Considering Lana Del Rey’s recent release of “Mariners Apartment Complex,” which, in the estimation of some, addresses the very interview that had fans and critics alike up in arms over her comment, “I wish I was dead already” (but for the “real” story behind it, read here), it seems timely that LDR should post a selfie with the very person it perhaps offended the most at the time, Frances Bean Cobain. When The Guardian released the interview in 2014, just as the promotion for Ultraviolence was kicking off, Del Rey was at peak on-brandness for being known as some sort of dark, depressed mistress, a poster child for suicide, or at least songs to cut sideways to. So it was that the male interviewer, Tim Jonze, was overly eager to make her sound especially insensitive in her white girl privilege for relishing melancholia (because heaven forbid white girls could know the plight of discrimination and stereotyping).
Del Rey, appalled by how the interview came across in its final result, immediately commented in response to the most outraged of all by Del Rey’s so-called glamorization of early death, Frances Bean, “[The interviewer] was asking me a lot about your dad. I said I liked him because he was talented, not because he died young. The other half of what I said wasn’t really related to the people he mentioned. I don’t find that part of music glam either.”
Bean (or is it Bean Cobain? one never knows) had initially reacted to Del Rey’s “sadness out of context” with the warning, “The death of young musicians is nothing to romanticize.” That it was also the same year as The Endless Summer Tour, for which Courtney Love would serve as opener to the show when Grimes wasn’t (ah those pre-Elon Musk days), lent added irony to the bizarre love triangle between her, Frances Bean and Courtney (or, in other permutations, Lana, Courtney and Kurt or Lana, Frances and Kurt). That Frances Bean’s rapport with that maligned matriarch, Love, has generally been on shaky ground for most of her life makes Del Rey’s recent photo with both parties and the caption, “Babes,” seem especially unprecedented (and again, always further proof in support of the notion that we are in a simulation).
So either 1) Love manufactured the encounter for the sake of finally burying the hatchet or 2) Frances Bean is the one trolling all of us and commandeering the puppet strings (it would be an appropriate twenty-first century plot twist to the twentieth century setup). Del Rey’s long-standing “obsession” (the same way Love confessed to being “obsessed” with Del Rey in 2017) with Kurt and Nirvana made itself known early on in her career, with her well-received live cover of “Heart Shaped Box” in 2012 even prompting Love to call out the fact that the lyrics were about, um, her. Specifically reaching out to Del Rey to say, “You do know the song is about my vagina right? ‘Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back.’ On top of which some of the lyrics about my vagina I contributed. So umm next time you sing it, think about my vagina will you?” Well, how can Del Rey not think about Love’s vagina with the very child that sprung from it sitting right next to her. So maybe it is Love who manufactured it all (the photo op, that is), being the same mastermind who “killed Kurt” and everything.
Whoever decided it would be a good idea to document the moment–“take in the sweetness”–it would seem that, at last, Del Rey has appropriated Bean’s 2014 advice, “Embrace this life, because you only get one.” Stay tuned for her 2019 album, I’m So Happy I Could Die.
