With all of the attention surrounding Lana Del Rey’s forthcoming album Born to Die (which has leaked and will be released on Tuesday), I noticed many of the discussions around her existence, while almost all unflinchingly brutal, seem to ignore a major elephant in the room: sex.
I’m going to ignore critiques from excellent feminist authors, because I think the irrational hostility towards the former Lizzie Grant comes mostly from men who consider themselves part of indie rock circles. Moreover, it was think pieces from Maura Johnston and Amy Klein who convinced me to stay off the LDR bandwagon. I do believe that men who show more hostility towards LDR reveal more about their issues with women than with any problems Lana Del Rey has.
While it would take a very strong argument (and probably some alcohol) to convince anyone her recent performance on “Saturday Night Live” was anything but a total disaster, she surely isn’t the first person to bomb on national television, nor is she the first person to publicly have difficulties with sudden fame being hoisted upon her. The accelerated Internet culture certainly doesn’t do anyone any favors in terms of artist development, but why are the comments on Del Rey so much more vicious than they are from her peers?
While Lana Del Rey has been covered extensively by websites like Stereogum and Pitchfork, and her marketing strategy involved reaching out to “indie” press, she doesn’t fit the image of an indie rock crush, the way that Leslie Feist, Zooey Deschanel and Jenny Lewis do. Lana Del Rey is different in that she is quite sexy (and possibly artificially so) and sings overtly about sex. Even if her role is submissive (on “Video Games” she sings “I’m in his favorite sundress, watching me get undressed, take that body downtown”), it’s still doesn’t ignore the fact that she is conventionally sexy and sings about deriving pleasure from sex.
Is that such a taboo in indie rock? Well, yes, and it’s always been that way. Neko Case, once voted “Sexiest Babe in Indie Rock” by Playboy’s website, way back in 2003. In 2011, she tweeted, “ladies in bands don’t get ANY action.” An essay by ARS favorite Anya Marina in the Huffington Post said mostly the same thing.
As Simon Reynolds wrote in Melody Maker in 1986, “indie-pop tends to present love in almost quaint terms of devotion and idealization, barely alluding to sex…. There are far more unrequited love songs.” Later in that piece, he wrote, “The indie scene is struggling to protect ‘innocence’ in the face of a sophisticated culture.” In a study of British indie culture, academic writer Wendy Fonarow wrote in her important book Empire of the Dirt, “Indie’s sexual practitioner denies sex a commodity value. Rather than treating sex as cheap (as they view the mainstream groupie doing – that girl who is willing to trade sex for trinkets, or so other people will think she is special), indie sexual acolytes treat sex as priceless.”
But this is an act, as she writes elsewhere in the book, “indie hides its trickerism behind an earnest Puritan facade.” In 2010, she wrote in the Guardian that while, “indie has a more enlightened sense of gender relations than many genres,” “However, in practicality, indie does not exist in some parallel universe. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen female musicians ignored in interviews. Additionally, female spectatorship and fanship is sexualised. There is an assumption if you are female at a show that you are sexually available to performers.” She notes, “This assumption that audiences are filled with sexually overwhelmed girls is belied by the fact that for rock and metal as well as for indie the audiences are disproportionately male.”
Maybe Lana Del Rey’s critics are being intellectually honest when they cite her lack of “authenticity” as their criticism of her, or that she’s not ready for the attention, but no one seems to mind how many personalities David Bowie has had. Plus, why is getting a second chance under a different name such a terrible thing? And can’t we at least acknowledge that LDR’s supposed crime of not being good on SNL is nowhere near as troubling as the public meltdown Nathan Williams of Wavves went through a few years ago.
Lana Del Rey makes herself an easy target by fitting into conventional ideals of beauty (it’s easy to imagine her on the cover of Cosmopolitan, for example), and the contempt celebrities face is nothing new, I only wish that the issues her (mostly) anonymous critics would be resolved not in public but on therapists’ couches. It would make this world a nicer place and we’ve run out of lips jokes long ago.
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Cool article! I like how her existence has become more about having a conversation on society and less about her music. I think you hit the nail on the head. I think the hatred comes from people associating judgements with looks. Throw a couple lip rings on her and put on some bright red lip stick and she would be an indie hero. Her indifferent attitude would magically change from bitchy to aloof. Her performance would be endearing and vulnerable instead of studied under a microscope. Come on people this is pop music not the Mozart of our time. Although I do have to say that Mozart received a good amount of criticism himself in his day. Something to think about I guess. To be fair to the critics though this IS pop music and I part of the fun of it is to analyze the characters under a microscope. I for one like the existence of Lana Del Rey. My fiancee and I had a lot of fun mimicking the words “video games” in a low scooping voice last night. You should try it its fun!