“She has many different qualities that women in our culture aren’t allowed to be, all at once, so people are trying to find the inauthentic one,” says Tavi Gevinson, the founding editor of teen-girl mag Rookie. “She’s girly, but not infantilized. I relate to her aesthetic the way I think other girls relate to Taylor Swift lyrics—her femininity isn’t too sexy or too pure, and that’s something I can get behind.”
How Del Rey defines herself in the classic-pop cosmos has changed as her music and image have evolved over the past year: “Gangsta Nancy Sinatra” gave way to the slightly more finessed “Lolita lost in the ‘hood.” More recently, she catchphrased her major label debut Born to Die as “Bruce Springsteen in Miami,” trading up on that Jersey striving. Born to Die features familiar Springsteen tropes—no-future kids tangled in sin and forever promises; Del Rey’s songs are like answer-back dispatches direct from “Candy’s Room,” but the door’s slammed shut and the stereo’s up. She’s telling the missing side of the story, revealing a new, true character living behind that scrim of male desire: Born To Die is the good girl who wants it just as bad as he does.
III. The Backlash: It’s About the Music, LOL
The issue with Lana Del Rey is not whether she is a corporate test-tubed ingénue, but why we are unwilling to believe that she is animated by her own passion and ambition—and why that makes a hot girl so unattractive. The big question here is not “Is she real?” But, rather, why it seems impossible to believe that she could be.
On its surface, the Lana Del Rey Authenticity Debate™ swings between two depressing possibilities: (1) That’s she’s all but the fourth Kardashian sister, Frankensteined together (by old white guys) in order to exploit the now sizable “indie” market, or (2) that she is a moderately-talented singer who is getting over by pushing our buttons with nostalgia and good looks. This is the distracting crux, a pointless debate that casts a long shadow over Born to Die. For critics and anonymous commenters alike, the reality of Lana Del Rey seems to be an unsolvable equation: the prospect of an attractive female artist who sings plainly about her desire because she has it, with an earnest vision, who crafts her own songs and videos, who understands what it takes to be a viable pop product and is capable of guiding herself to those perilous heights. It’s seemingly beyond possibility. Yet, Lana Del Rey is doing it all, before our very eyes.
Being sexy and serious about your art needn’t be mutually exclusive, even when your art involves being a pop package. Defending herself to Pitchfork last fall, Del Rey said, “I’m not trying to create an image or a persona. I’m just singing because that’s what I know how to do.” If her ambitions were to “just” sing, she’d still be making the rounds at Brooklyn open mics—but here she’s attempting to refocus our attention on her music. Which, for a short time, was the reason we cared about her. Perhaps, if she’d faked us out with a record on a modest indie label like Merge first, some hesitation towards major labels or the mainstream, all her ambition would’ve been palatable instead of outrageous.
The central, mistaken assumption being made about Del Rey is that she is a valence for DIY/indie culture, which she’s never been. She played daytime, industry showcases at overlit venues in Midtown for years, and was taking meetings at majors since mid-2010. These are the steps of someone who wants to be a pop star, not signed by Matador. Bloggers and tastemaking websites believed they noticed her first, when, in fact, they were two years behind a pack of lawyers and A&R scouts who were eager to sign an artist who was the total package.
While a few (two) blogs got on the Del Rey wagon early—successive waves of attention in late spring of 2011 were prompted by press releases. No one rightly discovered her and even the coolest blogs were being jumped into by publicists or “grassroots” marketing firms, their LDR posts repeating the story as it was fed to them. Many of these same blogs are now indignant, fronting like they were duped into caring about her or lending her credibility—though they certainly weren’t so discerning before. They were just eager to claim “first,” as is the law of the jungle.
In the weeks surrounding the release of Del Rey’s Born to Die, every interview and TV performance became a new proving ground. Video interviews showed Del Rey as both self-aware and funny, as when a VH1 interviewer condescendingly comforted her for not being on this year’s Coachella lineup. She deadpanned, “Aw, thanks,” before cracking herself up. Her much-maligned Saturday Night Live performance sounded just as awkward as every other band that performs on the show. Still, her unevenness was taken as resounding proof that she was Born 2 Fail by no less an authority than NBC news anchor Brian Williams.
In other interviews, Del Rey has talked about studying cosmology and a six-year stint doing homeless outreach, suggesting that she’s more engaged in the real word than her ardent critics. Though she aims high, she’s still hardly acting like a star, telling MTV, “I consider being able to pursue music a luxury, but it’s not the most important thing in my life. It’s just something that’s really nice that ended up working for me for right now.” Still, she doesn’t bother hiding her ambition—she’s cited the self-actualization classic Think and Grow Rich as her recommended reading.
Surprisingly, it’s still easier for people to believe the ancient model of a major-label star system—girl of moderate talent is groomed and posed to appeal—rather than accept that a young woman could plot her course by her own animus. Meanwhile, sexist critiques of Del Rey’s appearance, songs and videos get spun as incisive discernment, offered up as knowing analysis of a deceptive product. Her songs are assailed as “trying too hard” to be sexy, as if we have slept through the past three decades of liberated pop-diva sexuality as written by Madonna/Janet/Britney/Rihanna and are now shocked by Del Rey’s slight approximation. She’s by-the-book, and yet she’s seen as breaking the rules. It’s doubtful we’d even be intrigued by a female artist being subtle or modest. As an audience, we make a big stink about wanting the truth, but we’re only really interested in the old myths.
TAYLOR SWIFT, GRIMES AND LANA DEL REY:
THE YEAR IN BLOND AMBITION
Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, January 2012
It seems so long ago—certainly more than 52 weeks—since we were all flustered by the audacity of Lana Del Rey. Her crimes, it seemed, were legion and very, very serious—concerns that trumped consideration of whether or not her music was any good. She was bad on Saturday Night Live. Her lips, perhaps, had collagen in them. A few years ago, she was playing A&R showcases backed by hired guns, and suddenly she was all over Pitchfork like a real-deal indie ingénue, but (gasp!) it turned out she already had a deal with Interscope. Her name was not actually Lana Del Rey, and, unlike any artist in the history of ever, she’d attended private school.
As we enter the new year with a clean slate and hindsight, it seems fair enough to chalk up our lil’ Lana freak-out to our long-standing weirdness with women’s ambition and the antiquated notion that image consciousness is somehow antithetical to the making of true art and is, in fact, a sin against rock’s visceral mandate. It’s a problem we tend to have with girls and women more than with the boys (word to Jack White’s continuing Campaign 4 Realness). This past year proved there is a special sort of animus reserved for women—Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift and Grimes’ Claire Boucher—whose ambition seems especially naked and, if you will, feminine.
It’s only natural that young female artists engage us with and communicate through their image(s) as much as they do with their music. Image is a more effective vehicle for expression than songs. No girl escapes teenhood without a keen awareness of exactly how the world sees her, what it expects of her; she knows the weight of the world’s desire for her down to the ounce.
When it comes to music, image is believed to be the teen girls’ area of fascination and special expertise; young women’s arduous fandom is often taken as the very proof of a performer’s artlessness. The perception being that girls are so rapt with an artist’s surface image that it
supersedes any sort of real connection with or understanding of the music itself. Though Swift and Boucher placed high in this year’s Pazz & Jop—Lana less so (Born to Die, #54 album)—the critique with all three has often regarded the seeming purposefulness of artifice in their image, as well as their dutiful maintenance of it.
We took Lana’s ambitions personally—as if she was preying upon us, marking us as hornball simps so seduced by her porny licking of her fake/not-fake lips that we’d buy in on whatever it was she was selling. The offense being? That we’d actually fall for something so constructed? Or was it the fact of the construction itself?
Part of what made Boucher’s work so exciting this year was her zealous courtship of the zeitgeist, the irreverence of her ambition, that her cultural reference points were young and female. She’s an autodidactic indie artist who pinpoints the unnatural qualities of Mariah Carey’s voice as her greatest influence. Subversion of manga imagery and lost-in-the-mix, baby-voiced cooing are far from the riot-grrrl-influenced rage that we commonly use to verify feminist artistry.
Boucher’s merchandising of “pussy rings” was overtly feminist, though some still wrote it off as a ploy for attention. Boucher had the temerity to manufacture merch that wasn’t a T-shirt—a feminist rebuttal to the cock-’n’-balls scrawled on every dressing room wall. How is a plastic rendering of a vulva so utterly escandalo in the Internet age of 2012? (The gender divide on the pussy-ring reporting is stark and telling of just how and who Grimes connects with.) While Boucher can be faulted for some things—is that a rain stick sample on “Know the Way?”—would she really be a more credible artist if she showed less ambition?
Swift, who is a little younger than Boucher and Del Rey, had a year of evolution for her image as well. On Red, Swift deflects power with a studied naiveté. Love is something that she falls victim to; men are fundamentally the bad actors. She’s amid an incredibly careful transition from pop’s Virgin Queen into young adulthood, so now it’s slightly less of a big deal to imply that she has had a boy sleepover in a song. Swift is nothing if not a cautious star, a multimillion-dollar industry unto herself—she is not going to pull a Miley in order to signal what a big girl she is now. Throughout Red, she is frequently seduced, victimized or unable to steel herself against her own desires, as if adult womanhood is a powerful undertow dragging her out to the sea. It’s a curious thing to watch such a powerful cultural force abdicate her own might, but it’s understood that claiming it comes with its own cross.
Swift’s mastery of her own feckless image is as finely-honed a piece of work as any of Red’s half-dozen singles; it engages many of the common expectations of girlhood, so much so that it presents us with an impossibly perfected persona. The controlled iterations of Swift are subject to constant remix due to her celebrity status, where her songs conflate with the tabloid fare of her life and create a larger, narrative work. Be they peer, cad or Kennedy, each new Swift boyfriend presents or disproves a song theorem of Red. In the latest widely circulated pap shot of Swift, she’s exiting a tropical isle alone via small craft. It reads as forlorn from a distance of a pixelated 30 yards and adds chiaroscuro to “Sad Beautiful Tragic.” Swift’s got a Joni problem now: The interest in whom she’s seeing and speculation over which song is about which dude now obfuscates the merits of her work (though it is hard to suggest any human force could blunt the thundering Max Martin’d chorus of “Trouble,” but alas).
To be galled by these women’s advances upon their audiences is to play the Pollyanna about how any product gets across the transom to us. In their manipulations and fluid manifestations of their images, they each show incredible deftness—a cultural prescience that speaks to their ambition and interest in being understood. All this girlish guile makes their art no less pure.
WE CAN’T STOP: OUR YEAR WITH MILEY
Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, January 2014
Is there a scribe among us—save for Wire writers and those whose bylines eagerly accompanied reviews of that Larry Coryell reissue—who didn’t pull down at least $40 for Miley musings in 2013? Perhaps a shocked-and-awed news item, a post-VMAs reaction, a pondering of that preponderance of tongue? If not, I hate to break it to you, but you got ripped off. It was her year, whether we liked it or—well, yeah.
We wrote about Miley perhaps not so much because she fascinated but riled us with her every move. And to be sure, it was the moves—of her masturbatory fingers, nude body, her twerking, her waggling tongue, the way she used other women’s bodies and her own in videos and performances. Her actual album, Bangerz, was a tertiary concern at best.
It was a long year for pop aggrievement; exempting Bruno Mars’ five-week run at the top of the year, the No. 1 spot on Billboard in 2013 was occupied by white artists. While those Baauer, Macklemore, Robin Thicke, and Lorde hits got their share of controversy and think-piece lather, nothing disquieted us as thoroughly as Miley. She did a mere three weeks with “Wrecking Ball,” but spent the last half of the year as a lightning rod for our censure and outrage; we cut off her head and she just kept writhing, unchastened.
Writing about Miley is simple because she’s impossible to define and easy to vilify—whatever we want to billboard onto her sticks because all at once she is enrapturing, repulsive, hysterical, ignorant, white, young, female, ultra-rich, sexy, scary, skeezy, unafraid, feminist, an artist, not feminist, privileged, talented, sad, visceral, fake, real, too real, and friends with Terry Richardson. What can’t we say about her? Apparently nothing. Bad girls are infinite. Miley possesses us in a way that fully clothed Lorde never will.
Yet the sins of Miley were real. She made egregious missteps amid her attempts to telegraph her artistic primacy, appropriating black cultural idioms and playing on historically racist stereotypes. She claimed she doesn’t see or consider race, and of course she doesn’t have to consider race—she’s a very rich and successful white woman living in America. To ask her to see the scope of her privilege—to understand what it means to mean-mug and then push in her gleaming grill, to really get how a swipe of her tongue across Amazon Ashley’s ass could play to anyone but herself—is an act of futility. Miley’s defensive assertion that we were all prudes with a problem illustrated how wide the chasm between her actions and her awareness was. It made her naiveté seem willful, emblematic—it made her continual triumph downright enraging.
Then there’s the matter of the paucity of imagination in how Miley served herself to us in 2013, permanently lensed in the pornographic gaze. Every glance was a demand to imagine what it is to fuck her or to imagine ourselves as her, being consumed. By the time the video for “Adore You” was released in December, Miley’s pussy-as-Thor’s-hammer pretext and uncomplicated invitations began to feel ruthless in their continual deploy. Their cheap power was fatiguing.
If there was any discernible deep thought behind the image, Bangerz could have been a masterful Top 40 long con, a work of weapons-grade performance art on par with, say, Valie Export’s Actionist peepshow Action Pants: Genital Panic. Miley engaged our baseness and biases, only to make us confront how much we want to see, how much we’ve been culturally sensitized to be turned on by a rich, white bitch daring us to want her, watching us as we watch her. By year’s end, she’d utterly failed to shock anyone who was still paying attention. Which, if we’re being honest, was all of us.
In the same week “Adore You” dropped, Miley offered up a hopeful revision of herself to The New York Times. If taken at face value, it would seem we’ve misunderstood her all along: She’s a Mandela-mourning, big-tent feminist living in hope for America’s post-racial future. She doesn’t want to be a bad example to the youth, but she’s got a rebel nature. She claims she respected her Disney-branding enough to curtail it till she was legal. The part of that complex equation that actually jibes with the Miley we recognize is that yoke of Disney. Her grown-up image requires a constant reminder of her Disnified past to show us just how wayward we should understand Miley to be. They m
ade millions branding Miley as a clean-fun-loving, purity-ring-clasping everygirl; Disney had her formally apologize for taking bikini selfies after the then-teenage singer’s phone was hacked and pics disseminated. It is only natural that even the most tepid, predictable adulteration of Miley’s emblematically pure image would be sensational, that it would have the power to horrify us.
Miley’s Bangerz-era story is a transformation fantasy built on proximity to what she was, how we knew her, how fast she went from supersweet to superfreak, suggesting that, yes, she was an authentic bad girl all along under that darling disguise. Her drifting orientation from the Mouse mothership is meant to tell us as much about who she is now as when she cried real tears and writhed nude on a wrecking ball for Richardson’s camera. This is her ceremony to show us, whether we want her or not, she belongs to us now.
LOUDER THAN LOVE:
MY TEEN GRUNGE POSERDOM
EMP Conference paper, Spring 2005
There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when I was not cool. In 1990, I was 14, almost 15, and just entered the ninth grade at the largest high school in Minneapolis and was orbiting somewhere between loner dork and amorphous weirdo. My wardrobe consisted of a lot of black clothes, a lot of orange clothes, my mother’s business apparel from the ‘80s; I wore cowboy boots and long, unbelted tunics that made me look like I was in a cult. I spent a lot of time alone, sewing hats and reading news magazines to keep up on international politics. The music I knew about was from the radio. I had a few tapes I liked: the B-52’s Cosmic Thing, Deee-Lite, the first Tracy Chapman album. I mostly listened to the tapes on the weekend, when I was delivering my newspaper route, though sometimes I would lay in bed at night and listen to the Tracy Chapman tape over and over and cry a little.
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic Page 5