‘Electra Heart’ by Marina: an album and an aesthetic
Well if you haven't noticed, the world kind of sucks right now. We're in a worldwide pandemic, relying on the leadership of people who care more about profit and personal gain than the welfare and health of the entire world, and every day brings new, exhausting bullshit that I’m somehow enraged by whilst simultaneously numb to. My personal experience has been rotten, but I have to acknowledge, not as hard as others by a long shot. I still have a job, though it may or may literally not kill me, and I can still pay my bills. I'm a little bitter over the fact that I receive no hazard pay while working directly with the public and all my University classes have been moved online, which sounds manageable in theory, but in practice adds more work and completely changes the content of my courses.
The good side of this, though, is that it's prompted me to think seriously about what I actually want in life. I'm not keen on dying from a horrible disease while working in a shitty customer service job, and I've realized I have no actual hobbies. I do, however, have interests, so I'm just going to make hobbies out of those. This is a long way of explaining that from now on my hobby will be blogging, and my main topic will be something I'm passionate about: flop pop albums that have gained a cult following.
There are tons of examples of this. Those who flop in pop usually do so for complicated reasons–sometimes a popstar’s previous success sets expectations too high, sometimes an album’s promotion creates problems with its release and reception, and sometimes an album’s content is too experimental to succeed in a mainstream market. None of this means that an album is bad, even if relatively unsuccessful; so when a flop album gets decided as under-appreciated by die-hard stans, the passion surrounding it grows exponentially once stans feel like they’re rooting for an underdog.
I hope to explore as many albums as I can, but I want to start with one that I don't think gets as much recognition as it should, despite gaining a significant cult following since its release: the 2012 sophomore album of Marina Diamandis (professionally known as just Marina, or formerly, Marina + the Diamonds), Electra Heart.
Assessing the flop-status of Electra Heart is not easy. In some ways, the album is Marina’s biggest success, being easily her most recognizable and best-selling album to date. In other ways, it’s her biggest failure. Despite debuting at number one on UK charts, the album at the time broke the record for lowest-selling number one album of the 21st century, and in the US, its peak came at just #31.
That's all fine and even impressive for an indie artist, which Marina technically is, but given the time and money put into the album, many expected Electra Heart to have a stronger commercial performance. The album's production credits, featuring big names like Dr. Luke and Diplo, along with Marina's change from a quirky, indie style to a highly-produced dance-pop genre prompted many to think she was leaving the indie scene and making a transition to full-on popstar, changing the standards for what a "success" is. When the album didn't hit as well as hoped, stan twitter moved to playfully–but maybe not always–calling Marina broke (she isn't), and she herself joked about bankrupting her label (she didn't).
Fan reaction is also hard to evaluate, possibly split down the middle. For some, Electra Heart is Marina’s magnum opus, a true pop masterpiece that Marina has never been able or even attempted to replicate. For others, it’s her worst album, a misstep a little too mainstream, disrupting her otherwise admirable indie-pop achievements. To this day, Marina’s entire fanbase seems to come in two forms: those who like her glitzy pop aesthetics and catchy hooks, and those who appreciate her DIY weirdness and yearn for the days of The Family Jewel’s cutting lyricism.
Even Marina seems to have mixed feelings on the project, simultaneously appreciating the love much of her fanbase has for Electra (it is currently the only era you can buy merch for in Marina’s online store, despite not being her last, or even second-to-last, release), while occasionally appearing bitter about the process its creation had to take. The many compromises Marina made in order to finish the record prompted plenty to call her a “sell-out,” and while that’s maybe harsh and over-simplified, it’s not totally uncalled for. In 2010, while promoting her first album, Marina was heavily critical of what she called “shitty American pop,” specifically calling out producer, Dr. Luke, and singer, Katy Perry, for working within a “hit factory” and churning out generic product. Less than a year later, she was touring with Katy Perry and co-writing with Dr. Luke (mind you, this is pre-scandal).
In recent years, Marina has admitted the album doesn’t fit well within her discography; she's likened its era to creating and acting in a play. This may be a way for Marina to contextualize her own disconnect from the record, but it also helps to explain the appeal of Electra Heart–an album that didn’t start as an album, and maybe thrived in spite of the actual music.
The story of Electra Heart begins where it flourished: on tumblr.com. Marina told The Irish Times of the record, “I was starting to think about our Tumblr generation, and how photos appear on Tumblr and people become almost like mini-stars of the internet, and you don’t know who the hell they are – they’re just anonymous faces.”
The first post on the official Electra Heart Tumblr (named: “THE ARCHETPYES”) came in June of 2011–one grainy picture of a newly blonde Marina and a caption that read “♡ I B E L I E V E I N M E ♡.” The first music video would be posted about two months later.
Even on the day of the video’s release, Marina wasn’t sure what form her finished project would take, calling “Fear and Loathing” simply: “Part One.” A narrative was beginning to form; in “Fear and Loathing” (the video), Marina stands in a mirror, chopping off half of her gloriously voluminous black hair and cooing lyrics like “got different people inside my head, I wonder which one that they like best.” In Part Two, the video for "Radioactive," she dons a cheap, blonde wig and wields a chainsaw next to some male co-star who barely matters. Part Three is the first video without an official accompanying song, though the instrumental resembles her then yet-to-be-released track, “State of Dreaming.” Marina sings slightly off-key, “housewife, beauty queen, homewrecker, idle teen,” introducing the story’s revolving characters, or “The Archetypes.” By the time the era came to a close, Marina would have crafted an eleven-part video series, only a few parts of which (three to be exact) working as promo for actual singles.
Throughout, Marina’s tumblr continued to be updated with a mix of professional photos and shots that came directly from a webcam in poor lighting. All captions follow the same format–quick catchy slogans, like “don’t put all your eggs in one bastard” or “a walk through the valley in the shadow of meth,” in spaced-out caps and book-ended by heart emoticons, exhibiting maybe the album’s greatest asset: it’s aesthetic.
I’ll admit, despite its mixed reviews, I was a bit surprised and disappointed to not see Electra Heart on a single “Best albums of the 2010s” listicle published late last year/early this year. Maybe Marina isn’t big enough to be considered amongst the decade’s most influential singers, and maybe the album didn’t blow critics away, but if you were on Tumblr from 2011-2013, Electra Heart was practically inescapable.
This is due, in part, to Marina’s own marketing campaign. Having started her career as an indie MySpace musician, Marina is and has always been excellent at social media. Electra Heart is the epitome of this, cultivating a specific aesthetic for the album that took a sort of pink or pastel grunge look (all the rage at the time) and injected it with pop-art sensibilities. One could argue that Marina was one of the Internet's first e-girls and possibly a pioneer for the subculture. Not only did she cultivate a particular image online, in any interview or performance you watch from the era, Marina is wearing a sort of uniform: bleach blonde hair with dark roots as a nod to the album’s themes of artificiality, a pink headband, and ultra-feminine dresses.
If you check the e-girl tags on TikTok or wherever else they virtually reside, occasionally you can spot a girl with a heart on her cheek, a signature of Electra Heart, the character, that Marina certainly didn't invent but maybe proves she was aesthetically ahead of her time.
Electra Heart was an album for sad bitch hour and the aesthetics of its promotion both complimented and juxtaposed this. It was pastel and girly, but thematically dark and desperate. The actual music evoked exactly that. The first track, “Bubblegum Bitch” is almost aggressively pop, like a ‘90s or early aughts bop that just snorted a whole lot of cocaine. “Got a figure like a pin-up, got a figure like a doll/Don’t care if you think I’m dumb, I don’t care at all” wind up being the opening lines of the whole record. It’s a genius opener, acting as a sort of litmus test for the rest of the album; if you can get down with “Miss Sugar Pink, Liquor Liquor Lips,” you might just *get* Electra Heart.
The word most commonly used to criticize the album is “overproduced,” or some synonym of this, and that’s fair. Electro-ballads like “Lies” and “Starring Role” nearly work; the lyrics feel vulnerable and intimate and Marina’s distinct, almost operatic voice brings a level of drama that complements the theatricality of the project, and yet the instrumentals are too generic to make the tracks anything special (you’d be better off listening to the acoustic versions). The instrumentals are a bit better on “Radioactive,” but the chorus cares too much about being catchy pop to the point that it’s mostly forgettable, even if the lyrics involve a nuclear heart and burning blood.
But there are times the over-production works to Marina’s benefit. “Primadonna,” the album’s first official single, features a throbbing dub-pop beat that may have felt trend-chasing and unoriginal (especially while Britney Spears was riding a nearly identical one on her 2012 hit, "Hold It Against Me"), but operates almost as a satire of itself in its conformity. Nothing of note really happens in the music video, and yet it’s transfixing. A singular spotlight follows Marina around an empty mansion while she does nothing in particular other than pose and flirt with the camera. It's a representation of the album's highlights, containing a story in its aesthetics without offering a complete narrative. More than that, it indulges in its visuals while simultaneously exposing, through framing and Marina’s performance, the desperation required in achieving a particular image. If the album succeeds, it succeeds because its satire of a popstar is made by someone with an obvious love for pop. Marina told Huffington Post:
“On the first album I secretly wanted to be a popstar but I wasn’t. The first album didn’t take me to that level. I criticized the whole American songwriting industry and the pop side of it and I was bitter about it. And I stepped back and thought ‘Why are you bitter? You can’t just stand there like every other indie musician and criticize this so-called “generic” music when you’re not doing anything to challenge that.’ So I wanted to use the pop model or the pop formula to become the kind of artist that I wanted to be, but also to make an album that was pop but that also has something behind it that was more than just ‘drunk in a club’ lyrics — which I actually love but you can’t dress that up.”
As a concept album, Electra Heart is a story following the titular character, Electra, and the archetypes that define her. What the actual story is is a bit unclear. This is another criticism of the album, but credit should still be given for its thematic cohesiveness. The narrative seems to revolve around a break-up, one that leaves Electra nearly broken, and through that brokenness, she reconstructs herself with the help of “the archetypes”–embodiments of female expectations.
Though never a single, “Teen Idle,” is a fan favorite, not just of the album but of Marina’s career. Fellow singer-songwriter, Billie Eilish, has called it “the best song in the fucking world.” Melanie Martinez named it as the song she wished she’d written. The track almost has a cult following on its own, becoming a sort of theme for sad bitches across the internet and inspiring loads and loads of fanart with lyrics like “I want blood, guts, and angel cake” and “I wanna be a real fake.”
Flaws and all, Electra Heart is an ambitious album with themes of sex, feminism, celebrity, and heartbreak that utilized visuals as much as it did music. She may have surpassed Marina in popularity in recent years, but the release of Melanie Martinez’s album, Cry Baby, received plenty backlash at the time for its similarities to Marina’s style on pop forums and stan Tumblr/Twitter. Martinez is an admitted fan who, at numerous times, covered Electra Heart’s “Starring Role”–a song that could have fit neatly in Martinez’s album released more than three years later. How similar something needs to be to be considered derivative is debatable, but it shouldn’t be controversial to say that Cry Baby was almost certainly influenced by Electra Heart. Like Marina, Martinez uses a visual concept album to fictionalize her own experiences through the lens of a titular character. The aesthetics are similar, though with a Lolita flair, and while Marina didn’t originate the style, it’s probably true that without the success of Electra Heart’s social media campaign, the visuals for Cry Baby could have been very different, and maybe not as daring.
After Electra Heart, Marina withdrew somewhat from mainstream pop attention. She went on to criticize co-writing in pop, either despite her experience making Electra Heart or because of it. Her following album, Froot, features only two production credits–Marina and David Kosten–and no co-writers for any of its 12 tracks. The album peaked at #8 on US charts despite getting zero radio play and critical reception was dominantly positive, being widely considered to be her best album to date. Electra Heart is still more recognizable and maybe more widely discussed even among hardcore pop stans. It wasn't her strongest musically, and the story of the concept album is too vague to be a real pop opera, but the impact is clear. “Primadonna,” “Sex Yeah!,” “Bubblegum Bitch” and “Teen Idle” are iconic masterpieces as far as I’m concerned.
The magic of pop, which many stans understand, is that it's partially a visual medium. Lady Gaga wouldn't have been as big without her aesthetics, nor would Madonna, Britney Spears, or nearly any other legendary (especially female) pop act, making Electra Heart an easy cult classic. The legacy of the album remains because half of it had nothing to do with the music at all. Rather, Electra Heart is a relic and embodiment of a particular time on the Internet–a time where we were all sad bitches who just wanted blood, guts, and angel cake presented to us in pastel pink packaging with heart emoticons.