All the Lives I Want

by Alana Massey

  Lana’s first hit, “Video Games,” centered on seduction: “I heard that you like the bad girls / Honey, is that true?” Unlike Fiona, she is not a girl recognizing her own sin in penitential retrospect; she is a woman broadcasting it, perhaps exaggerating the authenticity of her own wickedness as sex appeal. Lana surrenders to man rather than God, begging to retreat to the shadows of the narcissistic but ordinary men whose toxicity seems to intoxicate her. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you / Everything I do / I tell you all the time / Heaven is a place on earth with you / Tell me all the things you want to do,” she sings. Her cry is desperate and real; you believe her when she says it is all for him, her passion momentarily letting her audience forget that this complete devotion to a man whose company she considers akin to that of God and the company of heaven is playing video games, of all the mundane activities in the world.

  In the video-cum-short-film Tropico, Lana appears as both Eve in the Garden of Eden and as a retro 1970s version of the Virgin Mary in the first portion of the film, which is set to the song “Body Electric.” Before an audience of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Jesus Christ himself, she dances seductively with Adam before biting into the forbidden fruit and suddenly losing her footing. She falls not onto soil but onto the stage of a strip club, now wearing lingerie with a flutter of bills falling around her as “Gods and Monsters” begins. “God’s dead, I said ‘Baby, that’s alright with me,’” she declares, not so much an atheist as an apostate. Lana does not even make an effort to couch her rejection of God in euphemisms as she declares, “Me and God, we don’t get along, so now I sing.” She adds insult to injury when she sings, “In the land of Gods and Monsters / I was an Angel / Looking to get fucked hard.” The rejection of God is not enough for Lana; she must also replace him with a man, the less holy the better.

  Before the world was treated to the harshness of Fiona’s self-flagellation or the defiance of Lana’s sexuality, Dolly gave us her first hit in “Just Because I’m a Woman,” a song centered on forgiveness. “Now a man will take a good girl / And he’ll ruin her reputation / But when he wants to marry / Well, that’s a different situation,” Dolly sings of the hypocrisy of a man who will ruin a woman’s reputation but not marry her, insinuating that premarital sex is the cause for his judgment. “Now I know that I’m no angel / If that’s what you thought you’d found / I was just the victim of / A man that let me down,” she continues, acknowledging what she sees as the sin of her own actions, but not without holding a man accountable for bringing her to that sin.

  The presence of God in Dolly’s music is more obvious than in the songs of Lana or Fiona, but hidden under sparkling jumpsuits and bright blush, there is profound theological darkness. Dolly’s 1971 hit “Coat of Many Colors” recounts how her impoverished mother sewed rags together to make her a coat, the resulting garment more likely to be a clashing eyesore than Joseph’s dazzling robe from the book of Genesis that signaled his father’s favor. The young Dolly in the song tries to tell the Bible story to her classmates who ridicule her coat, but it falls on deaf ears among godless children. The narrative of 1971’s “Letter to Heaven” seems more at home in Flannery O’Connor’s macabre oeuvre than in Dolly’s. In the song, a little girl has her grandfather pen a letter to her dead mother, which she intended to be sent skyward toward God’s kingdom, only to be struck by a car and killed on her way to the post office to mail it. It closes, “The postman was passing and picked up the note / Addressed to the Master and these words he spoke / Straight up into heaven this letter did go / She’s happy up there with her mommy I know.” Were it penned by anyone but Dolly Parton, this song would sound like a crude and cruel joke. But in her capable hands and voice, the only cruelty is that of a god who renders our departed beloveds accessible only if we depart ourselves.

  But God is not all inscrutability for Dolly. In “He’s Alive,” she places herself among the witnesses to the crucifixion and recounts her subsequent doubt that he has risen again. But upon seeing the risen Christ, she embraces him in an ecstatic relief. “And as I looked into His eyes / The love was shining out from Him / Like sunlight from the skies / Guilt in my confusion / Disappeared in sweet release / And every fear I ever had / Just melted into peace,” she sings. For Dolly, to be looked upon by God is an opportunity for a welcome surrender. The gaze of men, however, is less gentle in her world.

  Obscured by her intoxicating good cheer and reputation as a wholesome if sometimes tacky entertainer, Dolly’s markedly melancholic view of love is easy to miss. Even within country music’s tradition of tragic romances as the only ones worth singing about, her romantic despair is because her lovers are not dying valiantly but vanishing casually. Lovers routinely abandon Dolly, and when they don’t, she lives in fear of their doing so, as she famously described in “Jolene.” She begs Jolene not to steal her man, in the forgivable delusion that it is women who steal away men rather than men who relinquish themselves readily. “I have cradled your head on my pillow / Quenched your thirst from my sweet loving cup / I have bowed to your needs like a willow / Now you’ve gone in the prime of our love,” she mourns on “Prime of Our Love.” One gets the sense that it was not Jolene who was the problem after all. Dolly is hopelessly dependent on love, declaring, “I am only happy when you are by my side / How precious is this love we share / How very precious, sweet and rare,” in “Love Is Like a Butterfly.” She has only one source of happiness, and among its defining characteristics is its scarcity. “Do you ever wake up lonely in the middle of the night / Because you miss me, do you darling / Oh, and do your memories ever take / You back into another place in time,” she asks in “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind,” a song that reads like a thinly veiled confession that he is certainly crossing hers in the ways she describes. Dolly’s religious piety may be real, but her obsession with finding the approval of men lingers at the border of worship.

  Lana, on the other hand, is more single-minded in her devotions. She is the most dangerous kind of blasphemer, not a denier of God but a creator of her own. “When things get bad enough, your only resort is to lie in bed and start praying. I dunno about congregating once a week in a church and all that, but when I heard there is a divine power you can call on, I did. I suppose my approach to religion is like my approach to music—I take what I want and leave the rest,” Lana said in an interview.3 “Take what you want and leave the rest” is a slogan frequently used in Alcoholics Anonymous, alongside its more strict cousin, “Take what you need and leave the rest.” Lana has mentioned in passing her involvement in 12-step recovery, and as a former member of this group myself, I can attest to the slogan’s value in resisting stringent codes that are not conducive to sobriety. I can also attest to how useful it is when eschewing the hard work required of facing the reality that such codes might have some value or purpose. It is also not unlike her old buddy Thomas Paine’s remarks in The Age of Reason: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”

  But while Paine’s apostasy is one that goes beyond self-reliance into self-worship, Lana does herself no such favors. There is no apparent solace at the altars of the men she worships. There is only more longing. “When I’m down on my knees, you’re how I pray,” she sings on “Religion,” from her album Honeymoon.

  On Fiona’s sophomore album, When the Pawn…, she is noticeably less repentant than on her debut. She is hardened by a music industry that very publicly shamed her for having the audacity to speak human truths, and particularly female truths, on public stages. In the first track, “On the Bound,” she sings, “You’re all I need,” and takes a pause before realizing her real need: “and maybe some faith would do me good.” But the difference between Lana and Fiona is that Lana long ago determined that her faith was doing her no good. Fiona grasps at it continually, singing on “Paper Bag,” “But then the dove of
hope began its downward slope / And I believed for a moment that my chances / Were approaching to be grabbed / But as it came down near, so did a weary tear / I thought it was a bird, but it was just a paper bag.” All the divine signs turn out to be the detritus of the world, but Fiona grasps onto it in the vain hope that the next might be something holy.

  When Fiona can no longer grasp for the signs of God’s love, she accepts an alternative role: the role of the martyrs absorbing the sins of others into her flesh. “And I will pretend / That I don’t know of your sins / Until you are ready to confess / But all the time, all the time / I’ll know, I’ll know / And you can use my skin / To bury your secrets in,” she sings in “I Know.” Even when she is at last confident that she is not the sinner herself, she sees it her bounden duty to take on the sins of other men, internalizing their wickedness as punishment for the sin of loving them.

  But Apple’s 2005 album, Extraordinary Machine, represents a marked shift away from the hold—and zeros in on the destructive men who cannot appreciate her love. “Oh what a cold and common old way to go / I was feeding on the need for you to know me / Devastated at the rate you fell below me / What wasted unconditional love / On somebody who doesn’t believe in the stuff / Oh well,” she sings on 2005’s “Oh Well.” She begins to call out men directly for their transgressions against her, for their failures to love her in return. There is still something of the guilt-ridden girl in her self-professed culpability for allowing such men into her life, but there is effort to move away from it. “But I’m not being fair / ’Cause I chose to listen to that filthy mouth,” she confesses on “Not About Love,” but she makes an effort to turn away from it. “But I’d like to choose right / Take all the things that I’ve said that he stole / Put ’em in a sack / Swing ’em over my shoulder / Turn on my heels / Step out of this sight / Try to live in a lovelier light.” There is an intentional shift in her tone, an ambition to do more than suffer under men’s indifference toward her love. It would be seven more years before she released another album.

  A 2012 profile of Fiona in New York magazine is considered among the best of its kind and so, too, is the album Fiona released that year, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. Dan P. Lee’s storytelling and descriptions are artful indeed, but his extraordinary subject does much of the heavy lifting. Her eyes are like “mint chocolate chip when it melts” and she “was odd-looking in the way most beautiful people are as children.” She gets his name wrong constantly, calls him at all hours of the night, and speaks of “mirror neurons” and childhood superpowers.4 But what was more telling than what Fiona actually did during the profile was the fact that she was doing anything at all: Fiona had made herself so scarce in the twenty-first century that even small peeks into her life would have been revelatory. The great feat of Fiona is her disappearance from the public eye, leaving us to wonder often if she found the redemption and love she sought for so long.

  Her last album also is one of self-awareness that revealed despair not quite conquered but certainly more contained. “My love wrecked you / You packed to twirl your skirt at the palace / It hurt more than it ought to hurt / I went to work to cultivate a callus / And now I’m hard, too hard to know / I don’t cry when I’m sad anymore, no no,” she declares in “Left Alone,” a tribute to solitude. In the song “Valentine,” she reveals, “I’m a tulip in a cup / I stand no chance of growing up / I’ve made my peace I’m dead I’m done / I watched you live to have my fun.” On the page, her words are stripped of the defiant blues she calls on to sing, making it difficult to convey in words here that this is something like triumph in her acknowledgment that she coexists with memories of these men rather than being haunted by them. When she turns away from the men who will not love her, she finally stops speaking of the sin that plagued her earlier music. It is her most successful to date in terms of critical appeal and chart success, and yet I can listen to it only as background noise; the piano and voice remain familiar but are no longer family. She is not the sister I once knew. She is too far from the oddly ecstatic pain of living under the surveillance of man and God. But Lana remains close.

  “We both know the history of violence that surrounds you / But I’m not scared, there’s nothing to lose now that I’ve found you,” she sings in “Honeymoon.” It is a challenge and a capitulation at once. One gets the sense that this is the same man she watched playing video games and to whom she proudly declared her curses to God and at whom all of her sadness is directed across one album every year for four years. “I know what only the girls know / Lies can buy eternity,” Lana confesses in “Music to Watch Boys To,” the same track on which she declares, “I live to love you.” It is hard to tell if this is the lie that is buying her eternity or some other declaration on the track, like that nothing good can stay or that it’s all a game to her.

  I am perhaps too eager to choose to believe that “I live to love you” is the lie she is using to manipulate the men she once deified. I want to believe that Lana has also escaped the paralyzing gaze of men whose shadows she found warmth inside of, these puny avatars for God who function as deciders of our fate nonetheless. But even if she is momentarily triumphant in lying about her love as a ticket to salvation, it does not stick. “Getting darker and darker / Looking for love / In all the wrong places / Oh my God / In all the wrong places / Oh my God,” Lana moans in “The Blackest Day.” She cannot help but cry out to him despite the emptiness of his promise and the cruelty of his gaze.

  “I have found Lana Del Rey in the same moments that I have found myself the most dysphorically disenchanted with what I can do,” my friend Natasha told me after midnight in the early winter. Natasha is a force that men shatter against but that women can fold into like a blanket. Englishness seeps out in her accent and intonations, but her Russian heritage shapes the pure and terrifying wisdom that pours out of her mouth. Her gestures are massive and her body is minuscule, and she is one of several of my friends I’m still shocked occasionally to think have selected me. She is also one of many friends who share my affection for Lana Del Rey. “We like Lana because none of us are exempt from that which we are sold,” she said. And despite all the hand-wringing that went into the fallout following Lana Del Rey’s revelation as a persona, Lana is not a dangerous product we were sold. She is a reflection of a logical response to our inheritance. We will be surveilled under a masculine gaze whose warmth or coldness toward us will often be largely out of our control, whether we pass them on the street, surrender our names to them in marriage, or pray to them in the blackness of night. We might as well find love among the ones we can see.

  Bearing witness to the vulnerability of Lana is what lets me cling to her when I have largely let Fiona go, confident that even if she has not escaped the memories of these men, she is at peace with them. I have a desire to protect and encourage Lana and women like her, those who suffer the cold but won’t step out of the shadows of those who keep them from the light. I want them to take a lesson from the playbook of Dolly Parton, the author of one of the greatest love songs of all time, “I Will Always Love You.” Many don’t realize that Dolly wrote it because it was made most famous by Whitney Houston—happy proof that its tender message and strength are transferable from one woman’s love to another’s. The song is not about wanting a man to return, but choosing to walk away from one. It is a bittersweet farewell certainly, but it is the resolute decision of the woman singing it. “I hope life treats you kind / And I hope you have all you’ve dreamed of / And I wish to you, joy and happiness / But above all this, I wish you love,” she sings, devoid of the resentment that so often characterizes breakup songs. It is an offering of forgiveness, and it is the act of mortal love that most closely resembles grace.

  There Can Be Only One

  On Lil’ Kim, Nicki Minaj, and the Art of Manufactured Beef

  The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from
doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.

  —Toni Morrison

  PERCHED IN A SALON CHAIR that she commands like a throne, Lil’ Kim sports a heavy side part through expertly straightened hair that falls in a dramatic swoop over her left eye in a look reminiscent of Veronica Lake. She is being fussed over by a hairstylist, and as her interview begins, she puts on a pair of oversized red sunglasses that match the peacoat she wears buttoned all the way up. Keeping an eye on the stylist as the interview proceeds, it becomes clear that she is not actually doing anything substantive with Kim’s hair, which is already perfectly in place. But like wearing the sunglasses and coat indoors, the stylist is there for dramatic effect, the kind of decorative embellishment that amplifies the gravitas of a celebrity. The scene would be unremarkable if not for the fact that it takes place not on MTV but on PhatClips,1 an underground rap show in St. Louis. It is also early 1996, several months before Kim’s debut album, Hard Core, is set for release and is at the time still titled Queen Bee. She is still mostly known in the rap scene as the sole female member of Junior M.A.F.I.A., a rap crew headed by the Notorious B.I.G. But Kim is the kind of woman who dresses for the job she wants, not the job she has. And the title she’s after is the undisputed queen of rap.

  When she releases Hard Core in November of that year, Kim gets the job as album sales hit 78,000 in the first week and go on to double-platinum certification, an unprecedented feat for a female rapper. I was among the younger buyers of the album at the age of eleven. I expressed little more than a giggly appreciation for Kim’s raunchy demands for sex, love, power, and merchandise when I played tracks for friends out of the earshot of parents. We doubled over in laughter at the graphic puns and dirty sketches between tracks, but when I listened to it alone, I felt a visceral shift in my posture and attitude. I was acquainted with Third Wave Riot Grrrl bands performing a brand of sex positivism that functioned mostly as a “Fuck you!” to power disparities in gender and sex, but this was something entirely different. Kim was inverting these same structural powers through her rhymes, not with a “Fuck you!” but a “Fuck me… No seriously, come the fuck over here and fuck me.”