Jan. 26, 2012 at 1:27pm with 7 notes
what i'm readingeveryone sucks
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Del Rey, after all, isn’t the first to take more than one shot at finding a pop persona that worked. Imagine a 1969 Internet reacting to David Bowie’s breakthrough with “Space Oddity”—a single as mannered, languid, and beguiling as “Video Games,” and a performer as in love with artifice and with plenty of past to dig up. Would his career have benefited from blogs tearing apart his inconsistency and torrents bundling his hit with “The Laughing Gnome”?

Self-reinvention and persona play are the glue of pop and the ghosts that haunt and anger social media. And those concepts are also what Del Rey’s single is all about. For me—and there are kinder, just as convincing interpretations—the singer in “Video Games” is a solipsist, casting herself as a master manipulator and her lazy, drifty relationship as a great love. So I hear a record about fakery and self-projection, which is more timely than how “authentic” the woman who made it is.

—

Tom Ewing, Lana Del Rey Lights Up the Internet

Since the Lana Del Rey kerfuffle has been a Thing, and since having opinions on Del Rey has been a Thing, I’ve stayed out of all of it. I have a pretty significant academic grounding in popular culture theory, which is something that sounds outrageously pretentious but has mostly served to make me overthink anything that calls into question authenticity, appropriation, dominant stereotypes and tropes, etc. I try not to write about any of that here. I got into too many fights on my old Tumblr when it came to the discussion of, especially, pop/popular culture and feminism, and it just really fucking sucked—because the ladyblogging and music-blogging communities can, holy shit, really fucking suck, most of the time. I prefer to search for meaning in, like, Village Voice blog posts now.

So I haven’t said anything about Lana Del Rey, and I won’t, even though I so want to parse out some of the issues that she raises, especially the idea of self-reinvention alluded to above. But I will say that I’ve listened to “Born to Die” quite a few times, because I like it. The album bores me overall, but there are tracks (“Summertime Sadness,” especially) that I, well, like. My enjoyment of Lana Del Rey, or my dislike of any other artist, isn’t all that matters—pop and popular culture have overreaching implications on groups and societies, as we know—but it’s most of it.

  1. thecallup said: The concept of “authenticity” as a standard for measuring worth or value in pop culture is ludicrous. And it seems to apply more stringently to women, the difference being that men get to first be authentic and then be absurd.
  2. doug said: I’ve stayed out of it here, and whenever forced in social situations to “have” an opinion I just fall back to “She’s a human who is trying to make something, and that at the very least deserves thanks.”