The First Parody Is Always a Baptism

Royals was everywhere in October 2013—on every playlist, every listicle, every late-night performance. Ella Yelich-O’Connor, sixteen years old and performing as Lorde, had written a song about not being rich that became the most universally beloved pop single of the year. And then Key of Awesome got to it, which means it had officially arrived.

There’s a specific kind of attention that parody represents. Not mockery, not exactly—recognition with a smirk attached. Key of Awesome’s send-up lands somewhere between affectionate and pointed, doing the usual thing where you lampoon the very qualities that made the original irresistible: the minimalism, the deadpan, the total lack of interest in being fun.

The Lana Del Rey comparison was already circulating, and I understood it. Two women with carefully constructed personas, both critically adored and internet-suspicious in equal measure, riding waves of hype that felt too vertical to sustain. Lana came crashing back down—the SNL performance, the backlash machine, the sudden consensus that she was a fraud. Whether Lorde would follow the same trajectory was genuinely unclear at the time.

She didn’t, as it turned out. But in October 2013, watching the parody, you couldn’t know that yet. The first parody is always a baptism. Sometimes it’s also a countdown.