The Meaning of Lana Del Rey Snubbing the Priscilla Soundtrack

Practically since the “dawn of Lana Del Rey,” a.k.a. the Tumblr era, there’s been that image circulating around that features her head Photoshopped (this was before AI manipulation as we currently know it, after all) over Priscilla Preseley’s. Specifically, the image of her wedding photo with Elvis. Where they’re sitting down and he’s holding her hand. The aesthetic connection between Del Rey and Beaulieu (lest anyone forget that was her maiden name) is not a coincidence. Like most of the iconography Del Rey has pulled from, it’s very calculated. Plus, it’s no secret that Del Rey is an Elvis stan, even writing a song called “Elvis” at one point that eventually served as part of the soundtrack for 2017’s The King. Then, of course, there was her 2012 declaration on “Body Electric” announcing, “Elvis is my daddy.” Lisa Marie would beg to differ. 

In fact, Lisa Marie would beg to differ with a lot of things about the “Priscilla project” in general. Maybe not least of which is a soundtrack that doesn’t offer a contribution from Del Rey (or even her father, for that matter, as Sofia Coppola wasn’t able to buy the rights). But, more than that, she was vexed with Coppola (per some recently released emails) for “making” her father “seem” like a predator when it came to his pursuit of an extremely underaged Priscilla. Except, obviously, it goes without saying that Elvis was a predator; Coppola doesn’t need to do much work to make that translate on screen. Especially since she’s using Priscilla’s own 1985 biography, Elvis and Me, as the source material. Material that covers everything from being raped by Elvis (a scene that also shows up in the 1988 TV movie adaptation) while they were married to his rampant affairs, most famously with Ann-Margaret. The book conveyed such a toxic master-slave “bond” that it inspired Depeche Mode to write the beloved single, “Personal Jesus,” a song about “how Elvis was [Priscila’s] man and her mentor and how often that happens in love relationships. How everybody’s heart is like a god in some way.”

If there’s one chanteuse who’s an expert in creating that effect (apart from Taylor Swift), it’s Lana Del Rey. Or at least it was…when we were in the era of Ultraviolence Lana Del Rey. This being the album wherein she freely filched the controversial Crystals’ line by annoucning, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss.” Priscilla knew that feeling too. But perhaps not as well as Elvis’ final “lady friend,” Ginger Alden, who wrote her own memoir detailing the propensity Elvis had for casual gunplay as a psychological mindfuck. Indeed, everything about Elvis screams “cult leader,” of the sort Del Rey was talking about on “Ultraviolence” when she sings, “‘Cause I’m your jazz singer and you’re my cult leader/I love you forever, I love you forever.” These lyrics are just as easily envisioned coming out of the mouth of Priscilla as she roams the empty halls of Graceland in the midst of yet another one of Elvis’ extended absences. In fact, it would be completely on-brand for Sofia Coppola to feature a scene just like this using that song (see also: her implementation of The Strokes’ “What Ever Happened?” in Marie Antoinette). But, for “whatever reason,” Del Rey’s inclusion on the Priscilla Soundtrack is nonexistent. Though it wasn’t for a lack of trying on the director’s part, who reached out at least twice to try to make something happen. 

As Coppola told E! News, “We were hoping she could do a song for it, but it didn’t work out with the timing.” This, to be sure, is always a bullshit excuse for being able to get out of something you’re not all that passionate about. Nor was Del Rey all that passionate about attending the premiere of the film, which Coppola also invited her to. Even if she was rather late to the party on apprehending the internet’s long-standing connection between Lana and Priscilla. For, as Coppola admitted, “I’m learning that people really connect Lana Del Rey and Priscilla and I didn’t realize that, but I got a lot of requests with, ‘How is she gonna be a part of the movie?’” The answer, clearly, is that she’s not. And maybe part of her overt snubbing under the guise of “schedule conflicts” has something to do with her own vague awareness of the ick factor that comes with being associated with a narrative like this in 2023. Even if Del Rey isn’t exactly known for being anything other than tone deaf about what she calls “the culture.” 

Nonetheless, something about her willfully missing the opportunity to be part of a pop culture moment so tailor-made for her “brand” appears to indicate that maybe she’s attempting, in her own small way, to move on from the “toxic romance” label that has followed her from the outset of her career. Just as it did Amy Winehouse. The singer who more truly embodies the “Priscilla spirit” not just in her beehive coif and constant application of heavy, garish eyeliner, but in her assessments of love. One such example being, when she said of The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss),” “There’s only a certain percentage of people that would understand what that’s about. Most people would be like, ‘How dare you promote domestic violence?’ But to me, I’m like, ‘I know what you mean. I know exactly what you mean.’” So did Priscilla, and so, as she herself claims, does Lana. Yet copping to that understanding has become increasingly problematic (especially in the years that have gone by since Winehouse ruled the charts, and could more effortlessly bill this rhetoric as something like “beautiful and tragic”). Even for somebody who has typically been rather blasé about her largely anti-feminist body of work. Try as many might to position her “world-building” as an “authentic” exploration of what it is to be simply: a woman in a relationship. And a “fragile” one, at that.

But fragility has never stopped a man from roughing a “dame” up, as Priscilla found out. Incidentally, “Ultraviolence,” the song from Del Rey’s canon that most reminds one of the Priscilla and Elvis dynamic (particularly as LDR dons a wedding dress in the accompanying video), is something she’s become more averse to in recent years, telling Pitchfork in 2017, “I don’t like it. I don’t. I don’t sing it. I sing ‘Ultraviolence,’ but I don’t sing that line anymore. Having someone be aggressive in a relationship was the only relationship I knew. I’m not going to say that that [lyric] was one hundred percent true, but I do feel comfortable saying what I was used to was a difficult, tumultuous relationship, and it wasn’t because of me. It didn’t come from my end.” Though a lot of internalized misogyny still does seem to come from (and out of) Del Rey’s end. However, this “schedule conflict” of hers with regard to participating in Priscilla might mean there’s hope for her “re-pivoting” away from such “predilections” in the future. Even if Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd isn’t necessarily a harbinger of that.