![]() ![]() When she did a book signing wearing a mesh mask, she was accused of putting lives at risk. protests against police brutality, she drew criticism for posting videos of looting. Her timing was impeccable: That same week, the Amy Cooper scandal turned white women’s “fragility” into a punch line.ĭel Rey tried to get back on the right side of history, but once again she was playing with imagery whose meaning had slipped out of her grasp. “The fact that they want to turn … my advocacy for fragility into a race war - it’s really bad,” she said in a follow-up video. But it was 2020 - who was capable of logging off? Instead, she dug in her heels. A more calculating star might have known it was time to go away for a while. Del Rey’s own fans pleaded for her to delete the post. can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money … without being crucified or saying that I’m glamorizing abuse? … I’m not not a feminist, but there has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me.” The other artists’ fans united against her, pointing out that she’d mostly targeted women of color. In May, she announced her new album with an Instagram post: “Now that Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani, Nicki Minaj, and Beyoncé have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating, etc. ![]() So of course Del Rey wasted no time stepping in it. The video for “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.” Photo: Lana Del Rey/YouTubeĢ020 was a treacherous year for celebrities online, who had to navigate a complex set of unwritten rules about the proper tone to strike on social media that bedeviled even the savviest among them. Who cared anymore if someone wasn’t “real”? That paled in comparison to other sins, like cultural appropriation. She benefited from a shift in the discourse, too: “Video Games” came out during indie rock’s dying days as a cultural force. Critics began giving her grudging respect, then actual praise. In Cedric Gervais’s throbbing remix of “Summertime Sadness,” she got her first and only Top 10 hit. The music got better, too, as she learned how to move between personae, from unapologetic gadfly (“Fucked My Way Up to the Top”) to unhappy recipient of the male gaze (“Pretty When You Cry”). She was a musical Tarantino her overwhelming collage of references was the aesthetic. As she got more prolific, it became easier to understand what she was doing. If Del Rey was really so bad for women, why were so many of them buying her record? The French academic Catherine Vigier pinpointed the source of Del Rey’s appeal: She was “representing and speaking to a contradiction facing thousands of young women today, women who have followed mainstream society’s prescriptions for success in what has been called a postfeminist world, but who find that real liberation and genuine satisfaction elude them.”ĭel Rey released a follow-up EP at the end of 2012, another one a year later, then the album Ultraviolence six months after that. ![]() ![]() When Lana’s first proper album, Born to Die, debuted on the heels of that SNL appearance, the New York Times called it “album as anticlimax, the period that ends the essay, not the beginning of a new paragraph.” The public did not agree: Born to Die became the fifth-highest-selling album of 2012 worldwide. (The Village Voice called it “early-’00s singles bar music.”) Still, her image had real juice. If writers paid more attention to her iconography than her music, well, that was partly because there wasn’t much music out there yet, and critics seemed to agree what she had released wasn’t interesting. “It’s just that the aesthetic references surrounding her are all already so pungent, evocative, and well worn that it’s hard to reshape them.” “It’s not that there’s anything ‘inauthentic’ about Del Rey,” argued a Pitchfork writer. By the time you’d heard of Del Rey, you’d probably also heard she was a fake, an industry plant who put the “retro” in “retrograde.” Soon, though, there was a backlash to the backlash: Hadn’t plenty of male artists embraced alter egos? Critics noted this but remained unconvinced. That hair! Those lips! Who could forget the press release touting her as a “gangster Nancy Sinatra”? Five minutes’ digging proved her backstory was not very gangster at all: She had a marketing-exec father and a well-to-do upbringing upstate, and had previously released an EP under her real name, Lizzy Grant. ![]()
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