is, in fact, unattainable and unknowable.
On the contrary, followers of Jesus know something about the true end of humanity, not because they discovered it, but because it was revealed to them in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Humanity’s end is realised in the new creation where human culture will be in perfect communion with the triune God, neighbour, and creation. Christian hope anticipates this reality. Human culture finds its end, not in an imagined ‘perfect place,’ but in a city brimming with architecture and craftsmanship, languages and ethnic cultures, music and politics (Rev 21:2). Creation starts with a garden and ends in a city.
It is often pointed out that some of the places most lacking hope are not the industrial wastelands or the poverty-stricken slums, but the places where there is too much money, too much high culture, too much of everything except faith, hope, and love. To such places, and the weary people who live in them, such as the world of Perfect Places, the message of Jesus and his life, death, resurrection, and ascension comes as good news, the surprise of hope. On the surface, Perfect Places may sound like an anthem for the experience of drunken misery and cuss words, which we should keep young believers away from, but there is a deeper cry in Lorde’s lyrics that reflect the longing of Romans 8. In Romans 8, Paul affirms that the whole creation is groaning in labour pains as it longs for its redemption. Perfect Places elicits this posture of eschatological longing that, indeed, the whole creation has been participating in ‘up until the present time’ (Rom 8:22). The beauty of the created order at present is transient—it is in pain—but that pain is taken into the very heart of God and becomes part of the pain of new birth. Art is a good part of human culture which responds to and tries to express, imitate and highlight the beauty of God’s creation, a beauty which it does not simply possess in itself, but within view of its promised end.
Art is a window into the soul, it tells us something about the human condition and spurs us inward to our deepest thoughts and longings. By thoughtfully examining the lyrics of Lorde’s music, one taps into a valuable resource that offers insights into the desires and fears of an audience, indeed many Christian, that embrace her. Perfect Places is the anthem of a generation longing for truth and meaning, a desire no earthly substance has been able to satisfy. It acts as a signpost towards a new age which is announcing itself in the aching groans of birthing pain, and will fulfil the thirst of every human heart. The author C. S. Lewis describes his sense of this transcendental itch:
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world...earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”
True peace lies in the future promises of God. In the words of St. Augustine, “…you have made us for yourself Lord, and our hearts are restless until they can find rest in you.”
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Stephanie Chan 陈雪莹 is a theology student in Tāmaki Makaurau.