A post shared by Lana Del Rey lanadelrey. While Del Rey's exploration of domestic abuse and control in unhealthy relationships has long been considered problematic and harmful to impressionable listeners, her social media post invited society to question creative rights — humans make art to express emotions and experiences.
With a topic so triggering, how is it possible to convey experiences and ideas Del Rey does without glamorizing it? They're afraid, but that doesn't mean they don't lash out. In the context of Del Rey's work, women in her songs are made to be submissive and simple — Del Rey has too labeled herself a submissive woman.
The idea violence is tragically beautiful to Del Rey, as seen in her lyrics, adds to a misleading portrayal of domestic abuse situations, Lindsay said. It's not only problematic, but it's just not true. Most people experiencing violence hate it," she said. If the first stage of the Lana-versation was marked by a lack of actual content, her disastrous January performance on Saturday Night Live changed all that. With the benefit of hindsight, she was an inexperienced live performer shrinking from a too-bright spotlight, but few at the time were in the mood to make excuses for her.
Enough viewers complained that SNL had to do a follow-up sketch begging the haters to chill. If Del Rey was really so bad for women, why were so many of them buying her record?
Del Rey released a follow-up EP at the end of , another one a year later, then the album Ultraviolence six months after that. As she got more prolific, it became easier to understand what she was doing. She was a musical Tarantino; her overwhelming collage of references was the aesthetic. Critics began giving her grudging respect, then actual praise. That paled in comparison to other sins, like cultural appropriation.
Occasionally, she had employed iconography too powerful for her to control — her cavalier comments about Kurt Cobain sparked a dustup with his daughter — or played with imagery she had no right to. It would have been like getting mad at Betty Boop. In response to the changing times, she scrapped her American-flag motif and stopped singing a lyric about physical abuse.
Del Rey wrote that she feels her work has helped her "[pave] the way for other women" to be open about sadness and vulnerability in their music, even though she was "deemed literally hysterical as though it was literally the s" for her first two records.
Del Rey ended her message with an announcement that she's releasing two new poetry books, whose proceeds will benefit Native American foundations of her choice. Bazaar Bride. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Goodbye to All That. When Video Games became a hit and her second album, 's Born to Die, cemented the singer's mainstream breakthrough, she was plagued by accusations of "fakeness".
Music writer Rhian Daly notes that at this point in her career, some of Del Rey's critics were "obsessed with the idea of exposing her description of her early life as a fabrication"; they wanted to "prove" that she came from a more affluent background than she claimed. Even her strikingly full lips were considered fair game for a rather sexist line of journalistic inquiry.
In real life my lips don't look that big," she told the New York Times that year. Still, despite this early sneering at her supposed lack of "authenticity", Del Rey has firmly defied her detractors. Nearly a decade later, the singer's excellent seventh album Chemtrails over the Country Club has just become another chart success, debuting at number two in the US and number one in the UK. Chemtrails is a richly evocative pop album on which Del Rey continues to build her own mythology — opening track White Dress finds her pondering her pre-fame days as a waitress — and reveals a growing disdain for fame.
Impressively, though Del Rey is playing this "dark" game at a time when artists are subject to increasingly close scrutiny, she has maintained much of her mystique. Thanks to the shape-shifting flair of David Bowie and Madonna in particular, conventional wisdom states that pop stars must reinvent themselves to stay relevant. With such reinventions, the mechanics of pop stardom are often laid bare, because even a genius-level chameleon can't hide every single contrivance.
However, Del Rey has succeeded by doing the exact opposite. With each album, she doubles down on her aloof persona and refines a sound that is cinematic, languid and dreamy. It's also instantly recognisable as her own. All the while, she has never made it any clearer where Elizabeth Grant ends and "Lana Del Rey" begins. In , she doesn't seem inauthentic — whatever authenticity is — at all.
Rather she looks like a proper pop auteur — one who doesn't try to be "accessible", "relatable" or anything else that pop stars are supposed to be in the social media era.
This only enhances her appeal to intensely invested fans who don't just enjoy streaming her music, but owning a piece of her art. In its first week on sale, Chemtrails became the UK's fastest-selling vinyl album of the century by a female artist. Another significant obstacle to fostering enigma in the 21st Century is social media, which allows artists to be more readily "called out", then lets them reply to any criticism instantly.
It's this kind of dynamic which has disrupted Del Rey's latest album release. Chemtrails is another critical as well as commercial hit, but its rollout got off to a bumpy start when Del Rey shared its cover art on Instagram in January.
0コメント