As LDR insists on not wanting to “beat a dead horse,” she nonetheless continues to speak on her “not controversial” (as she calls it) comments comparing herself to fellow women in the music industry when in fact silence on the matter would probably be best so as to mitigate the tone deafness of her various “missives.” But anyway, if she can beat a dead horse, so can her “critics,” or rather, people who don’t seem to be as ensconced in the bubble she’s created for herself. One in which she can make “art videos” about her walk down the steps to a seemingly private beach and comment “cooingly” and “dreamily” how, “It doesn’t even look like we’re in California. I mean, it kind of looks like Hawaii.” What an appropriate addition to her Instagram after her diatribe, as though aiming for a more “earthy”-seeming Marie Antoinette. Also a “fragile” woman misunderstood, one would imagine LDR’s estimation to be.
Meanwhile, others outside her world are focused on more pressing matters other than her pseudointellectual bullshit consisting of pronouncing “chaff” as “shaft” in the cliche “separating wheat from the chaff” she uses in her latest spoken word poem. Although alluding to the agricultural practice of winnowing makes sense for Del Rey’s current vibe, which is all about “reparations” to Native Americans, specifically the Navajo nation which apparently “moved” her in her youth. The girl is, after all, a child of Upstate New York, that is, before she found her way to the big, bad city roughly five hours away by car. The place where performing for binge drinking, trust fund-packing white folk in Williamsburg and the Lower East Side got her her start. All of them, too, posing as not being privileged. Just “simple” artists trying to find their footing in “glamorous” yet “seedy” New York (which hasn’t been either since the early 90s before Disney took up residence in Times Square).
That footing, of course, was found with a little help from Daddy Grant, her domain developer/investor father who helped pay for her first album’s production and then came to her rescue when she didn’t want it out in the world anymore. Perhaps too “fragile” to deal with the criticism that might arise over it if she ever did become famous. Which, of course, she did. But not as the doddering blonde with a zaftig physique called Lizzy Grant. No, the persona of Lana Del Rey (rife with backlash nickname potential including Lana Del Cray Cray, Lana Del Gay and Lana Del Reytard) was necessary for her to ascend to the “echelon” (another word she favors besides “culture” and “fragility”) she desired.
This, as you’ll remember, transpired in 2012. Indeed, there was a poignancy to the fact that Del Rey’s meteoric rise took place the same year that the first season of Girls aired on HBO. Detailing the “travails” of a quartet of white girls from privileged backgrounds (just like the actresses playing them), outrage was rampant over that show as well, just as much as “accusations” that Del Rey bought her career… particularly after the notorious SNL performance (one that, in further six degrees of separation to Girls, Brian Williams, Allison Williams’ daddy, called one of the “worst outings in SNL history”). Where Lena Dunham and Del Rey most intersect (apart from just having hard-ons for Jack Antonoff), of late, is in their blind determination to be pitied as a misunderstood victim. What’s more, both white women seem to be dogmatic in their belief that it is only intentions that matter. Yet, as the adage goes, the road to hell is paved with “good” intentions. On that note, a review of Girls from Inkoo Kang for PopMatters saliently assessed the show as follows: “Despite its intentions, Girls simply can’t be a reflection of creator Lena Dunham’s multicultural, multiracial, downwardly mobile generation–the characters are too white, too wealthy, and most damningly, too insular and incurious about the world beyond them.”
The same can be said of Lana Del Rey. Particularly these days, when she blithely posts the “white propaganda” (a still from the Bond movie Thunderball, followed by a clip of From Here To Eternity’s most famous scene–both references hailing from a period when white people could carelessly ignore “racial sensitivity”) of Old Hollywood at a time when doing so feels like more than a slight snafu in the realm of PR. Her one-sided persistence in trying to show the world that race is irrelevant smacks of the sort of person who never had to deal with what it meant to suffer systemic injustice. It’s a lovely (and also delusional) thought to try to believe that we live in a color blind world, but we very glaringly do not. Del Rey’s lack of mindfulness doesn’t come off as someone being an “advocate”–as she calls herself repeatedly throughout her video tirade–so much as someone trying to gloss over a reality that doesn’t suit “her story.” Her slurred speech (maybe she’s been studying Marilyn footage a little too closely in her study on fragility) and bedraggled appearance forebode something almost Britney Spears-esque if people don’t start to adopt the opinion of her she wants them to. But it’s hard to have sympathy for someone whose intelligence level appears to be atrophying by the day. Case in point, her seeming unawareness of the fact that third wave feminism already happened (despite her assurance that it will come soon in a follow-up “letter” to the original post that caused all this scandal).
Not to mention her disjointed thoughts on not apologizing, which covered the gamut of fragility (again), mental illness, reparations (bringing Marianne Williamson into it), the sickness of the culture and dragging another woman of color into her victim narrative (this time, FKA Twigs because when she gets on the pole it’s art but when Lana does it she’s a whore). Making herself sound as though she’s been as sexually provocative over the years as a Madonna or Britney when, in fact, she’s been pretty goddamn tame from a “take off all your clothes” standpoint. Could’ve even made a few more videos of herself as a stripper if she felt like it. It doesn’t take long before listening to her becomes harder and harder to watch. Especially when she claims to only be making the video for other “fragile” women like her (while also doubling down on insisting she’s strong, proving she clings real hard to that Walt Whitman quote about containing multitudes). Failing, again, to check her privilege as she lacks comprehension of the fact that being fragile is a luxury most non-white women don’t get to indulge in. Indeed, the conversation perhaps isn’t had enough about the self-indulgence of depression in women of means like Sylvia Plath and, unfortunately, to use her name in the same sentence, Lena Dunham, whose grotesque precursor to Girls, Tiny Furniture, was further applauded by being added to the Criterion Collection. And it’s just like, Lana, sweetie, if you identify with Plath so much, it might be time to stick your head in the oven and rid yourself of these half-baked notions. Rather than disseminating them to your already pontifical fanbase.
Not “making it about race,” Del Rey hones in on fragility in her latest poem, “Patent Leather Do-Over,” as a decidedly white woman’s game, calling out Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana and, of course, Sylvia Plath. She also mentions a blonde Violet, though who knows if she’s referring to MacMillan or Tweedale (neither of which seem “tragic” enough to suit the other women she’s mentioned alongside, LDR giving us something of a “which one of these is not like the other” SAT test), or anyone at all. Maybe it’s a Nabokov allusion. In any event, Del Rey again seems pointed in her selection of race in illustrating certain facets of “the culture.” That she claims “unawareness” of such a practice is almost what makes it worse. As for her insistence that there has been no place in pop culture for “women like her” who are fragile and strong at the same time, one could argue that Ariana Grande and Beyoncé, both of whom appeared in the lexicon before Del Rey did, have achieved this with greater grace by not prattling on about it, and their contributions to other women following them. By letting the work speak for itself instead of complaining. Both perhaps knowing they have no right to when the paper’s this good. And no one is arguing that Del Rey’s music isn’t rich and sumptuous, if overly dependent on grandiose imagery that some find it hard to relate to. But, of late, she’s making her voice outside of her art outshine it. Which, clearly, hasn’t been ideal for sustaining her place among the “upper echelons” she classifies herself in. Furthermore, thank u, next and Lemonade are both very much a study in how to showcase the contrasting parts of a woman in both her vulnerability and fortitude. Madonna, too, perfected this long ago on 1989’s Like A Prayer and 1998’s Ray of Light. Del Rey is the one who has chosen to make herself stand alone by insisting that she is.
As for her vehemence about her intentions being all that matters, well, that reeks of another self-righteous white woman in the form of Reese Witherspoon’s rendering of Elena Richardson on Little Fires Everywhere. Convinced that everything she does for Mia Warren (Kerry Washington) is from a place of “pure-hearted” “goodness,” every move she makes instead comes off as condescending and self-superior. Even in Del Rey’s early days of reasoning that she wanted to take up residence in a trailer park as more “interesting experiment” designed to boost credibility rather than long-term desire to live there is manifest in her statement, “There was a white trash element in the way there was a time that I didn’t want to be a part of mainstream society because I thought it was gross.” P.S. you can always go back to the trailer if that’s how you really feel.
The video itself is filled with the artifice she’s known for: black and white and grainy, which somewhat heightens a lack of empathy when Del Rey can’t let her guard down enough to be as real as she thinks she’s being, later sure to “casually” drop in the name of her upcoming album as well, Chemtrails Over the Country Club (a vision she likely saw while growing up in Lake Placid).
Assuring, “Nobody gets to tell your story except for you” by the end of it all, Del Rey is speaking from the place of white privilege (à la Lena and Elena–such fittingly similar names, to boot) in which it has always been Caucasians who write the history books. So sure, it’s easy to believe only you get to tell your story (if you’re of the correct race and socioeconomic background). Del Rey certainly has, even if a fabricated and folkloric narrative about her background and rise to fame. And that’s when you have to pose a “question for the culture” that Del Rey is coming from. A niche culture that relishes self-victimizing and accusing everyone else of being illiterate or anti-intellectual or “too stupid” to understand what she’s saying when it’s all drivel amounting to the woe-is-me rhetoric that has led so many white women to give Plath an eye-rolling name by serving as their collective talisman. Alas, there is no “patent leather do-over” for Del Rey’s metamorphosis into a composite of the aforementioned self-martyring blancas.
The complete transcript of Lana Del Rey’s Richardson-meets-Dunham flavored video can be read below:
“Hey, so I don’t wanna beat a dead horse and I don’t wanna, you know, go on and on about this post thing, but um, I just wanna remind you that, um, in that post–my one and only personal declaration I’ve ever made–thanks for being so warm and welcoming–um, you know, was about the need for fragility in the feminist movement. It’s gonna be important. And when I mentioned women who look like me, I didn’t mean white like me, I mean the kind of women who, you know, other people might not believe because they think, ‘Oh well look at her, she fuckin’ deserves it’. Or whatever. There’s a lot of people like that, you know, and, um, you know, I just think that it’s sad that the women I mentioned, you know, whether they sing about dancing for money or whatever, the same stuff by the way that I’ve been singing about and chronicling for thirteen years, that’s why I’m in that echelon–yes, they are my friends and peers and contemporaries–um, the difference is when I get on the pole, people call me a whore, but when Twigs gets on the pole, it’s art. So you know, I’m reminded constantly by my friends that, lyrically, there are layers and, you know, complicated psychological factors that play into some of my songwriting, but I just wanna say, you know, the culture’s super sick right now and the fact that they wanna turn my post–my advocacy for fragility–into a race war–it’s really bad. It’s actually really bad. Especially when in that same declaration, I was talking again about the idea of how important it is, for me, to make reparations to the Navajo community. And, you know, that I believe in personal reparations because it’s the right thing to do and, you know, I think what’s really sad is, like, as a personal advocate, as a girl’s girl, as somebody who wants the best for every culture, you know, what Marianne Williamson was talking about, reparations to the black community that never got done during the Emancipation period, that was why I liked her ‘cause I always felt that way. So I just wanna say, to all of the other women out there who are like me–good girls, good-intentioned who get fucked up the ass constantly by the culture just because you, you know, say what you really mean–I’m with you, I feel for you and I know that you feel for me and, you know, I’m super strong, you know…you can call me whatever, you know. I’m sorry that, you know, I didn’t add one Caucasian–100% Caucasian person into the mix of the women that I admire but, uh, you know, it really says more about you than it does about me and I think that’s what interesting is the very first time I decide to tell you anything about my life or the fact that I’m writing books that chronicle that fragility, um, that, you know, 200,000 hateful, spiteful comments come in, and you know, my phone number leaked and, you know, comments like, ‘You fucking white bitch,’ you know… it’s the opposite of the spirit of an advocate. It’s what causes fragility. But it’s not gonna stop me. Period. So I just wanna say that nobody gets to tell your story except for you and, um, even if that means it’s kind of messy like this along the way ‘cause, you know, unfortunately when you have a good heart it doesn’t always shine through. And you, you, trudge on anyway. You make those personal reparations to heal your own family karmic lineage and the sickness of this country, you know. Domestic abuse, mental health problems. The second epidemic that’s arising out of this pandemic. It’s a real thing. That’s what I was talking about. So… um…you know, as ever, I’m grateful that my muse is still here and that I have over the last three years been blessed to have the insight and ability to channel two books’ worth of beautiful poems and, um, you know, I think my new record, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, is special as well. And, uh, you know, I’m sorry that a couple of the girls I talked to, you know, who were mentioned in that post have a super different opinion of, you know, my insight, and especially ‘cause we’ve been so close for so long, but it really, again, makes you reach into the depth of your own heart and say, ‘Am I good-intentioned?’ Of course for me, the answer is always yes. I barely ever share a thing. And this is why. You know. The reason why I’m making this post and I know it seems a bit much, right? But there are women out there like me who have so much to give and, you know, don’t quite get to the…to the place spiritually or karmically where they’re supposed to be because there are other women who hate them. And try and take them down whether, in my case, it’s certain alternative singers or, you know, malintented journalists, or, men who hate women. You know. But I’m not the enemy and I’m definitely not racist so don’t get it twisted, nobody gets to tell your story except for you and, uh, that’s what I’m gonna do with the next couple books. So God bless and, yeah, fuck off if you don’t like the post.”
