I kind of missed the boat on this Lana Del Rey drama, I’ve mostly been catching people writing about trying to untangle the drama itself, and not so much the music or the persona in a vacuum. So I kind of don’t really understand what this is all about, except that it’s hit a nerve with some people, which is usually something that’s fun and interesting for me to check out.
I just read this piece by Dan Solomon where he ascribes Lana’s critical rejection mostly to sexism and slut-shaming. And I dunno, he’s probably on to something. But he argues that if we’re gonna reject Lana’s stage persona as inauthentic then we should do the same with A$AP Rocky and Skrillex. Which to me is like, well wait, this is not just gender we’re talking about here.
Firstly, no one will disbelieve a story about a young male who likes to party, drink, and smoke weed. These are the stories that are being told to us by A$AP and Skrillex. Completely believable, probably not far from the truth. The dressing up those two dudes receive probably amounts to little more than just that - stylists and fashion consultants or whatever. Business-wise, their personas are about as risky as opening a laundromat.
A sexpot Nancy Sinatra cover is maybe a little more out there. Which is fine! But you gotta remember that this is America we’re dealing with, and if you wanna do the pop thing, you have to find a way of dealing with (our antiquated and kind of silly model of) authenticity.
I’ve seen a couple ways of doing this: 1. Make your persona believable. (e.g. Kurt Cobain, Nicki Minaj, probably most artists that hit the billboard charts); or 2. Make your stories so outlandish that they can’t possibly be your own. To do this, the music has to be really compelling to a lot of people (e.g. Tom Waits, David Bowie, Bob Dylan), or the stories need to play out a lot of people’s fantasies (e.g. Lady Gaga). Or both!
For my money, I think Lana Del Ray’s music is pretty good, but probably won’t become a pop classic, and doesn’t play out enough collective fantasies to really qualify for #2.
…
Kinda the lens that I see this through is the viewpoint of what it’s like for someone to step into someone else’s musical tradition as an outsider. Two examples I can think of are white rappers in America (recently watched a really interesting episode of Dead End Hip Hop, Black Rappers vs. White Rappers) and my own experiences with playing traditional East Asian music (plus reading about people like Simon Barker and Christopher Yohmei Blasdel).
If there’s one conclusion that I can draw from looking at all these different cases, it’s basically that if you want to step into someone else’s music (and I think this is true to an extent for pop music as well, although advertising dollars also play an immense role in what becomes successful in that world), the best path to acceptance is just to practice real hard and be fucking dope at whatever music it is you’re making.
Quote from Kinge in the beginning of that Dead End Hip Hop video: “The question I wanna pose right now is: When you see a white rapper, what are your initial thoughts? Since hip hop has more or less been of the darker persuasion, normally when a white rapper come out, [a lot of people] kinda dismiss him.”
This is all kind of long and rambling and I have to get out of this cafe now, but you should probably check out that Simon Barker video I linked, mostly for Bae Il-Dong’s FUCKING AMAZING vox. In fact here:
