In keeping with the theme of “Everybody Scream,” Florence + the Machine’s second single from the album of the same name is all about fame. Though, in contrast to “Everybody Scream,” which is sort of like Florence’s version of Lady Gaga’s “Applause,” “One of the Greats” is much saucier, exploring the more vexing aspects of what it means to be a “rock star” as a woman. More to the point, the double standard of it. And so, while “Everybody Scream” is about what fame gives, “One of the Greats” is more about what it takes (this phrase having two meanings in this instance).
In this regard, “Everybody Scream” is the “Angel of My Dreams” of the outfit, while “One of the Greats” is more of the “IT Girl” (yes, one needs to listen to JADE’s That’s Showbiz Baby to understand the reference). And, once again, Florence Welch is very much embodying her “Elvis reincarnated” aura in the accompanying “visualizer”—or is it a video? Either way, it’s directed by Welch’s go-to, Autumn de Wilde, even though there isn’t much to direct in that all Welch has to do is sit in the back of a car and get chauffeured somewhere like the rock star she is in the dead of night. And naturally, even though it is night, she’s still got to be wearing her black shades—her “I’m too famous to be seen” sunglasses. In addition to wearing a tailored ensemble that consists of a black blazer and white button-front shirt. Then, Welch soon raises her hand to reveal she’s also holding a cigar. It’s all very Madonna—not just from her 1992 “Deeper and Deeper” single cover art, but also from the “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” video, during which she, too, is being chauffeured around at night while wearing sunglasses and also looking very blasé about the whole thing. If not utterly horrified by it.
Welch, in contrast, is slightly more enamored of what fame has meant. Not just that she has a devoted following (like Jesus himself), but that it allows her creativity to flow into and through something that will actually be “received” by others. By the same token, being “inspired by the muse” is not without its own unique drawbacks. Which is perhaps why Welch refers to creativity almost like it’s Lazarus, rising from the dead every time an artist thinks they’ve laid their creative pursuits to rest. So it is that Florence opens the song with the evocative (and, yes, biblically allusive) verse, “I crawled up from under the earth/Broken nails and coughing dirt/Spitting out my songs so you could sing along, oh/And with each bedraggled breath, I knew I came back from the dead/To show you how it’s done, to show you what it takes/To conquer and to crucify, to become one of the greats/One of the greats.”
And what Florence has shown her acolytes over the years, in terms of “what it takes,” is a lot of physical and emotional agony. For her, it’s the former category that has been especially prominent, having broken her foot onstage twice (once in 2015, and another time in 2022) and then having a near-death experience in 2023 (mentioned by way of, “Oh, burned down at thirty-six/Why did you dig me up for this?”) after undergoing an emergency medical procedure for a still-unspecified condition that would have been fatal had she not gotten the surgery immediately. So it is that Welch was led even further down a mystical, witchy, “hippie-dippy” path with her latest work, originally conceiving “One of the Greats” as a poem.
In this regard, it shares a certain DNA with Lana Del Rey’s “Fingertips” (and not, surprisingly, “The Greatest”) from Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (which is delivered in a very stream-of-consciousness kind of style, though it wasn’t originally a poem). But Welch still outpaces the length of the verbose “Fingertips,” with “One of the Greats” clocking in at six minutes and thirty-two seconds. Indeed, Welch didn’t think the label would actually “let” her release a song like this, recounting, “…you’re always asking the label if you can put out a song that’s five minutes long so with this one I was like, ‘They’ll never put this out the way we really want to put this out, seven minutes long,’ but they were like, ‘Yeah, we love it.’” Which perhaps just goes to show that Welch really is “one of the greats,” therefore “permitted” to release whatever the fuck kind of music she wants to.
In this instance, music that’s once again co-produced by Mark Bowen and Aaron Dessner, who layer on the sparsest of instrumentation so that Welch can really dig the knife in with her vocals when she says something like, “‘Cause who really gets to be one of the greats/One of the greats?/But I’ve really done it this time/This one is all mine/I’ll be up there with the men and the ten other women/In the 100 Greatest Records of All Time.”
Welch doesn’t stop there when it comes to shading how the music industry continues to deify male musicians in a way that simply doesn’t happen for women, who are held to a standard that no man could deal with even trying to live up to. So it is that Welch ribs, “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can/Now don’t get me wrong/I’m a fan/You’re my second-favorite frontman [after herself, of course]/And you could have me if you weren’t so afraid of me/It’s funny how men don’t find power very sexy/So this one’s for the ladies/Do I drive you crazy?/Did I get it right?” The answer, of course, is a resounding yes—for there isn’t really an occasion when Welch doesn’t get it right. Yet another testament to the level of her artistry.
However, that doesn’t prevent her from asking the question of what really makes an artist “one of the greats” and who gets to decide such a thing—and why They get to, based on what criteria? Then there is her lately constant exploration of the “cost” of fame (going back to Madonna on “Drowned World/Substitute for Love,” it was she who said, “I traded fame for love without a second thought” after realizing what she had sacrificed for so much of her life in service of fame). So it is that she told Radio 1’s New Music Show with Jack Saunders,
“[‘One of the Greats’] was one long poem I wrote about greatness or the cost of it or why do I want it? Who gets to decide what that even is? And then it was also kind of a joke, so it’s like really serious and also [a] really unserious song… And it kind of evolves in this train of thought and that’s very much how it was recorded, but I guess I wanted it to feel like you were disintegrating into nothing at the end ‘cause it is sort of about the process of creativity being like a sense you sort of destroy yourself for something and then you kind of dig yourself up all over again to do it again and you’re like, ‘Why do I keep doing this? What is this thing that I’m reaching for?’ There’s a Martha Graham quote that’s called ‘divine dissatisfaction’ and I think that sort of sums up the process for me, it’s this sense of this like divine dissatisfaction that just keeps propelling you forward all the time.”
Hence, Welch’s repeated divine question pertaining to divine dissatisfaction: “Did I get it right?/Do I win the prize?/Do you regret bringing me back to life?” The answer, for the fans that venerate her, is a resounding no. They would dig Welch up an infinite number of times to keep watching and listening to her be “one of the greats.” Though, if you ask any man in “the industry” about it, they’re liable to write her work off with a shrugging, “So like a woman to profit from her madness” (Taylor Swift would surely approve of this sarcastic lyric based on her own song called “mad woman” from 2020’s folklore). As though “women’s music” is just that—somehow meant to be cordoned off into its own separate “outlier” category despite the fact that, now more than ever, female musicians are dominating the charts.
This no doubt in part because many of them feel like Welch, who admits, “I was only beautiful under the lights/Only powerful there.” Or, as she phrases it on “Everybody Scream,” “Here, I don’t have to quiet/Here, I don’t have to be kind/Extraordinary and normal, all at the same time.” Because, yes, it’s important to remember that, no matter how much you worship “one of the greats,” they still shit, too. Or, to put it in a more 2000s way, “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!”
