Lana Del Rey, who has never been one to shy away from heteronormative, 50s/60s-era themes and iconography in her work (in fact, that is the crux of her work), has outdone herself in that regard at a recent show in Arkansas. Yes, of all places, Arkansas. In fact, it would seem that the geographical location of her concert is what inspired her to perform a particular cover choice: Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” Released in 1968, as the women’s liberation movement was sweeping the country, Wynette’s plea for staying loyal to one’s man was not only a “soulful” and “earnest” number, but also a wet dream for fearful conservative men who didn’t want to lose their “control” over women (which sounds a lot like the conservative male fears centered around Barbie right now).
Ironically, “Stand By Your Man” was the single released right after “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” which Wynette’s producer, Billy Sherrill, was convinced would be her “signature.” It didn’t take long (only four months, in fact, with “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” released in May of ‘68 and “Stand By Your Man” released in September of ‘68) for him to realize it was instead to be what many called an anti-feminist anthem. In this regard, Del Rey’s selection of the track seems both fitting and perhaps like a bit of a troll (because we always want to think that celebrities know exactly what they’re doing). For no one of the modern era has been accused of anti-feminism as much as Del Rey. Indeed, she brought up this reality in an article for Interview magazine, wherein she told Billie Eilish, “…in San Francisco, I was eating at a bistro and a woman threw a book about feminism at my face… Everyone gets their fair share of think pieces, but there were definitely some sixty-page articles about me being the face of feminine submission and the pro-domestic whatever.”
Del Rey, despite knowing the outrage this causes among women still trying to fight for some modicum of feminism to even exist in this patriarchal world, appears to want to double down on her “pro-domestic whatever” image. Which makes sense when noting just how overtly she’s been pandering to the South and Midwest of late, particularly with her last three albums, Chemtrails Over the Country Club (showing specific love for Arkansas, which she pronounces “Ar-can-sus,” via the lyrics, “Sing me like a Bible hymn/We should go back to Arkansas”), Blue Banisters (“There’s a picture on the wall/Of me on a John Deere/Jenny handed me a beer, said, ‘How the hell did you get there?’/Oklahoma”) and Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (“Then I went to see some friends of mine/Down in Florence, Alabama”). Each album has its explicit name-checks of locations flung across what those living on the East and West Coasts would call the “flyover states.” States that Del Rey has expressed a fondness for in the years since she became “Queen of California” perhaps because she knows, in the end, the people who live there are her bread and butter clientele. People who still believe in “good Christian values” and the nuclear family. That is, the traditional nuclear family: helmed by a man and a woman. Some might ask, of course, how it’s Del Rey’s “job” to speak on things she doesn’t have firsthand experience with. Clearly, she has the heteronormative white woman’s perspective on lock in terms of immortalizing it in song. And shouldn’t that be all she’s responsible for, if she’s to speak solely from personal experience?
And yet, even looking to her equally as vanilla (probably more so) counterpart, Taylor Swift, the latter at least makes occasional vague attempts at branching out from her heteronormative white bubble (though the video for “All Too Well” was not an example of that). For instance, there was her requisite “ally” song, “You Need To Calm Down” and, then, casting a trans man as her love interest for the “Lavender Haze” video (granted, actually kissing him would have been way too much for Swift). Del Rey has never done anything of the sort, nor does she seem to feel obliged to. This is perhaps part of why she faced the accusation of voting for Donald Trump back in 2020—so much about her is just so fucking, well, Republican. From her fetishization of older white men driving trucks (/older white men in general, including John Wayne and Elvis Presley) to her (as she would phrase it) “glamorization of abuse,” Del Rey’s entire oeuvre is rooted in conservatism and “traditional American values.” That is, the values deemed traditional and correct by older white men (who are only too happy to be fetishized by younger women thanks to the Lolita Syndrome…and yes, obviously, Del Rey has a song called “Lolita”).
The defense of Del Rey’s themes and visuals has often been that she’s displaying them from a place of irony, from a place of showing an America in decay. The thing is, America was already rotten to the core during the era Del Rey overtly romanticizes, and to insist that only later, “post-Empire,” did things get really bad is emblematic of the white privilege that chooses to acknowledge when things are “really” bad only when they’ve become bad for white people (hence, a sort of “red pill” phenomenon taking place during the pandemic for the Caucasians). Del Rey’s “problem” during the pandemic would turn out to manifest as a “question for the culture” that’s presently being interpreted as a “prophecy” because Del Rey is “such a witch” like that. And because, at the moment, she’s sidestepped the backlash that was at a peak for her in 2020 and 2021 (with additional help from a catch-all defense that goes, “Print it into black and white pages, don’t faze me/Before you talk, let me stop what you’re saying/I know, I know, I know that you hate me”—so yeah, talk about shutting down any chance for a healthy discourse).
It’s plain to see that she’s well-aware of her “untouchability” if choosing to sing “Stand By Your Man” in a climate like this one is any indication. But, again, that she opted to do it in Arkansas is also telling that she knows her audience, and which ones are going to be more “open” to her, let’s euphemistically say, “old school vibe.” Something she was able to better get away with when she first “burst forth” onto the internet scene in 2011.
To that end, if “Stand By Your Man” is Wynette’s “signature song,” then “Video Games” is arguably Del Rey’s. Not just her first “proper” single (that also happened to catapult her to fame), but the one that would make her stand apart from the rest of the musical landscape at the dawn of the 2010s (rife as it was with EDM-inspired rhythms). And yet, like Amy Winehouse before her, all Del Rey was really doing (and still is) was repackaging that which was old and making it new again. Indeed, it can be argued that “Video Games” bears many thematic similarities to “Stand By Your Man” as Del Rey waxes poetic about the joy she gets from just being near her man and watching him play his video games. With the chorus itself expressing a servility (“It’s you, it’s you/It’s all for you/Everything I do”) that Wynette also conveys in “Stand By Your Man,” urging women, “And if you love him, oh, be proud of him/‘Cause after all, he’s just a man.” This last line being the lone “justification” through which women can safeguard the song, for it infers that men are too daft to know “any better” about what they do (a real “boys will be boys” sort of mentality). This, incidentally, reminds one of the Barbie tagline, “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.” Elsewhere, Wynette continues, “Stand by your man/Give him two arms to cling to/And something warm to come to/When nights are cold and lonely.”
Although Del Rey might have done that for someone like Sean Larkin, it didn’t stop him from cheating on her in one of the worst ways possible (as she very publicly confirmed at a July 9th Hyde Park performance). In addition, it’s rather poignant that Larkin is the one who seemed to pivot Del Rey toward the Midwest thanks to his residence in Tulsa, Oklahoma (where she “just so happened” to place the only billboard to promote Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, remarking of the decision, “It’s personal”). Nonetheless, she seems to still be of the “Let Me Love You Like A Woman” belief that all women should be gentle and understanding toward the men who “allow” them to be a mostly “full-time gal” (when he’s not out with his part-time, of course). To heighten the already heteronormative association “Stand By Your Man” has, Del Rey punctuated her performance with a man and a woman slow dancing in “classical” fashion (which can really just mean no “TikTok dancing” at this point) while she sang with her hair up “real big, beauty queen style” at the Walmart AMP (Arkansas Music Pavilion) without so much as a hint of tongue-in-cheekness. Not even when it came to being in Rogers, Arkansas in the first place. For that’s, at this juncture, merely a matter of staying “on-brand” (especially after delightedly “slumming it” as a Waffle House “waitress” [Lana’s word, not modern times’] in Florence, Alabama).
Just as “Stand By Your Man” has consistently provided the “brand” of cannon fodder required for feminists to call out anti-feminists. To be sure, the female feathers that “Stand By Your Man” has ruffled over the past few decades since it came out have never been in short supply. And yet, it was Wynette’s feathers that were ruffled in 1992 when Hillary Clinton famously defended her decision to, um, stand by Bill (appropriately, the former governor of Del Rey’s beloved Arkansas) after the Gennifer Flowers revelation that led the two to appear on 60 Minutes for some damage control. Part of which included Hill defending herself for staying with Bill by insisting, “You know, I’m not sittin’ here, some little woman standin’ by my man like Tammy Wynette.”
Beyoncé might have said the same thing in 1992 as a means to secure her place as a “feminist” while still staying with Jay-Z after he cheated on her and she made a commercially and critically successful album out of ordeal (thus, speculation that perhaps the entire thing was made up, what with everyone wanting to believe, for the sake of undisturbed deification, that celebrities are just Andy Kaufman’ing it). In that regard, “Stand By Your Man” apologists, including Wynette, have frequently emphasized that the song is not about allowing yourself to be subjugated to accommodate male whims so much as it is about sticking with someone through thick and thin (in which case, the song is definitely Hill’s anthem). Of course, that doesn’t come across so evidently in the repetitive, straightforward lyrics that urge, “Stand by your man/And show the world you love him/Keep giving all the love you can, mm, mm/Stand by your man, hmm, hmm.”
So despite Wynette getting upset over Hill’s belittlement of standing by your man, she ultimately said the same thing or worse by adding of her decision to stick with Bill, “I’m sittin’ here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he’s through and what we’ve been through together.” Something that a “quayn” of heteronormative monogamy like Del Rey could get on board with as well. Or maybe just an endless string of relationships (if not marriages) like Wynette. Even so, although Del Rey might want to sing like Wynette, she’s made it clear in a past song called “Breaking Up Slowly,” “I don’t wanna end up like Tammy Wynette” (complete with Valium, Demerol and Dilaudid addictions). That’s actually Nikki Lane’s line, but Del Rey carves out her own Tammy allusion by speaking from the “tragic” singer’s perspective when she says, “Georgе got arrested out on the lawn/We might be breakin’ up after this song/Will he still love me long after I’m gone?/Or did he see it comin’ all along?” The real question (for the culture) is: did Arkansas see Lana comin’ all along with that cover?
Based on her past behavior, they probably should have. And, naturally, most will say that the song simply “suits her” (even if the delivery hardly does Wynette’s version any justice). That one should heed the sentiments of another cover Del Rey once did, in which she sings, “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good/Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” But it’s a bit difficult to misunderstand her captioning the video of her performance with, “Sing it cause I love it and I live it.”
