Lana Del Rey is back with her seventh studio release, ‘Blue Banisters’, tomorrow – and off social media indefinitely. A full decade after she blew up with her viral hit Video Games, it’s worth asking; can an artistic persona pull through the social media age, or is it meant to be destroyed by parasocial relationships (and rivalries) we form with the people behind them?
When I first heard the opening lines of Lana Del Rey’s 2019 record ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell!’, I was perplexed. God-damn man child, the Manhattan singer croons. You fucked me so good that I almost said, I love you. Wasn’t this self-assured narrator just singing about how he hit me and it felt like a kiss?
Around the time ‘NFR’, as it’s known, came out, Duncan Cooper of Vice boldly claimed that if it wasn’t for Lana Del Rey, there would be no Billie Eilish or Lorde. Many found Cooper’s article to be strangely venomous towards a certain Taylor Swift, but Lana’s admirers’ aggressive defensiveness may come from a place of near-trauma. That trauma was the early 2010s, and the way social media viciously tore into the decade’s first musical star – Lana Del Rey. Last year, Elizabeth Grant (Lana Del Rey’s given name) defended herself against a slew of critics that now adored her – in a puzzling, potentially career-finishing statement.
Long gone are the days of the mid-century nymphet singing about riches and fame; in 2020, the woman known as Lana Del Rey concluded her transformation into a real-life person, who makes music about the uncomplicated life of a waitress handling the heat. It’s as if, when she sang in ‘NFR’s The Greatest, back in 2019, the culture is lit and I had a ball, I guess I’m signing off after all, she really was.
Go play your video games: an (internet) star is born – and killed
Recently, in an act of revisionist history, Pitchfork rescored some of their past album reviews. Among them was Del Rey’s debut, 2012’s ‘Born To Die’, bumped from a 5.5. to a 7.8. Now that the singer has clawed her way into industry acceptance, it’s easy to forget that Pitchfork’s middling review was not an anomaly at the time; in fact, they were far kinder than others. Evan Rytlewski of the A.V. Club, for example, called ‘Born To Die’ shallow and overwrought, with periodic echoes of Ke$ha’s Valley Girl aloofness. Oof.
But, for better or worse, she was a trailblazer. When Cooper pinpointed Lana Del Rey as the predecessor of Lorde and others, he didn’t just mean as the first internet sad girl (something which YouTuber bambasalad broke down perfectly). Lana may have been the first pop artist to do what is now a weekly occurrence: to blow up solely on the back of online hype. That’s exactly the reason why Paul Harris of the Guardian was quick to call her an example of modern fame.
In October 2011, a video spread like a wildfire in the multimedia sharing platform Tumblr; it was simply titled Lana Del Rey – Video Games. The song was lush, grandiose, profoundly romantic; the video, an apparently homemade collage of old Hollywood fixtures, grainy home movies, and Lana herself. The next twelve months would be a whirlwind for Elizabeth Grant, the quiet singer who had been trying to make it for years – now Lana Del Rey.
A few months later, Lana Del Rey dropped her second music video, Blue Jeans. Her few live shows sold out. She was nominated for and won awards. Normally, this would signal a clear upward trajectory; but, as fast as she rocketed towards cultural adoration, she imploded on the very same place it had started – online.
The smoke started rising as the internet caught wind of Elizabeth Grant’s origins. An inspiring rags-to-riches story? Turns out she’s a millionaire’s daughter. A DIY music video and song? Apparently, she’s backed by Interscope, a major label. Even the reveal that her obviously fake stage name had been picked by her management read as betrayal.
But the true fire starter was an appalling Saturday Night Live performance in January of the following year, which was trashed by everyone from anonymous bloggers to NBC News anchor Brian Williams (who called it one of the worst outings in the show’s history). At the time, the singer lamented to Rolling Stone: there’s a backlash to everything I do. True, that. By the time ‘Born To Die’ came out, two weeks later, the public was already cold.
The culture is lit and I had a ball: from redemption arc to cancelation
How did Lana Del Rey survive such a disastrous start of her career, fuelled by one of the most ferocious (and, as many have pointed out, misogynistic) character assassinations in recent memory?
According to Reddit user gabachoelotero, it happened through sheer grit and fan adoration. These were crucial not just for Lana Del Rey’s progress, but for her triumph. Lana kept on releasing music, all the while continuing to hone her glamorous persona through sound, aesthetics, and fashion.
As Lana carried on the fantasy – draping herself in the American flag, double-cosplaying as Jackie and Marilyn, and playing the troubled nymphet – it continued attracting controversy. One of her critics was Lorde herself, who said the gloomy singer’s world was unhealthy for young girls. In a culture that increasingly pushed for self-awareness, Lana’s out-of-touch dreamscape made many uneasy.
Still, her fan base grew, steady and ferocious, until, in 2019, she got her due. ‘NFR’ was a certified critical darling. It nabbed the singer two Grammy nominations; Pitchfork called her one of America’s greatest living songwriters. But, with Lana Del Rey, there is always a twist.
The day is May 21st, 2020. Lana Del Rey takes to Instagram with a question for the culture…. In her text post, which garnered over 1.6 million likes in a day, she says she is disgruntled with how her music is being treated by the critics, in comparison to other female artists. She protests about how other singers found success with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, cheating – while she has faced backlash for singing about sometimes submissive or passive roles in relationships. Many noticed that the other artists she compared herself to favorably – Doja Cat, Camila Cabello, Beyonce, and others – were almost all women of color. It was – as Twitter put it relentlessly – a bad look.
To make it worse, Elizabeth Grant proved she had no awareness whatsoever of how the cancel culture machine operates, and later committed the cardinal sin; defending herself. Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever call me racist, because that is bullshit, she cried.
It was bad, really bad. Even I could tell her career was over.
Question for the culture: are we done with artistic personas?
Looking back at Lana Del Rey’s trajectory, it’s safe to say playing the part got to her – and to us. But she hasn’t quit; since her infamous outburst, she’s released a poetry book and an album – ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’, which garnered positive reviews. Now, she’s back with ‘Blue Banisters’. The album’s first single, Arcadia, sees her tally the usual; cars, hotels, heartache, and, of course, America – a word she has alluded to so often it no longer resembles anything real.
But there is something truthful here, as was on her last outing. In Arcadia, Lana Del Rey may still be singing her brand; but now she’s on the outside looking in. She no longer sounds cool and detached – on her chorus, her voice quivers. When she promoted the song on Instagram, she said; ‘listen to it if you listened to video games’. Then, she dipped.
Only Lana Del Rey herself can say until when she intends to chase her fictional muse; her new, unpolished sound makes it seem like she’s retired it for a new, permanently offline one. Maybe the only way to have an artistic persona nowadays is to disengage completely, or else your social media presence will find a way to break the veneer.
Revisiting Lana Del Rey’s magnum opus, Video Games, a decade later, I find it has now the same quality of a precious antique. It’s the product of a time where the internet was radically different, as was our relationship to the artists we listened to.
In 2011, all I knew about Lana Del Rey was what she told me; that she was an elusive ‘vamp of constant sorrow’, as Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone once profiled her. Hell, she might have not been a real person, for all I know – with no real intent, thoughts, politics. Now I know far, far too much.
