And so the Lana Del Rey-bashing economy moves faster than the actual Lana Del Rey economy, a reminder of how free people feel to clobber someone, especially a young woman, for the crime of art. Not always artful art, but that matters less than the elevation of the mundane into something worth exploding. Ms. Del Rey generates so much anger precisely because she does so little. People don’t know what to do with this unformed thing they’ve been told they need to care about; crushing it is easy, almost humane. - Jon Caramanica in this NY Times piece on Lana Del Rey

For me, watching the spectacle around Lana Del Rey unfold has been fascinating and unsettling (mainly because of my aforementioned interest in the intersections between sexism, misogyny, and music criticism, but also because I actually like Lana Del Rey’s music — I know, I know, I am vast, I contain multitudes, blah, blah, blah.)

The economy of hate around Lana is difficult for me to process — I can understand the basics, I guess. People think she is “fake” and makes “bad music” and that major label representation/resources have offered her undue opportunities insofar as “media exposure” on national TV and in the music press go. That said, I don’t really understand why any of this matters, because isn’t that basically the discourse around every single mainstream pop star that indie rock dudes hate on? So is Lana just such a big deal because she’s being covered extensively by supposedly “alternative” publications? Would people feel differently about Lana if the major label was taken out of the equation? If they didn’t think she had gotten cosmetic surgery? If she was releasing a cassette on Bathetic instead of an album that you could pre-order an iTunes deluxe edition of? Is this kind of like how people hate Nico? Because she was pretty and weird and vacant and Jackson Browne wrote some of her best songs?

It’s also interesting to me that I feel compelled to defend her. It’s true, I like her goofy songs with their whispered lyrics about “sipping Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice” and wanting to be cool but not “know[ing] how yet.” I like that in her interviews she says that she actually doesn’t feel very passionately about music at this point in her life and is really into video editing and community service. I like her in the same simple way that I like everything else I like. I would like to hang with her and ask exactly how she gets her hair so full because even though my hair is super full bodied it usually looks really flat (probably because I don’t really brush it or use hairspray). I really like that Caramanica describes her on SNL as “looking uncertain, like a child singing her grandmother’s favorite songs, dressed in her grandmother’s clothes” — to me, that is a really cool way to look and be and is probably not all that different from how I would look/feel if I were singing on national TV. I like that she reminds me of a time in my life when I wore high waisted pants and curled my hair and also had a bomber jacket and had a crush on a mean boy who drove an El Camino and was also always getting into fights with other mean boys at parties.

Re: the quote I am supposedly “responding” to, I don’t think there’s anything “humane” about the shit that some people have said about Lana (or many other female recording artists), I think it’s mostly petulant & childish & not grounded in anything especially meaningful or interesting. To me, most of it seems like this knee-jerk response of, “I am being told I would like this and I don’t and you can’t make me and her name isn’t even REALLY Lana, SO THERE!” (Which, come on, if “that’s not even her real name” and “those aren’t even her real lips” are the best you can do in a critical discussion, then you are pretty much doing it wrong.)

I guess mostly I’m disappointed — I think that there could be a lot of interesting discussion going on around Lana Del Rey. Like, it could someday maybe even be Nicki Minaj level interesting (maybe). Whenever I listen to the Lana demos and Lizzy Grant recordings that have leaked online, I’m struck by the ways in which she moves between different modes of classed whiteness, lyrically touching on tropes of low-income white families while playing with visual representations of upper class whiteness & how this play is contrasted by rumors of her father’s dot com millions vs. rumors of her having grown up in modular housing. But instead everyone is just like “WAH WAH WAH, PITCHFORK WRITES ABOUT HER TOO MUCH.” Which, who even cares? Most of the time Pitchfork is a well-curated blur of shit I could care less about.

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   moves faster than...Del Rey economy,...clobber someone,...

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    Lana Del Rey is the Milli Vanilli of indie rock. She’s being destroyed for doing the same thing many other artists have...

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