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Lana Del Rey
An Evolution Text//Charis Talcott
I’m gonna admit it. Finding the right angle to approach writing about Lana Del Rey has stymied me for quite some time. Going on two weeks into delving into what the internet has to say about her, reading blogs, watching her failed SNL performance, watching her music videos, watching interviews with the lady herself, listening to Born to Die and have it burrow progressively deeper into my head only after failing to get in to her packed show at Amoeba Music… this level of detached confusion about what to say about her is not for lack of effort. It’s one thing to evaluate a singer’s debut album making the rounds on the music blog circuit. It is quite another thing to interrogate the hype (and hate) machine(s) around an up-and-coming artist who simultaneously follows and bucks the trends around her. Lana Del Rey obviously wants to be famous. She began as blonde and Brookyln-based singer Lizzie Grant, releasing an album to petite Internet fanfare. That first album, Kill Kill, was then retracted from the market to make way for the newly-brunette “Ghetto Nancy Sinatra” known as Lana Del Rey. Singers package and reinvent themselves all the time. Thoughts point to Lady Gaga’s similar evolution from New York-based Stephanie Germanotta to the overblown fantasy figure she has become. Declare your own uncompromising desire for fame? Check. Sing about how your uncompromising personal ideals got you there? Not so much for Lana Del Rey. Herein lies the rub: she doesn’t overtly sing about female empowerment. In fact, she sounds pretty desperate. Her songs are rife with, depend on how you look at it, hopelessly
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romantic or just hopeless lyrics such as “I will love you till the end of time / I would wait a million years.” Package these sentiments up with retro-vintage style infused with a touch of ghetto fabulousness and apply them to the persona of an attractive (for a reading of our media, also see: “skinny”) singer with a somewhat husky vocal affect, and you, apparently, have the recipe for a shit-ton of media controversy surrounding “who this girl even thinks she is.” Conversations about the artifice that is Lana Del Rey don’t stop at discussing the nerve she has in choosing the way she presents herself through clothing, style, and affect. Many music bloggers have decided that Del Ray is taking it a whole larger step further. She has, in fact, taken it upon herself to reverse the course of feminism! The gall. By singing about getting the attention a boy as he’s wrapped up in a video game, Lana Del Rey is laying in wait for the male gaze to recognize her precious “to-be-lookedat-ness.” Is the number of times Lana Del Ray discusses what she is wearing in order to attract a man a rallying cry toward progressivism in gender relations? No. Should she be allowed to sing about these things from her own experience, even if they aren’t in line with diva-like notions of female empowerment that we have come to expect from the Lady Gaga and Beyoncé set? Yes. Far be it for me to assume that every song lyric a female singer puts out doesn’t have to be on the straight-and-narrow when it comes to a feminist reading. Am I a fan of perpetuating the idea that women have to be “pretty” in a very certain way and work hard for the approval of a male figure? No.
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Do I acknowledge that dealing with that experience and feeling those feelings has been a part of my own development as a woman/ feminist/person? A thousand times, yes. In this way, I can relate. I cut Lana some slack. It seems that the only place Ms. Rey can catch a break is on my Tumblr dashboard. In a rather notable fashion, she has bucked a trend I constantly observe: gushing posts about new music have almost always been dubbed “Best New Music” by Pitchfork. For Lana Del Rey, this is not the case. The site’s review charmingly referred to Born to Die as “the album equivalent of a faked orgasm.” Meanwhile, my cohorts in pastiche over at Tumblr generally feel that Lana Del Rey speaks to them. At a very basic and private level, sometimes people really do need to proclaim that “You fit me better than my favorite sweater” whilst staring longingly at a picture of a James Dean-derivative in their sundrenched teenage bedroom. It’s not a call to action, but it’s a feeling to feel, valid even if it seems somewhat pathetic in hindsight. And when it comes to the patriarchydriven male rock establishment, apparently this deviation from the norm of straight-up female empowerment scares and confuses them even more. I owe a debt to Liz Phair’s take on Del Rey when I say that it’s refreshing that a female singer lacking God-give talent but making up for it with a heck a lot of desire for fame is continuing to pursue what she want to do in the face of myriad complaints. Let’s sit back and watch what she does next. You know she wants us to.