Why Lana Del Rey Makes Me Fucking Hate Music Too
So I am fed up with the fucking Stone Roses, I think I’ve made that clear. And as for Lana Del fucking Rey, Christ she’s been getting on my tits recently as well.
Funnily enough, you know, I actually like Video Games; I genuinely think it’s a pretty good pop song, and if it was just that song by itself then I would presumably really like it.
But there are two things which started out just mildly annoying me, but with their sheer ubiquity have turned an indifferent snort into utter loathing.
The ubiquity itself is fucking annoying enough, just to start with. This is of course a little related to envy, but I have been checking the 6Music playlists a lot recently, for any sign of them playing our recent releases, and whilst they’ve cropped up here and there, that fucking Video Games tune has been on every fucking show at least once, every day for fucking weeks.
And the song, as much as I like it, just isn’t that good. I don’t know how fucking incredible a song would have to be before I wouldn’t be just slightly irritated seeing it all over the place like that, but I would imagine sampled birdsong from rare starlings whose wings are tipped with silver would have to be involved in some way.
It just fucking annoys me that all these unsigned bands and tiny labels are slaving away for fucking ages trying to get the slightest glimmer of attention, and some major label marketing department dresses up an established attention whore in something slinky and glamorous, butchers her fucking face, throws her at the media in a shower of pouting and cash and lo and be-fucking-hold, all the rest of us trying our best to score a moment here or there are instantly buried in an avalanche of sex-pouts.
That brings me onto the fucking second thing: her fucking image. Now, have a look at that video at the bottom of the page, back when Lana was just plain old Lizzy Grant. You can see the same hyper-sexualised pouting antics going on there, although admittedly that was before she decided to butcher her face, but it’s now quite clearly been turned up to eleven.
Just for the record, plastic surgery for vanity rather than medical reasons is something I find fucking abhorrent. If your self-esteem is so utterly defeated that you are willing to cut open your own face and turn yourself into some sort of freakish science project in order to desperately try and shore up your self-image I seriously pity you. So that ‘freshly punching in the face’ mouth of hers just gives me the heebie-jeebies to begin with.
But it’s the overtly sexual nature of it. I am not for a second pretending that a mumbling indie boy in a beard and a cardie isn’t triggering pre-conceived notions of style in his potential audience the very second he chooses his clothes and his haircut, but the image you choose shows how you view yourself as well, and Lana Del Rey’s, like her Leslie Ash trout pout, gives me the creeps.
Watching her mince her way through her fucking videos, as well as through shite like her Jools Holland performance tells me just one thing: that she judges herself pretty much entirely on her appearance and her sexuality, not her music. It’s not that men and women in pop should pretend not to be sexual beings, but every single thing she does is dominated by a pout, then doe eyes, then a coy smirk, then another pout, then a breathy gasp, then a moistening of the lips and finally some more pouting.
Basically, it feels like she and her label and her management are trying to sell their songs to my penis, rather than my ears. And that makes me feel insulted. It also seems like they have no faith in her music either, because the sex doll image so utterly overwhelms it, which is just insulting to her, frankly. It is, after all, a pretty good song without all that pish.
You know those identikit indie bands, with their attitude and their leather jackets and their ‘let’s ‘ave it’ machismo? Well they look like a bunch of cunts, don’t they. This is one of the female equivalents. The ‘I have nothing to say, so I am going to look pretty’ tactic which fucking bedevils women in music wherever they go. Katy Perry for indie kids.
And I actually think video games is a pretty good song. But I am fucking sick of the fucking lot of them at the moment, and I am going to go and fucking hide in my room until they fucking go away.
Enjoyed this post which (even if it wasn’t intended to) made me giggle.
A while back I wrote a defence of Lana Del Rey
http://breakingmorewaves.blogspot.com/2011/09/fck-authenticity-in-defence-of-lana-del.html
If you can’t be bothered to read all that waffe it effectively says, I fell in love with the music first so everything after that – the (possible) alterations to the plastic surgery, the pouting etc etc doesn’t bother me.
I can’t be bothered to get worked up about these things (sigh), I know I’m sorry, I’m lame. I should, anger is an energy after all – maybe my energies are just being over-used elsewhere.
Of course I completely agree it’s unfair that major labels get so much exposure over the struggling indepents like yourself- but life has always been unfair and for the foreseeable future small indies will always be buried under an avalanche of major label sex pout artists. It’s probably not ‘right’ but that is reality and it’s going to take someone with real vision and real leadership to change that. Having said that I think that Video Games (and the brilliant Blue Jeans and Kinda Out Of Luck) are just wonderful songs and I could listen to them all day on the radio on repeat over and over.
In a few years time (no – delete that – at the rate the internet works, in a few weeks time, maybe days) there will probably be a documentary on the TV “The Over Exposure of Lana Del Rey” where the tale of Lana is told where she became so ridiculed, criticised, commented on and joked about that she couldn’t take it any more and ended up in rehab / topping herself / quitting her music career and lived as a naked hippy in a commune (delete as appropriate). I hope not, but the levels of commentary on the internet are as prevalent as her A-list radio playlisting.
Of course it was supposed to make you giggle! These rants are always only supposed to be half serious.
And just because it’s inevitable that people with more money to throw at matters do better than people with less, it doesn’t make it any less worth getting angry over. There is a special level of zen which lets you accept these things, but I doubt I will ever get there.
And as for the pouting, I agree. Apart from the frustration of the over-playing, if I just listened to Video Games (the only one I’ve heard) then it would just be an over-played pop sing I kinda liked.
But I read all these ‘why do people hate her so’ articles and tweets before I ever heard the music, so when I looked her up it happened to be on YouTube, and the first time I saw that awful video I really did understand the reaction. She wants to be famous so much she cut her face and gets treated like a bloody sex toy hood ornament in her videos. The whole thing is fucking horrible.
I know this happens all the time in the world of disposable kiddie-pop, but it’s depressing to see it cross over so flagrantly into the corner of the music world I happen to inhabit. I know music everywhere is full of image manipulation, but this just seems more distasteful than most for some reason.
Hahahaha I love a good rant and this is a classic!
Mind you don’t think she looks that radically different when she was plain ole Lizzy either, just looks like a makeover… anyway I do understand your frustration, how some artists seem to be the anointed ones above all others.
However I’m with Robin on “Lana.” Great pop songs, with a twist which make me want to watch Twin Peaks episodes back to back. Sexuality and pop go hand in hand, it was ever thus and she’s not gone really gone the whole Rhianna and the banana thing, which to be honest is about as sexy as Louis Walsh being spanked with a cream covered kipper.
But this over exposure? Surely it’s down to the radio station and not the artist per se are your sights maybe not trained on the wrong target?
That’s true enough. I wasn’t even that fussed by her until I was scanning the 6Music playlists for any sign of our latest releases and it was honestly on every single show every single fucking day.
Who the fuck is this, I thought, suffocating our work by taking all the radio oxygen, and then looked her up. To then see the writhing, borderline pole-dancing, and the cod-Bardot lip-licking and sex-breathing that it all came packaged in just made me squirm.
Then to find out just how hard she has been trying to become famous and for how long, and it was like some poor dead-eyed X-Factor victim, still stunned from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, had been shuffled into a new arena to see if a fresh set of modern-day Romans would accept her as their new dancing girl.
I’m pretty sure cocks have bigger budgets than ears, so I’m not particularly surprised its that part of the body they’re marketing to.
Like Robin I heard the song first outside of all the marketing hubbub, so really quite enjoyed it as a song. I still do, and don’t listen t the radio enough for anything to really be overplayed to be honest.
The thing that has put me off her though was that awful Jools Holland performance when I thought she’d had surgery too. I’m with you 100% on the vanity surgery rant, and whilst she might deny it – I just can;t believe that look is real. It sure as hell isn’t natural – surely someone at school would have punched that pout out of her, no?
Looking at a Lizzie vs Lana picture comparison it’s either bad plastic surgery or an astonishing optical illusion.
The song is pish.
The rant however is rather splendid.
Apart from the Funk & Soul Show, Jarvis and Huey I believe that Radio 6 is not the station it was before all the let’s close it down, no let’s save it bollocks.
I still like Marc Riley and Gideon Coe, but then they are Old Farts of a Certain Age, and so am I.
“Sexuality and pop go hand in hand, it was ever thus and she’s not gone really gone the whole Rhianna and the banana thing, which to be honest is about as sexy as Louis Walsh being spanked with a cream covered kipper”
Yeah I agree with Von Pip’s point here. In the indie ghetto I guess sexuality is not something that artists generally want to be associated with – artists want to be known for making ‘proper’ records, but in the pop world that concept gets dispensed with – an artists haircut, their fashion and how ‘cool’ they are is as important as what music they make. Maybe this is why Del Rey has received so much criticism, having gained significant coverage in the indie press / websites she’s come out with a song that even many of her critics acknowledge is a decent song, but she defies the indie ideals, in terms of physical appearance.
What’s particularly interesting about this is that if the ‘indie’ scene is all about the music then why are the majority of her critics making judgements about the way she has chosen to appear ? I guess it shows that all of us, indie, pop, dance, folk heads whatever we are (I’m a bit of a jack of all trades myself) make judgements about music and artists on many other factors than just the music.
Personally I don’t like plastic surgery but all of us to a greater or lesser extent change the way we appear. Take punk with its mohican haircuts, the amount of folk singers that grow beards etc. Obviously some of these are ‘natural’ changes whilst others such as surgery or the like are not so. Del Rey has said in an interview that she hasn’t had surgery but on the other hand lip enhancement isn’t a surgical procedure as such so it could have been a clever way of avoiding an answer that admits she has had undertaken physical changes without ‘undergoing the knife.’
Anyway, great article that gets the debate going….
some months back, a whoooole lot BEFORE all this fuss, i heard lana del rey’s “diet mtn. dew” and loved it. i had no idea how the girl even looked like up until now, where i see her songs everywhere and i definitely had no idea how she was a lizzy grant. i remember i had put that song on one of my playlists & still have it as a loved track.
honestly, i have never cared what an artist looks like, even if i was a big fan, but this overexposure kind of turns it the other way around for me. with some exceptions of course, to which i wasn’t drawn to through marketing ways. i am a weird person probably, but having played a small part in the music business in the past, i never get impressed by this much promotion.
p.s: i do like this new category of why something/someone makes you hate music
ASG/Robin It’s not so much how she looks, although I find the Leslie Ash really rather off-putting, it’s more how she puts herself across. It’s kind of the implication that both she and her audience judge her on that basis, and it really makes me uncomfortable.
When I see a woman writhing around like that, it reminds me of being on a football tour in Amsterdam, and all the lads were marching around ogling the girls in the windows, and I just shuffled along behind them and couldn’t really bring myself to look. I got this overwhelming feeling of ‘It’s fine if that’s how you choose to make your living, but you don’t need me to be just one more person watching you do this to yourself.’
As you said, I think the strong reaction is due to the crossover. The song is clearly very indie audience friendly (or whatever you want to call it) yet the image and the way it’s put across is so at odds with what that audience is used to that it seems to cause the really strong reaction we are seeing.
As I sort of said above, it’s a bit like finding out some dead-eyed X-Factor reject was behind Grandaddy all along. In fact, dead-eyed X-Factor reject is exactly how she comes across.
Excellent rant. I’m just horrified when I see my 8-year-old and 4-year-old daughters’ expectations of what a “talented and famous” female artist “looks” like. Doing my best to push the value of intelligence and actual artistry. There’s such a pervasive sense that a woman has to look and act slutty in order to succeed in the pop music arena, etc. Makes me crazy, but so many things make me crazy, perhaps I’m just crazy.
Have a look at that link I put in at the end of the article about the sexualisation of women as measured by Rolling Stone covers. I know it’s Rolling Stone, but it’s still quite frightening.
I looked at that link, and all the comments below it. My ire is up. It cheapens/disrespects that women have actual minds and capabilities aside from being pinups. There’s an attractive female scientist/artist/doctor, etc. out there, and someone’s trying to get her to dumb-down and sex-up for some article/magazine so that her actual accomplishments get buried by all the other crap, as if that’s the most important thing about her. “How wonderful that she’s so sexy, too!”
Grrrr…. And no, I’m not a bitter, dowdy old hag who is just jealous.
Have you SEEN the halloween costumes they design for little girls these days? They want us to be sex kittens as soon as we turn 4.
I can understand your frustration, but I think there’s a little more to Lana Del Ray than just “hyper-sexualised pouting” to sell records.
Her image seems imbued in the narrative of the song. It wasn’t until Wendy Roby compared it to Twin Peaks in her Drowned in Sound (“…it might as well be sung by Laura Palmer and be about the Bobs at the end of your bed.”) that I started paying attention to the lyrics.
I think there’s a real sense of how the American ideal of beauty (Hollywood/beauty pageants/prom queen) is false, and little more than a veneer hiding the true ugliness beneath. And I think Del Ray’s image is very much constructed with this in mind.
For one thing, look at the actual video of the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO1OV5B_JDw.
It’s a vocal performance, delivered straight to camera. Sure it’s sexualised, but it’s a long way from Rihanna cavorting in various states of undress. In fact, you don’t even see her body.
And look at the other imagery used – stock footage of paparazzi, old Hollywood movies, advertising billboards. Look at her press photos – part beauty queen, part 50s movie starlet, part trailer trash. It’s there in the Lizzy Grant video too – American flag, Marilyn Monroe haircut. There’s definitely a discussion here of attitudes and ideas of ‘beauty’.
This of course is beside the point, as I’m sure it doesn’t make her radio play dominance any less annoying for you.
And it may also be entirely hypocritical – like those action film directors that claim to be commenting on violence in society by creating two hours of highly stylised and beautifully orchestrated violence.
But I just wanted to argue the case that there’s a little more here than just a pretty girl trying to use her looks to make it in the industry.
Lyrically it comes across as a fairly submissive, devotional love song, does it not?
I know what you mean about the imagery combining a lot of things, not all of which are as glamorous as some of the suggestion in the most extreme pouting, but is that commentary, or just hipster retroism?
I don’t know, you may be right, but she’s been peddling this image for a while now, irrespective of the contents of the song, and it can’t be applicable to everything she writes, can it?
And I don’t know what the male equivalent of this kind of thing would be, just to see if it would balance.
In ‘indie’ terms most blokeyness is inward-facing, despite being very male, albeit in a more shuffling, awkward way. Most outward facing sexuality in male music videos tends to be in macho indie-rawk, metal, hip-hop and R&B, and I can’t think of an instance in which it doesn’t make me think the person doing it comes across as a complete fucking muppet.
And again, just to reiterate, I do like the song, and if I just heard it here and there I would probably never have thought twice about it. I’d definitely have snorted and thought ‘fucksake’ (or something equally eloquent) when I saw the video though.
Nice post though, Barticles. You don’t say much around here these days, but it’s always worth waiting for when you do.
I liked Bart better when he was funny. He’s like the Steve Martin of Song, By Toad.
On the subject, I think I actually disagree with him.
She’s clearly been through some pop industry stylist’s workshop and stuck a gallon of botulism into her face in order to get attention.
Song’s dull as pish too.
“I liked your earlier, funnier comments.”
Dylan, I tempted to suggest that disagreeing with Bart probably means you are automatically wrong – it feels like some sort of immutable law of the universe.
Even when, in this case, he is clearly wrong
Incidentally, I don’t think hating the product is the same as hating the song. Sometimes people seem to have been under the impression that by having a dig at the whole shebang, I am having a dig at people enjoying the tune, which I most definitely am not.
I am mildly disagreeing with them about it, but not especially. It’s the whole business that winds me up, not particularly the tune itself, or indeed people liking it. Well perhaps liking it so very much winds me a up a little, but well, not really!
Where’s Chutters to call it all just a big pile of pish when you need him?
He’s got a raging boner for this song, so I wouldn’t be expecting that anytime soon.
Ah, of course.
He’s usually wrong too.
Bart said nearly everything i wanted to say on this you cunts
Smiley face!
Smiley fucking face
Sexism that is perpetuated by the music industry’s lack of faith in a woman’s ability to sell records based on her own musical merits is one of the only things that actually trickles down.
It’s taken a while, but I do now consider myself a “woman in music” (the whole “in music” part). I am not, and can never be, simply a musician. Why? because I am constantly reminded that I am a woman, who plays music. Now, I have met plenty of male musicians and promoters who don’t feel the need to point out my gender to me, but I have also had some deeply affecting experiences that I would love to be able to write off as just some douche’s slobbering verbal diarrhea about me as a woman musician. But I can’t. And I can’t because of all the above. And the Youtube commentary. And the Rolling Stone Covers. And the guys in the music shop. And the the fact that you’ve never heard of this woman (http://www.youtube.com/user/kjrichey). And the choices of music photographers. And all this permeates the atmosphere of music. Most days I choose not to notice.
A lot of female musicians try to toss aside the gender thing, they talk about how their gender is non-consequential and they don’t think of themselves as girls who play music, rather they are simply people who play music that also happen to be women. I would love to subscribe to this way of thinking all the time but I think, most women who play, are going to be confronted with it whether they like it or not. I’m not saying that this is naive, as I said, most days I choose not to notice, I think it’s actually a choice you have to make. However, my gender is consequential, people do view my band differently because there is a woman in it. And by golly, she doesn’t sing!? You know, no one ever thinks to ask me if it’s alright to borrow my bass amp, no they go ask one of the guys first.
Not being asked to use the bass amp because I am the woman in the band is fairly small offense on the list. I’ve had much worse, much more explicit and hurtful comments. But I think this reveals the trickle down that as Matthew put it “bedevils women in music”. Sexism in music permeates, are there are consequences to it, even bastions of music which is supposed to open and friendly to freaks and weirdos. (don’t) Read the comments on any Marnie Stern youtube video, just a bunch of guitar players tearing her down because, they “could do that” and the only reason she’s big (if you could call Marnie Stern “big”) is because she’s a girl. And god help you if are pretty and talented, no one take you seriously, not even your label. And if you’re plain and talented, well, don’t quit your day job.
/rant.
p.s. I like video games too, and actually the first place I heard it was on a feminist website, someone posted it simply because she loved the song. And damn if I didn’t have the “I’m in love with a dying man” refrain stuck in my head all night last night.
oh I love my ignorance some days, I’d never heard of her until you posted this.
In light of the debate going on here (to which I’m in the “heard the song and liked it without having the slightest idea who she is” school) that no-one checks out the album cover for Class Actress’ new album “Rapprocher”…
AMD – I suppose that’s a lot what bugs me. Not that she chooses to be a sex kitten, but the extent to which people seem to respond to it so obediently, and the extent to which there are so incredibly few non-sex kitten women in music.
When Joanna Newsom did those pictures for… whoever it was again, even though I have never been that fond of her music, I found it really depressing. Is there really no other fucking way?
Matthew- Well, sadly if there is no other way, than what “choice” is she making? Not that I think the situation is that fucking bleak… but it does feel that way sometimes doesn’t it?
Ha, great song, nice voice. Shame that she wants to look like Mick Jagger lol.
[...] might not believe me, given how much Lana Del Rey’s ubiquity began to irritate me towards the end of last year, but I was actually rather hoping I would like [...]