hello my beautiful doves. welcome back! so
today we're going to be talking about miss lana del rey and i'm assuming if you clicked on this
video you know who she is, but if you don't she is a singer who rose to fame in 2012. and she
specializes in singing these very melancholic ballads about love and hopelessness. and
lana del rey is actually her stage name, her real name is lizzie grant and i will be kind
of saying that a couple times in this video so i just need to say that so you
all know who i'm talking about. i would be absolutely lying if i didn't
say i was a huge fan of lana back in 2012. and like many other kids on tumblr of that era i
was extremely captivated by her aesthetic and her stage persona i do want to just say before
i get into this: i am a huge fan of lana's music still i still love to listen to her and i'm
not coming for her in this video i've just kind of been thinking a lot lately i mean this video
has been on the back burner for a long time but i've been thinking about how she rose to fame
and the criticisms that have come out lately and i just wanted to share my theory with you
all about all this first i just want to take a bit to establish what her aesthetic
is and what her music is all about because i feel like lana has achieved a pretty
good consistency between those two things so miss lana cultivated a very nostalgic americana
look for herself when she debuted in 2012 but i wouldn't necessarily call it glamorous or
luxurious i know i know controversial but i'll try to tell you what i mean by that another star
who i think really took hold of the retro post-war aesthetic was dita von tease but her style is
very glamorous and she clearly takes a lot of influence from old hollywood movie stars she's
really dedicated to her 1940s glam waves she's got the monroe-esque beauty mark tattooed on her
face and she always looks really put together lana on the other hand was like girl next door retro
she wasn't quite marilyn monroe she was more norma jean, aside from her little jackie kennedy cosplay
with asap rocky–iconic music video by the way–her aesthetic mostly geared towards romanticized
working and middle class visions of white america, for instance: cherry pie pepsi cola the american
flag racing cars beaches deserts trailer parks cocaine blue jeans and older men. she references
a lot of 20th century american culture references for example one of the lyrics to her song
"off to the races" on the born to die album is "light of my life fire of my loins" which is
the opening quote of vladimir nabokov's lolita her song ultraviolence has the line
"he hit me and it felt like a kiss." which is the name of a popular 60s song from the
girl group the crystals. lana has dipped her toe in some culturally appropriative motifs as well
like wearing a native american headdress and her "ride" music video and appropriating latino
american culture in her "tropico" film... things that were of course inexcusable at
the time but have aged even worse since. her fashion style is a little interesting
just because it ranges quite a bit if i could summarize i would say it
mostly consists of daisy dukes t-shirts 1960s baby doll mini dresses biker and racing
jackets skinny jeans floral prints and flats. on the red carpet and in her videos it's more
obvious that she takes style inspirations from mid-century fashion trends and pop icons but
on stage and on the daily her style fluctuates quite a lot. sometimes she'll do up her hair in
her signature beehive and put on a full 60s look and sometimes she'll wear her hair naturally with
a t-shirt and jeans. her day-to-day style is also very basic: lots of skinny jeans button-ups
t-shirts flat shoes and simple patterns. now that we've established that i want to talk about
her rise and cultural impact in the early 2010s. "vamp of constant sorrow," rolling stone
proclaimed over an image of lana wearing furs and smoking sadly of course. it's an image that
del rey would truly utilize in the years following whether in song names ("summertime
sadness," the unsubtle "sad girl") or public image (flower crowns, sepia
filters, a fixation with suicide and death). something about this overt yet glamour sadness,
this image of mascara smudged perfectly by tears of a cigarette in a holder held by a delegate
yet trembling hand, stuck in the cultural consciousness of the decade and thus the internet
sad girl was born. in the early 2010s the social media sites that we love or hate today so:
instagram, twitter, tumblr, facebook were starting to really take off and it's not really surprising
that the Sad girl, capital s, was starting to come into fruition. well let's be honest there's
been sad girls way before the 2010s but that's another video. it's not surprising because
these sites allowed users to share basically everything that they were doing, everything that
they were feeling to a virtual world–a concept not fully tapped into yet. i want to talk about tumblr
more specifically because it was a site that i was most familiar with at the time and also the
place that i think lana del rey really blew up on. let's set the scene it's 2011 your dashboard has
the reblog button at the top of each post every notification, you got came up on your dashboard
in chronological chaos, people were posting their deepest darkest secrets in stream of consciousness
format, you scroll past a low-grade impact font meme, and melodramatic black and white photos
with overlaid song lyrics are abundant. it was quite a simple time and most of the users were of
course teenage girls. and for anyone who was or was socialized or is still a teenage girl... being
a teenage girl sucks and if it didn't/doesn't suck i'm really happy for you i'm not one of those
20-somethings that try to gatekeep happiness, but let's just try to come up with a few things
that make teenage girlhood so awful. here we go: unchecked mental health issues, improper education
on sex and drugs, adults not taking you seriously, realization that the patriarchy exists and you
might not be able to accomplish a lot of things that you had originally wanted to accomplish in
life when you were a child and had rose-colored glasses about everything, navigation of queerness
in spaces that were still pretty unfriendly, and the neverending onslaught of drama with
friends and boys that just like made life a complete living hell. but you know even if you
didn't experience the whole range of everything, you can see why it sucked for a lot of people.
so introducing social media: which like i said basically gave you a virtual landscape where you
could cry and scream and have meltdowns and get validation from strangers who were just like you,
all while still remaining somewhat anonymous so that your text posts don't affect your personal
life in real life. yes i remember when tumblr was big and it was a social faux pas for you to
ask anyone in real life what their tumblr was. tumblr was your space and you weren't supposed
to actually know the people you interacted with on there. so the tumblr sad girl was born. it
makes sense. i think being a teenage girl once again is an awful experience but mostly it's awful
because you have no control over your life really. like you're still a child so you have to depend
on all these different forces: your family, your school, your community. and finding this community
online where everyone is also like, "i'm stuck and we're all gonna talk about it and we're all
going to embrace it and we're all going to own it and romanticize our lives," like i think that, in
theory, can be very powerful. the artist audrey wallen coined sad girl theory as being a radical
concept. she says the sadness of girls should be recognized as an act of resistance. "a limited
spectrum of activism excludes a whole history of girls who have used their sorrow and their
self-destruction to disrupt systems of domination. girls' sadness is a way of reclaiming agency
over our bodies, identities, and lives." the sad girl aesthetic of tumblr though was honestly not
very radical and i think it was counterproductive and it was kind of dangerous honestly. it
definitely portrayed self-destruction as this glamorous phenomenon and really, really bad
issues like depression, anxiety, drug addiction, and suicide were often romanticized. especially
when combined with the soft grunge aesthetic: popular images that circulated tumblr at this
time were pastel color graded photos of medicine bottles, soft focus bruises, tattoos on always
pale skin, and a lot of cigarettes and crying selfies. this was the state of the hipster world
when lana came into prominence. and i don't want to say that it was the mainstream rhetoric because
i don't think it was. i think the rhetoric in the mainstream culture was actually more focused on
self-love and optimism like katy perry's roar came out in 2013 i believe. but on tumblr and in
counter-cultural spaces it was cool to be sad. it was cool to go against the mainstream
rhetoric that was pushing this crippling pressure to succeed. lana's music allowed this
space for wallowing, which honestly is something that everyone needs from time to time. but with
this social environment it makes sense that lana blew up. she was this conventionally pretty, pouty
girl singing in a sultry cigarette tainted voice about hopeless devotion to abusive men and being
pretty when you cry. it was like peak glamorized self-destruction and while lana has said she has
never glamorized abuse in a post that i'll talk about a little later and that everything she wrote
about were based on her personal experiences... that may and will be true–it probably is true like
who am i to say that what she said isn't true–but the image she cultivated definitely felt
like romanticization. and this is because the 20th century female figures that lana
aesthetically aligns with are romanticized even to this day by the media for struggling
with addiction and mental health issues, being oppressed by the patriarchy, and
passing away untimely. the problem is not so much lana herself honestly but it's society's
obsession with beautiful, suffering white women. like take for instance marilyn monroe, jackie
kennedy, ophelia from shakespeare's hamlet, even marie antoinette. sad girls are expected
to be beautiful or they're not really Sad girls, capital s, #prettywhenyoucry. honestly that's
more society's fault than anything like lana can't control how she looks. well i guess you can
technically in this day and age but you understand what i'm saying. and what's interesting about
lana is that i don't think she was ever really relatable either. her lyrics could be relatable i
guess if you've been in a messy relationship with an older man but i question how many teenage
girls actually had those specific experiences or if lana just constructed a universe that they
wished to belong in. in a pitchfork article, writer lindsay zaladz says: "the people in del
rey's musical universe do not strive or believe that things will get better. they lounge around
all day manicuring their nails and then drink and smoke themselves into a glamorously inert stupor
by night." i feel like people projected onto lana and actually aspired to be lana because they
would listen to her music and be like, "here's a woman singing and she makes her pain sound so
beautiful. i want to make my pain beautiful too." the sad girl aesthetic pretty much died by the
late 2010s and i can't say i was really sad about it. i mean there's a lot of possibilities. my
opinion for its decline is because the sad girl aesthetic was really like white women/upper middle
class/ middle class focused and the struggles of poor women or of women of color or fat women or
women in non-western countries... like those were never talked about. their issues were never talked
about. in the last few years, especially in 2016, a lot more people started to realize uh there
are racial systemic issues and there are just intersectional issues in general. it's kind of
sad that it took so long but we're here i guess. i hope. when [censored] was elected it felt like
more people were starting to realize that the world is pretty f'd up and there are just larger
issues to complain about outside of the self. so where did lana fit in this cultural
transition? well people still liked her music because her music is good and
i think she did make a couple moves in the right direction. like i always thought
lana was a little bit behind the curve especially i remember this one fader interview she
did and she was like "feminism was not an interesting concept" to her so i feel like
she was always a little bit behind the curve. but she's been kind of pushing in the right
direction... she's just a little bit behind. she told pitchfork in 2017 that she wasn't
going to show the american flag anymore in her live performances even though she has one on the
cover of her 2019 release norman [ __ ] rockwell she also said she was no longer going to sing
the lyrics "he hit me and it felt like a kiss" from ultraviolence. in the past year she also
said that as "personal reparations," she donated the proceeds of her poetry book to digdeepwater
which is a non-profit organization that brings clean running water to indigenous communities.
obviously i can't personally say whether or not that puts her in the clear for her previous
transgressions but you know i think at the very least it shows that she is listening to what
people say about her. and i think also with NFR! she was kind of going down this path of recreating
her americana image in a more progressive angle but in a way that still made sense for her. in
NFR!, lyrics to her song "the greatest" include "la's in flames, it's getting hot, kanye west is
blonde and gone, life on mars ain't just a song, oh the live streams almost on." but for some
reason in may last year she made an infamous instagram post where she complained about how
singers like doja cat and beyonce are allowed to make songs about being sexy and wearing no
clothes, while she gets in her words "crucified" for singing about being embodied and feeling
beautiful by being in love even in a relationship that is not perfect. it was pretty bad because the
artists she mentioned were mostly black women who definitely have dealt with way more [ __ ] in
the industry than lana has. but then lana went on to say "there has to be a place in feminism for
women who look and act like me." i feel like it's pretty self-explanatory why it's tactless for a
white woman–especially one that built her entire image on romanticizing mid-century america–to say
something like that. and then when she released her album cover for chemtrails over the country
club which featured mostly white women on it, lana decided to defend herself in the comments
by saying that her best friends and boyfriends have been rappers, which to put it nicely is
not really the explanation people wanted to hear and probably just made things worse. questionable
stuff aside, even her usage of social media in general has changed the way that we perceive
her. daniela tijerina writes for vanity fair: "online, del rey is far less old hollywood vixen
and much more your mom on facebook, often posting filtered selfies and captions that invoke the same
corny energy as 'live laugh love.'" and in january 2020, the cut published an article saying "in
recent years as evidenced by a slew of paparazzi photos and concert looks, lana has pivoted to what
seems to be a more organic approach to dressing, a sort of casual midwestern mommy way of styling
herself. think heads floral knitwear and boot-cut jeans. it's decidedly american, but it's not
americana. it's an aesthetic choice some fans have dubbed her 'maxxinista period'" after
tj maxx. i will say though, as i said before, lana's everyday style has always kind of
been basic and midwestern-ish, if you look up paparazzi photos from years ago. but i think over
time more people have realized that her street style is not the same as her red carpet style
because lately and especially with chemtrails, like the lyrics that she wrote in chemtrails, she
seems like she's just getting tired of separating lizzie and lana. and at the 2020 grammys, lana
showed up to the red carpet wearing a dress she got at the mall. it was an aiden maddox
gown which retailed for 600 off the rack. i actually really like that lana did this because
even though the dress is still very expensive, compared to other major celebrities of
her rank who show up to the red carpet wearing something couture that was gifted
to them by some designer or brand #ad, it just felt really authentic and cool that
she just, you know, drove to the mall, picked something out that she actually liked, and then
wore it to like the biggest music awards ceremony of the country–in the country. to her credit, even
though she transitioned from gucci to tj maxx, her style still stays consistent with her music.
for example if you listen to the song "white dress," she reminisces about her life pre-stardom,
when she was working as a waitress. it feels like she's getting tired of the fame and fortune and
just wants to go back to living her small town, pleasant life. some people have theorized that
she might feel this way because she's getting tired of the onslaught of criticism that's
been coming towards her in the last few years. now i've kind of just been talking about the rise
of lana and some of the criticisms that have been addressed to her lately but the reason i
think this criticism has come up is not like because of some overdue analysis of her usage of
americana motifs nor her alleged glamorization of abuse. because let's be real she's been
criticized for those things for awhile now. i remember in 2013 lorde, who was 17 at the time,
told the fader that "she's great but i listened to that lana del rey record and the whole time i was
just thinking it's so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to you know, 'i'm nothing without
you.' the sort of shirt tugging, desperate, don't leave me stuff. that's not a good thing
for young girls, even young people, to hear." so this isn't news which i think is also the
reason why a lot of people were kind of weirded out that lana made that ig post to begin with.
it felt so confusing and unwarranted, because at the time she was still getting high praise
from NFR!, and people were literally saying it was like her best album ever. no one was really
hating and everyone still pretty much loved lana. so why is her image starting to crack? well in my
opinion, it's about social media and the idea of persona. to be clear lana has recently claimed
that she's never had a persona. when the music critic ann powers wrote honestly a
generally favorable piece about her, lana took to twitter replying: "here's a little
side note on your piece–i don't even relate to one observation you made about the music. there's
nothing uncooked about me. to write about me is nothing like it is to be with me. never had a
persona. never need one. never will." but let's be honest like let's be real miss lana del rey. she
definitely had a persona, some kind of it. i would argue that any artist who has a stage name has
some kind of persona. i would argue that anyone on the internet has some kind of persona. i also
think it's funny because in a previous interview she did with courtney love in 2017 for dazed,
courtney mentions that lana has built a persona and lana doesn't say anything against that. also
are we supposed to conveniently forget that she once dubbed herself "gangsta nancy sinatra" and
"lolita who got lost in the hood." that's a whole other issue. and it's not a bad thing to have a
persona i'm not like, "ooh lana has a persona, she's not authentic." i don't think that at all.
i saw actually something on tumblr a while back, it was a quote where it's like, "you are the mask
and the wearer." so every persona is still you, it's just a form of you. and her persona is why
the public loved her, it's why tumblr loved her in the first place. nate jones for vulture claims
it's even how lana escaped from major controversy. for so long jones said that "del rey's heightened
persona ensured that critiques never escalated into full-on controversy. you couldn't stay mad
at lana del rey. it would have been like getting mad at betty boop." i totally agree with
that stance. i genuinely think people enjoy thinking of her as this like bygone cool girl
and that's how she got away with so many things. like honestly lana has included a lot of
messy subject material in her discography, the lolita references and born to die
as just an example. in the same vein, most old hollywood movies and actors had
problematic politics but it's our nostalgia for this old-timey era that lets these messages
slide over our heads. lana del rey used to be this nostalgia drenched character who sometimes
made you wonder whether the things she said were part of an act or things that she actually thought
in real life. and even her music, and even though she's come forward many times and has said these
lyrics are based on "my personal experiences" etc, it's just the way she sang and the words she
chose and honestly the whole production–it made the songs so theatrical and it made her feel
like she was describing a movie plot rather than an actual experience. i feel like it's definitely
a gradual merging of lana and lizzie over the years that have kind of destroyed her heightened
persona. but in the last year or so, lana has really been using social media to fight critics
and to speak her mind. unfortunately when you've created this mystique as an artist, it's really
hard to be on social media without shattering the illusion that you've created. there's a lot
of really cool celebrities and public figures who use social media responsibly and who still create
and maintain healthy boundaries for themselves. there's also a lot of public figures who've
actually grown their following and likability based on their interactions with their audience.
but i feel like if you became popular for creating this mysterious image, giving the public more
access to your private life is probably not going to go that well. the music writer rhian daly told
bbc, "we don't expect enigmatic artists to respond to criticism generally. truly mysterious artists
often seem like they exist in another realm to the rest of us. to achieve true prince-like levels
of mystery i think lana would have to be much more removed from the internet and the press than
she is at the moment." daly calls this phenomenon happening with lana right now "a slow dismantling
of mystique in real time." ouch. but to lana's defense, it's definitely hard not to be on social
media. a lot of the criticisms that lana addresses are reputation damaging criticisms like her
voting for [censored] or her being a racist. and social media is so dangerous because celebrity
gossip has really exploded in scale. rather than just a couple petty tabloids circulating around
a supermarket, you log onto twitter and there are thousands of people making judgments of who you
are assuming things, misreading what you've said, like i understand it is a really tough situation
to navigate and lana probably thought that using her internet platform to take control over
the conversation was a justified decision. and of course you may be wondering why is this
happening now? twitter and instagram have been around for a while now like longer than lana's
career. and i don't know, i'm just extrapolatingm i could be wrong about everything. if lana wants
to quote tweet me and tell me what she thinks... i'm also free for coffee. but maybe, maybe lana
is more reactionary these days and is caring less about her cool girl image because she, in some
capacity, feels guilty and is trying to navigate her music genre while considering today's
politics. or maybe she's just been famous for long enough now that she feels like it's time to
speak her mind. who really knows, except for lana. well that's all i have for today folks. thank
you so much for joining me. i had a lot of fun talking about this and um let me know in
the comments what you think about miss lana del rey. and yeah i'll see you next time
and i hope you have a lovely rest of your day!
