The GQ Party That Inspired Lorde’s New Song ‘Man of the Year,’ Explained
On Thursday, New Zealand pop star Lorde dropped “Man of the Year,” the second single from her forthcoming album, Virgin, and a raw new music video to accompany it. It’s a song she’s described as an ode to her ongoing gender exploration; when she previewed it on Instagram, she called it “an offering from really deep inside me” and “the song I’m proudest of on Virgin.”
For longtime GQ readers, the song’s title may ring a bell: Since 1996, this magazine has hosted its annual Men of the Year party (colloquially referred to as “MOTY”) to celebrate our year-end print issue, which honors the entertainers, athletes, designers, and others whose work defined the culture that year. In a new interview with the Australian radio show Triple J, Lorde said she began writing the song two years ago, the day after attending GQ’s Men of the Year event in Los Angeles.
On November 16, 2023, a bleach-blonde Lorde hit the MOTY red carpet outside the Chateau Marmont in a silky, emerald-green Acne Studios gown with a midriff cutout. It had been a little over two years since she’d released her third album, Solar Power—a mid-pandemic idyll about the blissed-out, if privileged, pleasures of touching grass and being stoned at the nail salon. She attended the party as a guest; that year’s honorees included Jacob Elordi, Kim Kardashian, Travis Scott, and Tom Ford. Per the radio interview, the party brought up new feelings about her own identity and self-expression.
“It was funny, I had been feeling this expansiveness of gender happening for a while, and this was my first event that I’d been to in a while, and I wore a kind of ‘hot girl’ dress, and I felt so not like myself,” Lorde said. “And it was a really cool marker, especially being at this event that was celebrating all these cool guys, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m one of those guys, like, sometimes, when I wanna be. And I was like, ‘Whoa, I don’t think the hot-girl dress is the right device for this moment.’”
While “kind of hungover” in the studio the next day, Lorde began writing a song about “how I’m the Man of the Year, for me.” (Also that day, on November 17, she shared a Getty-watermarked photo of herself from the event with the caption, “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man.”) The resulting track, which was co-written with producer Jim-E Stack, memorializes her experience of feeling her gender “broaden and shift and bust out of me in this way that was really amazing to me and also really scary and emotional.”
In a recent Rolling Stone profile, Lorde recalled a conversation with fellow musician Chappell Roan: “She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.” In the music video for “Man of the Year,” Lorde seems to embrace the dueling notions of boundaries and boundlessness. The clip opens with the musician sitting on a chair as she strips off her white T-shirt and binds her breasts with duct tape, which allows her to bound freely across a large studio space filled with dirt. “I didn’t think he’d appear / Let’s hear it for the man of the year,” she sings.
