Anyone who knows me knows that one of my favorite artists is Marina (formerly and most popularly known as Marina and the Diamonds.) She’s most known for her varying pop sound, expressive lyrics, and fantastic vocals. Every album Marina makes has a distinct sound, theme, and aesthetic — making each piece feel more like an era in her discography than just another album.
Marina’s sophomore album Electra Heart was a defining moment in her career, and grew to be a favorite among fans. It is an electro-pop concept album that follows the romantic and personal troubles of main character Electra Heart. The character is known by the small heart tattoo under the right eye.
The album chronicles the tale of Electra Heart, and how she tries to deal with her trauma from youth into womanhood. Marina uses themes of mental health (mainly depression and anxiety), sex, gender roles, and adolescence to tell the story of Electra. Below are the most important songs that detail the rise and fall of Electra Heart.
Note: This is just what I find important to the story in terms of character development and plot shift. In no way am I saying these are the best songs … we know they all slap!
Teen Idle
Teen Idle embodies the archetype of, you guessed it, the idle teen. In teen idle, Electra recounts her troubling adolescence. This is the only backstory we get about Electra, so we can assume that her teenage years is when her struggles with mental illness and relationships started.
The idle teen archetype is all about Electra’s adolescence. She spent her youth in the throws of depression, feeling “super, super, super suicidal” (the best line in the song … if you know, you know). Electra wishes that she had been the average teenage girl, and had the experiences that supposedly define teenage-hood. She wishes that she had done the risky things that typical teenagers do, such as underage drinking. Electra’s struggle with depression left her feeling like she lost a large part of her childhood. She wishes she had that moment in her life to be both risky and innocent, something one can only acquire in their teenage years. The name teen idle is a play on teen idol. Electra wishes she had been a popular beauty queen, but instead she ended up not doing much because of her mental health struggles. So, instead of being an idol, she was stuck on idle.
The most important line in the song is “the day has come where I have died only to find I’ve come alive.” This shows Electra’s transition from adolescence to adulthood. At this moment, she decides that the insecure and suicidal version of herself would die, and a completely different version of her would rise. Thus, Electra Heart was born. Teen idle shows us that Electra’s issues are deep-rooted from young, and have festered over time.
Primadonna
Electra Heart’s defense mechanism against heartbreak and mental trauma are four separate archetypes: Housewife, Homewrecker, Beauty Queen, and Idol Teen. Electra feels empty inside, so she has taken pieces from these four personas to form one “personality” for herself. Although she embodies all of the archetypes, she borrows from the one that fits the given setting the most.
Primadonna embodies the Beauty Queen archetype. Electra is straightforward in her attitude: “All I ever wanted was the world. I can’t help that I need it all!” For Electra Heart, her defense against depression and trauma is to be vapid and conceited. When your views are only skin-deep, real pain can’t phase you. However, a single line in the pre-chorus “I’m sad to the core, core, core” gives us insight to Electra’s true feelings. While the beauty queen exterior might be enough to get her through the day, it only serves as a facade to cover the pain she feels.
How to be a Heartbreaker (ft. Bubblegum Bitch)
Another archetype of Electra’s is the Homewrecker. Whereas the Beauty Queen is concerned with combating emotional trauma, the Homewrecker’s domain is relationships. Electra’s life is defined by failed relationships, unrequited love, and flavor-of-the-week lovers. To combat this, she prides herself on being a Homewrecker. She is proud of her sexuality and ability to go through men with no remorse. Bubblegum Bitch is all about Electra’s desire to be like a doll; perfect body, perfect looks, perfect everything. Who cares if she’s dumb and vain? She’s hot! She wants the boy to be putty in her hands, finally putting her in control for the first time in her life.
How to be a Heartbreaker is along the same lines. Meet a boy, lure him in, use him, lose him. Rinse and repeat. Electra lays out the rules to become the ultimate heartbreaker. She holds no remorse for the hearts broken, only focused on her next prey — I mean, man. But in classic fashion, Electra’s true self peeks out. In the bridge, the upbeat synths fade out and she becomes jarringly sincere and vulnerable. She reveals that she is a heartbreaker/homewrecker because she is trying to protect her already broken heart. She says that it’s “better to be fake” so that she won’t suffer from a broken heart again. This builds back up to the fast-paced chorus, which is symbolic of Electra’s tendencies. She has these moments of clarity, but they are too painful so she bounces right back to her archetype of the day.
*I know that the song Homewrecker would’ve seemed like an obvious choice for this one, but I felt that song was more of an introduction to the archetype. The songs above do a better job of getting into Electra’s mindset and motivations.*
Lies (ft. Starring Role)
The cracks in Electra’s facade starts to show in these songs. She is forced to confront her shortcomings in her love life, and it tears her apart inside. In both Lies and Starring Role, Electra is again surprisingly vulnerable and honest. The sparks have drowned out from her relationship, and her lover does not reciprocate anymore. Electra has done all she can to be perfect, but it still wasn’t enough to guarantee her love.
Electra knows that her failed relationships are due in part to her heartbreaker tendencies and selfishness. But, she also keeps finding herself in these relationships with men that do not reciprocate or appreciate her affections. Electra is a heartbreaker to protect her secretly fragile heart, and it attracts men with bad intentions who don’t care if they break her heart. This creates a vicious cycle of Electra attracting the very men she is trying to protect herself from. While it’s debatable which side is at fault, it is clear that Electra’s heartbreaker ways are contributing to her own heartbreak.
Valley of the Dolls
This is when we see Electra start to fall apart. She is brutally honest about her tumultuous life. In this song we see the walls come crashing down as Electra laments her life of emptiness.
Electra has felt an overwhelming emptiness since she could remember, as we’ve already seen with Teen Idle. She feels she was “born with a void, hard to destroy with love or hope.” Initially, she tried to fill the void with love and hope, as we all would like to do. But when that didn’t work she turned to adopting the archetypes to fill the gaps.
Although drifting from persona to persona worked for Electra in short-term relationships and attention, it brought no real substance to her life. She tried to appear perfect, and hoped that appearance would translate to a perfect life. However, it’s the perpetual strive for perfection that ultimately broke her. Now that Electra has reached her breaking point, she is “dying like a shooting star” in the valley of the dolls. It’s fitting for Electra to call herself a doll, as a line of dolls all look exactly the same. A doll is an empty vessel that you can assign any name, personality, background, etc. This is exactly what Electra does to herself, with her rotation lovers and persona-of-the-day.
Fear and Loathing
This song is arguably the most emotional on the album. And yes I know that Teen Idle and Lies exists, but hear me out. Electra is straight up raw in Fear and Loathing. There’s no smoke and mirrors, no rationalization, no pretending she is above being hurt. Electra says it plain and simple: “I’m done with trynna have it all and ending up with not much at all.” She realizes that she has lived her life in misery. She wants to feel free mentally and emotionally.
In the music video, Electra wipes away the heart on the cheek. She quite clearly kills off her past self, and her new bare face is symbolic of her fresh start. This is where we finally see Electra part ways with her archetypes once and for all. She is in a vulnerable state, but she is honest with herself. She can’t live life feeling unfulfilled and constantly on edge. She wants to feel real love and happiness. Electra realizes that the only way to real happiness is to leave behind her ways of deception. Being vulnerable is one of Electra’s biggest fears, but she knows it’s the only way to start anew.
The Aftermath
Although fear and loathing may seem like the beginning of a happy ending, it is short-lived. Electra commits suicide, an unfortunate but predictable end to her tale. I only say predictable because her death is foreshadowed in State of Dreaming and Fear and Loathing. In State of Dreaming, Electra sings in a dreamy tone, “If only you knew my dear, how I know my time is near.” While in Fear and Loathing, she laments “When the time comes along and the lights run out, I know a light will burn on when they blow me out.” Electra knows that the end is coming, and accepts it with a surprising certainty. Besides, I wouldn’t call it a Greek tragedy if it didn’t have a, well, tragic ending.
I don’t know about you all, but I can relate fully to many parts of Electra’s story. When I was in the worst of my depression as a teenager, I wished desperately that I could become someone else. I wished everything about myself could become the complete opposite: overthinking turned into vapidness, insecurity turned to arrogance, self-hate magically morphed into vanity. At a time when I hated myself, I desperately wished to be anyone else. Quite honestly this album made me realize that those things wouldn’t make me happy. If it was even possible to achieve all those goals, I would be miserable. Like Electra, it would just be a temporary fix to a perpetual issue. I do think that if I had gone down that route, I might have even come out on the other side worse off than I am now. I have to admit that I didn’t even realize this until I became an adult. As a teenager, I honestly wished I could be like Electra. I knew full well how dysfunctional and broken she was. I knew how the story ended; I wanted it anyway. To have one big, temporary rush of short-term happiness then burn out like a candle. To me that was better than living in perpetual sadness. Now, I can’t help but fear that there are thousands of young teens out there feeling the same way I did.
I think this album resonates with so many young women out there, as well as anyone who struggles with mental illness. There are so many things we do to combat the pain lurking inside us. As exaggerated as the story is, the crux of it is extremely realistic. We all have our coping mechanisms, and some of them are pretty harmful. They guarantee short-term relief, but never a solution to anything. Electra’s coping mechanism to overwhelming emptiness was adopting different personalities. Some people’s coping mechanisms are drugs or alcohol. Some people self-harm. In less extreme examples, many others cope with dark humor, food, shopping, sex, etc. Just like Electra’s, all these coping mechanisms suck and offer no real solutions — but we do them anyway.
Just like a Greek tragedy, Electra Heart has many relatable themes inside a story. It deals with topics of the ego, mortality, emotions, flaws, love, etc. Electra Heart stands to be one of Marina’s best works in all aspects. It is a testament to the fact that stories can be powerful in any form.
