The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper Read Free Book Online Page B

year after Winehouse’s “Rehab” hit ubiquity, and Del Rey is done up in a Jersey approximation of the singer: She’s wearing a silk bomber, her white blonde flip teased to a bouffant puff and tied up with a bandana do-rag, batting long fake lashes. She looks miscast—like a too-young housewife—a child bride trying to look grown. Her baby face and coquettish giggle give her away. The sound on the video is awful and the questions tepid, but Del Rey answers the two most important ones clearly and directly to the camera: This is where she wrote her record; and she moved to Jersey for the state’s surplus of metal boys. There is no mistaking what matters to her.
    “She has many different qualities that women in our culture aren’t allowed to be, all at once, so people are trying to find the inauthentic one,” says Tavi Gevinson, the founding editor of teen-girl mag Rookie . “She’s girly, but not infantilized. I relate to her aesthetic the way I think other girls relate to Taylor Swift lyrics—her femininity isn’t too sexy or too pure, and that’s something I can get behind.”
    How Del Rey defines herself in the classic-pop cosmos has changed as her music and image have evolved over the past year: “Gangsta Nancy Sinatra” gave way to the slightly more finessed “Lolita lost in the ‘hood.” More recently, she catchphrased her major label debut Born to Die as “Bruce Springsteen in Miami,” trading up on that Jersey striving. Born to Die features familiar Springsteen tropes—no-future kids tangled in sin and forever promises; Del Rey’s songs are like answer-back dispatches direct from “Candy’s Room,” but the door’s slammed shut and the stereo’s up. She’s telling the missing side of the story, revealing a new, true character living behind that scrim of male desire: Born To Die is the good girl who wants it just as bad as he does.
    III. The Backlash: It’s About the Music, LOL
    The issue with Lana Del Rey is not whether she is a corporate test-tubed ingénue, but why we are unwilling to believe that she is animated by her own passion and ambition—and why that makes a hot girl so unattractive. The big question here is not “Is she real?” But, rather, why it seems impossible to believe that she could be.
    On its surface, the Lana Del Rey Authenticity Debate™ swings between two depressing possibilities: (1) That’s she’s all but the fourth Kardashian sister, Frankensteined together (by old white guys) in order to exploit the now sizable “indie” market, or (2) that she is a moderately-talented singer who is getting over by pushing our buttons with nostalgia and good looks. This is the distracting crux, a pointless debate that casts a long shadow over Born to Die . For critics and anonymous commenters alike, the reality of Lana Del Rey seems to be an unsolvable equation: the prospect of an attractive female artist who sings plainly about her desire because she has it, with an earnest vision, who crafts her own songs and videos, who understands what it takes to be a viable pop product and is capable of guiding herself to those perilous heights. It’s seemingly beyond possibility. Yet, Lana Del Rey is doing it all, before our very eyes.
    Being sexy and serious about your art needn’t be mutually exclusive, even when your art involves being a pop package. Defending herself to Pitchfork last fall, Del Rey said, “I’m not trying to create an image or a persona. I’m just singing because that’s what I know how to do.” If her ambitions were to “just” sing, she’d still be making the rounds at Brooklyn open mics—but here she’s attempting to refocus our attention on her music. Which, for a short time, was the reason we cared about her. Perhaps, if she’d faked us out with a record on a modest indie label like Merge first, some hesitation towards major labels or the mainstream, all her ambition would’ve been palatable instead of outrageous.
    The central, mistaken