Unpacking The Controversies of Lana Del Rey
I’m trying to figure out precisely why Lana Del Rey’s recent…album promotion tactics (?) have disappointed and upset me so much. You see, I love Lana Del Rey, which is one reason why I’m taking all of this rather hard. I have seen her in concert, purchased her albums, and analyzed her lyrics like they are scriptures. I’ve watched hours and hours of her interviews on YouTube, scoured the Internet for her unreleased songs. I’ve been Lana Del Rey for Halloween.
Lana is an utterly American figure, who like Marilyn Monroe before her, created a persona for herself as an artist, complete with stage name and ultra-feminine public image. In a review for Pitchfork, Mark Richardson calls her a “Concept Human.” Lana Del Rey, the artist, writes and sings slow, melodious meditations on love, depression, drugs, and the men who treat her badly. Lana Del Rey will never write radio hits. She will never forfeit her artistic vision for a towering Swedish-megaproducer-penned hook. She will always be a high priestess of melancholy, and she will always sing about masochism, lust, and her own version of America. That consistency, that refusal to bow to trends, makes Lana an unusual figure in the current musical landscape. Taylor Swift, in many ways her closest analogue as a pop star, is no trendsetter. Taylor and Lana are both songwriters first, singers second. Both of them have expressed this. You know a Taylor Swift song from the extreme specificity of the lyrics (the infamous Scarf in “All Too Well”,) her preference for loping melodies (“betty,” “ivy,” and “Our Song”), and her warm, conversational familiarity as a singer. Taylor feels like someone you know. She also follows the crowd when it comes to musical style; her single “cardigan” is kind of a copycat Lana Del Rey song. So is “Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince”. It even has a reference to Americana (something Lana’s lyrics are known for) in the title.
Lana, on the other hand, remains committed to her own unique sound. Set apart by gauzy layered vocal tracks, trip-hop flourishes, consistently downbeat tempo, a general air of melancholy, and Old Hollywood strings, you know a Lana song from the sound first and the lyrics second. If you don’t believe me, listen to the title track of her third album Honeymoon and ask yourself if anyone else in the pop world is writing songs that sound like that. Lana also possesses a singular, distinctive voice. She doesn’t belt; she croons, sliding up and down different parts of her expansive vocal range with apparent effortlessness, gliding above the music like the mist over a meadow. It’s not hard to see her influence in younger artists like Billie Eilish.
But having extolled her unique artistry, we must now come to the controversies that are distressing me so much, at this point so numerous and interconnected that reciting them all in detail would be exhausting. I will link some more in depth pieces at the end of this essay. Viewed together, they showcase a specific pattern. Here’s a summarized rundown: In September 2019, she sicced her fanbase on Ann Powers, a critic who wrote a rambling--but largely complementary--essay about her for NPR. In May of 2020, she complained that her contemporaries in the music industry could sing about sexuality without getting criticized for it, while she apparently had been “crucified” or accused of “glamorizing abuse” by unnamed critics and singers. The fact that most of the female performers she mentioned were Black women revealed a stunning lack of awareness. Did Lana really think that Beyonce had never faced blow-back for her art? The woman who got repeatedly shut out of Grammy nominations, and who lost Album of the Year to Adele, despite Lemonade being an absolute cultural phenomenon? Did Lana really think that Cardi B had never received criticism for having worked as a stripper? Even stranger, this diatribe came out after months of career-best, glowing praise for her album Norman Fucking Rockwell. She made it worse by repeatedly doubling down on her remarks in subsequent social media posts. As Ashley Reese wrote for Jezebel, “the optics of Lana, a white woman, complaining about feminism lacking space for her while critiquing the acclaim allotted to several Black pop artists is mortifying.” That kind of sums it up.
And now the disastrous rollout of her latest album has seen her repeating this template. She wrote a comment seemingly pre-empting criticism for having women of color on her album cover, bragging that she had “always been extremely inclusive without trying,” and that her boyfriends had been “rappers,” as if “rappers” were an ethnicity. Then she went on BBC with Annie Mac and said that Donald Trump “doesn’t know that he’s inciting a riot” in reference to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol. Then, when magazines like Complex reported her comments, she lashed out at them, and then posted a rambling Instagram video defending herself, all while adamantly refusing to take any accountability or show any self-awareness at all. And I love Lana, and I’m biased towards her, and ready to give her the benefit of the doubt, but with this most recent controversy, she didn’t give me an opportunity to do so.
excerpts from Lana’s tweets and songs, and essays by Ashley Reese and Ann Powers. Collage by me.
And so, what are we to make of this? I don’t think anyone really expects Lana to be an astute commentator for political or cultural matters; we want her to be a songwriter and make beautiful art. Part of me wonders what Lana thinks this is going to accomplish for her as an artist or as a celebrity. She’s gotten this far. She must be shrewd enough to recognize that this parade of bad press is not the best way to promote an album. As a long time fan of hers, I was thrilled for the album rollout. Now, I’m so embarrassed by Lana’s public comments that I tend to forget that new music is coming. In fact I even feel a sense of unease about it.
I also wonder at how someone with a degree in philosophy--metaphysics! From a Jesuit school!--can be so bad at argumentation and rhetoric outside of songwriting. You can’t escape philosophy without studying rhetoric and formal logic. And yet Lana’s scandal-generating remarks are vague and unsubstantiated--who are all these people critiquing her for “setting back feminism a hundred years?” Who are the people supposedly criticizing her album cover’s lack of diversity? Additionally, she repeats again and again that her comments have been taken out of context, always the refuge of the person with an inherently weak argument.
But the flaws of her argument are not the root of the problem. In all the controversies I mentioned, there is one through-line, which is that Lana takes criticism personally, even if that criticism is in good faith. When she lashed out at Ann Powers from NPR, it came across as absurd because Powers’ essay was a serious, thoughtful response to Lana’s work as an artist. It wasn’t about criticizing Lana as a person, yet she responded to it as if it were some kind of personal attack. In a post that mentions several Black female pop artists, Lana only pays attention to her own perceived persecution, only the criticism lobbed against her and not against her Black contemporaries. In the many follow-ups to this post, it is the same. Lana’s feelings, perspective, and story are the only ones that matter. In 2019, she had earned enormous critical clout for her work, but as Ashley Reese writes: “why embrace that clout when she can fret over, say, a Pitchfork review of Born to Die from 2012 instead?” In her interview with Annie Mac, she said that racism “can’t” be her problem, and no one can “make” that out to be one of her issues. As if it were impossible. When Complex reported factually on the contents of that Annie Mac interview, Lana took it personally, as an attack on the supposed “relationship” she’d had with the magazine. The antagonism Lana has towards critics is even displayed in one of her songs, “Coachella: Woodstock In My Mind,” where she sings that critics can be so mean sometimes.
Maybe this is just what happens to you when you become famous; maybe it becomes harder to distinguish good faith criticisms from bad. And Lana has faced bad-faith criticism, especially early in her career when people were convinced that having a stage name made her totally inauthentic. There were plenty of critics and writers in 2012 who seemed to be rooting for her to fail because she confused them. But maybe these outbursts have nothing to do with the nature of fame. Maybe this is just who Lana is. This fragility is a difficult, reckless aspect of her character. But like many of her own songs, Lana’s behavior also reveals something difficult about America itself.
excerpts in from Lana’s tweets, interview with Annie Mac, Lana’s lyrics, and essay from Ann Powers. Collage by me.
America is full of people who can’t take responsibility for any part they may have had in upholding toxic systems. That is after all what Lana’s doing when she says that she can’t be accused of being racist. She’s conflating prejudice, which is personal, with racism, which is systemic. You can be free of prejudices and genuinely enjoy being around all types of people, while also perpetuating injustices against them--you could vote for policies that discriminate against them, or vote against policies that would help them. You could fail to stand up for people or speak up for them. You could work to maintain the status quo within a business or an industry because it’s comfortable for you, even if it is hostile to BIPOC contemporaries. Or you could simply fail to understand that the system is rigged, and rigged in your favor. I’m not accusing Lana of being either prejudiced or racist--I’m simply saying that she doesn’t seem to get that these are two different things.
America can only be understood through a system of dialectics--it’s a both-and country. It is both a country of extraordinary resilience and moral character, and a cesspool of bigotry and greed. It is both a country of opportunity and a country of oppression, poverty and splendor. Both things are true, paradoxes and contradictions abound everywhere you look. You have to both-and your way through this American life. Lana Del Rey’s songs often describe a similar dynamic: It hurts to love you and I still love you anyway. Love is like smiling when the firing squad is against you. He hit me and it felt like a kiss.
So how does she not see it?
It’s not enough just to have Black friends. You have to actually advocate for freedom and justice, and that means being willing to sacrifice some of the ease you’ve previously enjoyed so that said Black friends can have equitable access to resources and opportunities. It means you don’t automatically center your own experiences in discussions about race or racism. It means simply apologizing when your comments hurt people, and taking that hurt seriously. It means a lot of things. But in all actions, the work of anti-racism requires one particular trait from white people: humility. And yeah, being able to learn from good faith criticism is a big part of that.
Humility means recognizing that you are not at the center of this particular story. You have a part to play, but it isn’t about you. Too many white Americans have a hard time with this. I know, because I’ve been that reflexively defensive person. I’ve been the person who talks when they should be carefully listening. I’ve defended myself, absolved myself of blame, when I should have acknowledged that the status quo benefits me. I didn’t take accountability or look inside myself. It’s sad to see that same thing in an artist I deeply admire and whose work means so much to me, because I guess I expected more from her.
It must be said that we don’t really know who Lana Del Rey is in her private life, and so we have to take the sum of her public comments and actions as they are. In fairness to her, she has pledged to donate half of the proceeds from her recent poetry book to Native American organizations--and she made this pledge months before these controversies happened, so she’s not doing it just to save face. It’s a commitment she made in good faith. So the concept of making reparations--at least to some people--is clearly something she cares about and takes seriously. Also, again, I don’t think any of us want Lana to be a cultural critic who writes or educates about issues of race in America. I don’t think that would be all that interesting, and we already have activists who do this very well, such as Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Rachel Cargle. What I hope for her is that she is able to engage in some introspection. I don’t want to see a professional adjustment from Lana so much as a personal one (although she could stand to get a different publicist).
What I think she should do from a public relations standpoint, is issue a genuine apology--no excuses, no caveats--and let her music speak for itself for a while. She should then do the work of confronting white supremacy within herself--work that is private, ongoing, and difficult. She should also learn from Beyonce, who has for years retreated into public silence, making statements only when it’s really important. This silence has lent Beyonce an air of mystery unique in the social media-obsessed world of contemporary celebrity; it also gives her unmatched levels of control over her public image. Image-craft is as much a part of the project of Lana Del Rey as the music is. She would do well to remember that. When all people are talking about are the controversies, the glamour her songs possess quickly fades.
Lana has something of a tradition of covering songs performed by Nina Simone. At the end of the album Honeymoon, she sings: “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good/ oh Lord please don’t let me be misunderstood.” And I wish we could chalk all of this drama up to misunderstanding. But I think the problem is deeper than misunderstanding alone.
Sources and further reading:
https://www.insider.com/lana-del-rey-problematic-backlash-timeline-2021-1
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5814038/heres-why-lana-del-rey-is-so-controversial
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a35311661/lana-del-rey-appropriation/
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/757545360/lana-del-rey-lives-in-americas-messy-subconscious
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000r3k5
https://themuse.jezebel.com/lana-del-rey-could-have-left-this-one-in-the-drafts-1843586630
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19449-lana-del-rey-ultraviolence/