Lorde Defends Her Surprise Appearance On South Park: “It Has A Message Of Transgender Acceptance”
She also impersonated the impersonation of herself: "Yayaya! / I am Lorde / Yayaya!"
Full admission: I stopped watching South Park a fairly long time ago. But based on the most recent storyline — which features Lorde as a 45-year-old transgendered geologist, but deals with the issues presented in a far more sensitive way than we’ve come to expect from the show — Trey Parker and Matt Stone are still offering up episodes that are worthy of discussion.
In the first episode of the month, ‘Gluten Free Ebola’, the character Randy Marsh — Stan’s dad — claimed he worked with the singer’s uncle, and could get her to play at a pizza party (she does; her single, ‘Push (Feeling Good On A Wednesday)’, is hilariously voiced by Sia).
In the following episode, it turned out that Randy himself WAS Lorde; he had developed the character as a way to use the vacant women’s restrooms at work, but had since begun to strongly identify with the gender.
i have officially been the subject of 2 south park episodes and that is weird and cool
— Lorde (@lordemusic) October 9, 2014
i don't actually watch south park but from what i can tell sia was involved and someone's mum said something really nice about me.. score!
— Lorde (@lordemusic) October 9, 2014
Although dappled with moments of hilarity, the most recent episode — part of South Park‘s 18th season — did come with a much more progressive and inclusive understanding of the trans community than the show exhibited in 2005’s ‘Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina’. In a parallel storyline, Cartman is taken to task for pretending to be transgender to get into the women’s bathroom; meanwhile, Stan’s mother Sharon talks to her husband about his new identity as Lorde.
“Lorde represents something in all of us: the truth that wants to be heard. If I could talk to Lorde right now, you know what I would tell her? I’d tell her not to change who she is,” she says, in an attempt to encourage Randy to keep his new identity. “I’d tell her that, if people are making fun of her, it’s probably because they’ve lost touch with being human. I’d tell her to keep on doing what she does, because when someone’s not allowed to express who they are inside, we all lose.”
Lorde posted those clips on Instagram, with messages of support. “This is actually surprisingly cute – and from what I can tell also has a message of transgender acceptance (I’m still very new with this type of humour so I’m not sure if was actually genuine but it seemed so to me),” she wrote with one post. “Well shit this is downright sweet. Take that haters I got a South Park episode ☺️☺️☺️” she wrote with another.
She also chuckled her way through the gags:
The episode ends with the South Park Elementary student body voting to allow students to use which ever bathroom they wanted to, as Lorde/Stan’s workplace also abolishes their segregationist transgender bathroom. Queer site Out.com applauded the episode, which “represents a major step forward for the show”: “Managing to lambast both transphobes and over-aggressive activists, the episode is classically South Park, but rather than condemning trans people as the show has in the past, it instead follows the general thesis of the series that people should be allowed to do what they want, so long as it doesn’t hurt others.”
All of which leads us to an interview with Lorde conducted by New Zealand’s TV3 over the weekend, in which reporter David Farrier asked her what she thought of the episodes. “That was really funny! I got off really easy!” she says. “I was thinking, ‘Yeah he has a moustache… I mean I have a moustache, but is it that prominent?’ But it was someone’s dad pretending to be me.
“We actually, in my hotel room, went ‘Ya ya ya ya ya I’m Lorde! Ya ya ya!’ for like an hour, because that’s why they do on the episode, so…”
At which point Farrier asks her to perform the snippet, and she obliges:
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For the original:
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And for the actual “single”, voiced by Sia: