Lana Del Rey: Little Girls and Even Smaller Ideas

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The idea of indie authenticity died in 2002, when the Shins sold "New Slang", their pitch perfect spaghetti western melancholia, to McDonald’s. With hip hop always open for business and one of the most emotional indie ballads of the year embracing the uber glyph of Corporate evil, it was clearly time to shift quaint notions of selling out. This wasn’t a bad thing, especially since the internet had depleted one of the primary revenue streams for musicians, making such strident morality financially inconveniencing. The part of the Lana Del Rey debate that revolves around the a variation of reviving these tired authenticity arguments skewers her for having an orchestrated image, as if everyone from Prince to Elvis Presley didn’t morph into pop stars by angling themselves into our fantasies. Carl Wilson handily discards this criticism in Slate, but there are other issues with Del Rey that extend beyond the possible bean bag lip redux.

While it’s true that the idea authenticity has little coherent moral content, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still have some critical weight when applied to the way that someone wears their image. Certainly part of what was so excruciating about Del Rey’s much maligned Saturday Night Live performance was the visceral pain of watching her paper doll posturing collide with the raw reality of performance. She looked like someone trying to remember her own sound and movements, creeping her hands and fingers in a series of gestures that fell somewhere between tweaker and Children of a Lesser God. Worse still was her voice: smudged into a lower register she couldn’t hit while threading in vocal wheelie wipeouts. It was is she had been handed stage instructions that read: "You’re a dead pin up girl trying to find the right phone sex voice for a picky client." But that’s what happens when a rough draft makes a premature debut. In the age of the internet sensation, bands are always two practices and a Hype Machine search away from playing "Jimmy Kimmel."

Del Rey’s deeper weaknesses are artistic ones. She has a song called "Diet Mountain Dew". Unless you’re a calorie conscious Appalachian, there is just no way to shave the grate off that. If this were a crowd sourced creative writing class, one would have to notice that Del Rey’s two writing modes are the awkwardly pedestrian or the blandly generic. Even “Video Games” sits uncomfortably in the frankly gorgeous song that brought Del Rey into “it” girl status. How do you wrap lilting Russian sounding strings around an adult male who just cracked a beer and told you to come play a video game? Sure, the soft honeyed melody is hypnotic, but she also says “bestest”. There’s no refrigerator surface where that usage can be put and deemed good for her age. Bad girls, bad men, little girls, daddies: these are Catholic school dichotomies sewn onto the cliches of pornography. If you had a Lana Del Rey lyric machine, you could push a button and squeeze out her next single: “Slit dress, long hair, baby I’ll just tell them that I fell down the stairs”.

By far her biggest crime comes from the basic contours of her hackneyed persona: the chanteuse vending machine, sexually available to the nearest bad boy with a PBR and Xbox. Of course there will be the bored theoreticians who will prop up her weak work by insisting she’s doing some kind of complicated gender dance, toying with power and submission, instead of the reality which is that she’s a lazy writer, with minimal insight, who portrays women as, in the immortal phrasing of Danny DeVito as Frank Reynolds on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “bang maids”. This isn’t to excessively politicize pop music; artists should not have to submit their representations to groupthink agendas or even shape their identities in an empowering way. However, when you hear the mantra in “Put Me In A Movie” (“Come on you know you like them little girls/you can be my daddy”), it’s striking how unsexy and pathetic her portrayal is. Del Rey frequently transcribes the fantasies of “bad men” onto a flimsy sheen of noir. It’s a strangely bereft world of abusive cokehead men (“Off to the Races”) and women who are either “the other bitches” (“Blue Jeans”) or just abandoned rivals: “This is what makes us girls/ We don't stick together 'cause we put our love first”.(“This Is What Makes Us Girls”). You might be inclined to see this as anti-feminist, but the paucity of ideas and lyrical dexterity in Del Rey’s songs makes any resemblance to an actual idea, even a controversial one, accidental.

This is not meant to pile on Del Rey, only to aesthetically point out that it’d be nice if her image were more than skin deep, not seeped in the seedy spectacle of a 25-year-old woman trying to be a doormat femme fatale for tweens. That the debate about Lana Del Rey has devolved into sectarian love/hate camps or to the point where Mr. Gravitas, Brian Williams needs to weigh in on a SNL performance, a sound stage notorious for its shit sound and lackluster inspiration, shows how instantaneously pop culture debates devolve into vessels for emotionally retarded projection. There is no earthly reason to “hate” Lana Del Rey even if you can’t stand what she produces. By the way, she obviously can perform live. But if this is her makeover, she could stand another molt or two. Lana Del Rey is a James Elroy novel, directed by Aronofsky starring the Real Serial Monogamists of Williamsburg and that can’t possibly be enough for anyone really listening.

Lana Del Rey: [official]