Lana Del Rey has long been watching certain parties inch closer and closer to “copping her musical style.” Most recently, it’s been Lorde, accused of blatantly ripping off the sound of Chemtrails Over the Country Club’s “Wild at Heart” for Solar Power’s “Stoned at the Nail Salon”—but then, that could simply be through no fault of her own, so much as Jack Antonoff being burned out and running dry of new ideas. Even so, one would have thought that Lorde would shy away as much as possible from the “LDR sound” after once announcing to The Fader, “I listened to that Lana Del Rey record and the whole time I was just thinking it’s so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know, ‘I’m nothing without you.’ This sort of shirt-tugging, desperate, ‘don’t leave me’ stuff.” But isn’t it also “desperate” to blatantly pose off of others? Which, to add to the incestuousness of these three women’s musical styles, was only compounded by Chemtrails sounding like folklore.
Any who, long before Lorde, Taylor Swift has been leaning toward that “bent” of what Del Rey does with her songwriting. Yes, Swift has “technically” been around longer (meaning she got famous first while Lizzy Grant was still skulking around Brooklyn). And true, she’s always been “confessional” and “candid,” using her relationships as inspiration in a far more overt manner than Del Rey. But, sometime after citing Lana as her favorite “lyricist” in 2019, it seemed as though Swift was determined to better compare on that front.
Enter folklore and evermore, almost a direct (read: competitive) response to an album like Norman Fucking Rockwell (before LDR went and ruined all her accolades with that goddamn “question for the culture”). Wanting to exude “poeticism” and “storytelling” (that didn’t pertain to her own love life) in a mode that would one-up Del Rey, Swift has reverted back to her old “personal” methods with the re-release of “All Too Well.” A song that offers an accompanying “short film” that is so laughably white and basic it’s both 1) no match for Lana’s own short film, “Ride” (or Tropico) and 2) head-scratching in terms of why so many people are going apeshit for it. In any case, it’s the latest in an undisguised bid to be “the mainstream version” of Lana (herself mainstream, but not classifiable enough like Taylor, hence being lumped in to an “alternative” music category).
On one of her three late night show appearances to promote Red (Taylor’s Version), Swift opted to grace The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Veterans Day, humblebragging of the ten-minute version of “All Too Well,” “[This was] what was originally written for the song before I had to cut it down to a normal-length song ‘cause that’s, you know… Ten minutes is absurd, that’s an absurd length of time for a song to be—who thinks that they can put out a ten-minute song?” And that’s when one wants to shout, “Lana Del Rey!” Who fearlessly took that plunge with 2019’s “Venice Bitch.” At the time, she commented of the unusually long length (especially for a period outside of the 1960s era of psychedelic music), “I played it for my managers and I was like, ‘Yeah, I think this is the single I want to put out.’ And they were like, ‘It’s ten minutes long. Are you kidding me? Like why do you do this to us? Can you make a three-minute normal pop song?’ I was like, ‘Well, end of summer, some people just wanna drive around for ten minutes, get lost in some electric guitar.’” As opposed to Taylor’s banal acoustics.
That Del Rey is also coming from the California-specific sensibility of constantly being stuck in traffic (particularly in L.A.) added to her blasé attitude about “getting lost in some electric guitar” for ten minutes, a small drop in the bucket of a two-hour-plus traffic jam. And after all, there’s a reason that PSAs exist all over Los Angeles cautioning against driving high—because they know that everybody is doing so in order to deal with the cluster fuck of metal and wheels. Perhaps only “Venice Bitch” could soothe one through such transportation conditions if not weed (but likely a combination of both as Angelenos can scarcely function without the ganj).
“All Too Well” is an entirely different sound, one that does not seek to placate, so much as aggravate with (often puerile) accusations of betrayal and threats of forever remembering all too well. That remembering serving a bia all too well when she has the platform to recount the narrative in song format. While Del Rey also has this platform, her slant has never been toward “revenge” as much as it’s been toward pining in a rueful sort of way—in the very fashion that Lorde said was “unhealthy.” You know, the “I will love you till the end of time,” “ever since my baby went away, it’s been the blackest day” tone that Del Rey has become so well-known for. On a side note, it’s during “Blackest Day” that Del Rey pulls the Swift line, “Wind in my hair.”
Tone is arguably the thing that most separates Del Rey and Swift, particularly on these two epic and sweeping tracks that record executives without imagination never could have seen as “single material.” Where Del Rey is casual and lackadaisical, opening with, “Fear fun, fear love, fresh out of fucks forever,” Swift is more overtly bereft before veering in the direction of being recriminating. Del Rey, on the other hand, meanders languidly through the track, ruminating on her relationship and how “nothing gold can stay.” Oh well. That’s life, etc.
In contrast, Swift wants to play up victimhood via the lines, “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel in the name of being honest/I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here/‘Cause I remember it all, all, all/Too well.” Has Swift never heard of the magical wonders of wine-numbing (as Adele obviously has…if “I Drink Wine” is any indication)? It’s very helpful with turning pain into not giving a fuck… but that wouldn’t yield quite as much profit. Another reason why Del Rey possibly hasn’t reached the same sales heights as Swift. For every girl loves a tale of the caddish male (see also: Amy Winehouse) who ends up getting justice served by way of having a song written about him that rehashes the whole jilting affair. This, too, is something that Del Rey is renowned for, though to a slightly lesser extent. Likely because she’s more “chill” about the whole thing (at least in the post-Lust for Life epoch).
Conversely, the “shrewish” female archetype is something Swift has no issue with embodying and, in many ways, has striven to do so in order to break down the barriers put in place to keep women from expressing themselves without abashment—lest they’re branded as “bitches” for being “too vocal.” Del Rey, instead, seems to know how to wield that “awkward but sweet” (as she calls herself in “Wildflower Wildfire”) persona of hers into a song, like “Venice Bitch,” that is, quite plainly, more “grooveable” and less, shall we say, forced. Not to mention more accessible to different types of people. This isn’t to say that “All Too Well” isn’t some kind of sad (white) girl masterpiece in lyricism, but if we’re to select the more superior and affecting song, it’s “Venice Bitch.”
