The Trouble with Lana

I have a bit of a confession to make, and I feel a bit weird, almost guilty saying this: I kind of like Lana Del Rey. Kind of. I've felt this way for a while now, and despite my normal sense of comfort with my own tastes, I have made an actual effort to keep this fact hidden. I only listen to her when I'm alone, I feign ignorance when she's mentioned in conversation, the very few people I've admitted this to I've sworn to secrecy. For the first time, possibly ever, I have felt a certain amount of embarrassment for liking something. This feeling is new to me.

You can probably tell.

But the fact of the matter is, I can't help it. I like her music, whether I mean to or not, and the sooner I come to grips with this fact the better it will be in the long run. However, that doesn't mean I don't have a few problems with how she does things. After all, the reason I'm embarrassed is because I actually recognize why so many other people dislike her. With all the hate coming her way, I totally get where it's coming from. So what is the problem?

In a nutshell, it's her image. Everything wrong with her career just sort of revolves around her image, but it's not so much what that image is, it's that it's so central to her.

No, really, I just listen to her for the songs.  I swear.

Think about it; despite the fact that she's got a song about how she's on the radio now, I have not actually heard her on the radio. The first most people heard of her is what they saw at the same time in her music video to Video Games. And what they saw was exceedingly obvious hipster bait. From the get go of her career, she was attempting to attract a key demographic through means other than her music. And by the beginning of her career, I'm talking about the album she released, then rescinded, under the name Lizzy Grant. It was available briefly before she bought the rights back, and she has refused to re-release it since. While there's probably a good reason or two out there to explain a move like this, the most obvious possibility is that she was giving hipsters an opportunity to do what they do best: brag about being into something before anyone else. It's just that it's so obvious she was doing it. Throw in her (often sung about) time spent living in a trailer park (after she signed a recording contract for $10,000) and the fact that she's a little white girl from New York going by an artificially exotic name, and you've got all the markings of a singer trying to influence her way into a position of fame and adoration.

But she made a couple major mistakes. One, she estimated her intended audience wrong. She's relied on her image way, way too much, and while it's true that musicians make careers out of good looks or image alone all the time (see American Idol, seasons 1 through 11) it doesn't work quite so well when you want to be taken seriously as a musician. Lana wants to be loved and respected as an artist, and image based careers only work to this degree on pop music audiences. I mean, pop audiences adore Katy Perry and Justin Bieber enough to go to movies about them, they're not overly concerned with quality. She tried to illicit that same level of devotion starting with a core audience of underground music snobs and spread out from there, but she was so obvious about it that even hipsters recognized they were being manipulated. So they turned on her.

Her other problem is in her sexiness. Currently, audiences are completely fine with strong women who are comfortable in their own sexuality (Pink!), which can be empowering, and with women who use their sexuality in a way to attract a male audience (Katy Perry) and exert some level of control over them, which can be a kind of empowerment. Audiences are even fine with whatever Nicki Minaj counts as, and while not necessarily empowering, that certain counts as some kind of kind of self confidence. Lana Del Rey's approach to using her sex appeal consists of a creepily subservient “I exist only for your pleasure” image that I can't quite tell if it's for real or not. On the one hand, I'm not convinced it isn't just a satirical look at the image, on the other hand, she awkwardly flaunts it in ways that prevent me from being convinced that it is.

You see, this. This? This is exactly what I'm talking about.

She might be trying to show how dull and lifeless women are when seen as mere sex objects, or she might just be a sex object who's not all that into it. It's hard to tell. She makes it hard to tell.

Lastly, there's her SNL performance. Yeah, it was just really bad. There's not some greater issue with her persona or business tactics here, it's just that it really was bad. Like, probably not “worst ever” bad, but maybe within the bottom 25.

And all of this is a shame, because beneath the awkward sexuality, the fake name, the obvious manipulation, and the focus on her image and persona over her music, there is a talented musician with good music to perform. I don't care if some of her lyrics seem disingenuous; I only care if she feels the need to make us think they are genuine because then she'd be missing the point. I don't care if she wants to change names or labels; I only care if it starts to affect the availability of her music or if that music is sacrificed for (or worse, created as) a publicity stunt. I don't care if she isn't as good live; as long as what she puts to recording is listenable and good, I'll be listening and good.