Lana Del Rey, despite the success that has mounted and therefore augmented her clout with finagling potential endorsement deals over the years (still unclear why no Urban Decay collab has happened with song titles just as tailor-made for eye shadow and lip palette names), has generally shied away from promoting “products” …unless they’re related to Gucci. Yet yesterday, at what everyone seems to be fine with generically calling the “Apple event” at BAM, she found it within herself to remark of what Apple has “done” for music, “We’re really honored to be playing for Apple. It’s a company that’s done so much to change the way that we consume music, but also for people like me and Jack (Antonoff)–the way that we make music and record, whether it’s at home or in the studio. Um, with that, they told us not to swear. So for that reason, I can’t tell you the name of the upcoming record that me and Jack made.” Har har har. It’s hilarious to concede to a corporation.
So it was that she willingly seemed to allow the castration of her ovaries for the sake of kowtowing to the pervasive vanilla soft serve mentality that has infected a country that seems only to crave and cling to conservatism as an attempt to mask just how depraved it is. That being said, Del Rey has, in many respects, come to represent the Brooklyn of now: a controlled, dripping with “subtle” affluence aesthetic that “ironically” admits to a loss of edge in having done such things as moved out West, along with having “a kid and two cats in the yard, the California sun and the movie stars.” That she once played in the bars and clubs of Williamsburg that have ceded to the zoning laws of 2005 with the appearance of, of all things, an Apple Store on Bedford Avenue, only serves as a further element of knife-digging “full-circledom” in the reinvention of Brooklyn into something “faintly resembling” the hardness it once came to be known for in terms of the borough’s musical output (Lil’ Kim, Notorious B.I.G., um, Pat Benatar, et. al.).
So it is that Del Rey posed and made nice with a lovely white man, Apple CEO Tim Cook, the driving force behind the “family friendly” approach to the company’s streaming service, after obeying the request to “keep it clean,” even reworking the lyrics to her track, “Venice Bitch” (which she abridged to the title “Venice”) from, “It’s me your little Venice bitch” to “It’s me your little Venice chick.” Talk about “how to disappear” all rock ‘n’ roll credibility in terms of catering and pandering for the sake of performing one’s music to an audience just as soft as musical personas have gone. For all we have to “salivate” over now are Twitter beefs that fizzle out in the span of a day. And, apparently, antisepticized live performances not so thinly veiled as helping to worship the false god of an apple, once the fruit of knowledge, now the premier emblem of sanitization and oblivion. Though of course, one wants to give Del Rey the benefit of the doubt, to believe this is all some grand plan to “fuck shit up from the inside.” Just like Steve Jobs did before becoming “one of them.”
