During the Electra Heart era, MARINA used Tumblr just like her fans did - in a time where that did not feel cringe, or contrived, like it does nowadays when we see massive celebrities jumping on TikTok trends or otherwise trying to appear relatable. MARINA was fascinated by the way tumblr turned people into ‘mini-stars’ of the internet - anonymous faces reblogged hundreds of thousands of times a user could be famous in an instant without a single person knowing their name or even what they really looked like. It all meant something, even if it wasn’t always totally clear what that ‘something’ was. Not unlike Taylor Swift and her hidden messages in liner notes, every little thing about Electra Heart was intentional. There were multiple photograph series, all shared to her tumblr page, in which MARINA portrays a different archetype, all played by the titular Electra Heart - characters within a character.
MARINA ELECTRA HEART M4A SERIES
Then there are the four archetypes - housewife, beauty queen, homewrecker, idle teen - and each archetype has a series of songs on the album (or *not* on the album, but of the era) that correspond to their particular plight. There’s Electra Heart, the main character the narrator of the album. With further interrogation, MARINA’s Electra Heart becomes a chaotic, complex web of online content - beginning on her tumblr (now painstakingly archived by MARINA’s fan Wiki) trickling through all her interviews, and flourishing on her YouTube channel, where several songs and music videos exist from this era that never made it onto any official album edition, but still have millions of views on each, and contribute to the story told on the record. It’s a thread that can be traced throughout every one of her albums. The overall theme of Electra Heart is, at first glance, fairly clear - a young woman using pop music to comment on the vapidity and toxicity of celebrity culture, and the crumbling morals of society in general, with a feminist flair that is, while admittedly of its time, a credit to MARINA’s longstanding passion for gender equality.
However, it has endured amongst young people online, made the leap from tumblr to TikTok with ease, and continues to provide a gateway for teens who love pop, but are cynical about the world around them - and let’s face it, what teen wouldn’t be feeling cynical about the world right now? A Love Letter To The Chronically Online Upon release, Electra Heart received mixed reviews, failed to make any serious splash on the charts, and did not propel MARINA into global pop stardom in the same way that similarly themed albums did for her peers (e.g. That emotion is not just the nostalgia of ageing millennials - young people are still discovering Electra Heart and her chaotic, complex world, and feeling all those feelings, for the first time. There is something about Electra Heart and the little eyeliner heart on her cheek that ignites deep emotion within audiences, even after the primary frame of its existence - the heavily online, concerningly unregulated world of tumblr - has faded into obscurity.
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