As she re-releases her debut album after a year of wrestling with public opinion, Lauren Martin considers the love-hate phenomenon that is Lana Del Rey.
The article is huge, but I'll quote the most interesting parts.
Quote:
All this talk of artifice and how you react to it depends largely on your degree of cynicism about the pop music industry and how you regard much-debated and frankly tired issues of authenticity. Lana is one of the most overt lessons in the fragile art of pop culture myth-making in recent memory, but looking back this didn’t necessarily have to have been met with such vehement criticism. No one pulls up Lady Gaga for coming from a wealthy family, worshipping Bowie and not wearing ornamental lobsters on her head in high school, so why have we treated Lana Del Rey with such venom? She may be the direct opposite of artists like Adele who has endeared herself to the public with her “everywoman” image and stellar voice, but who are we to criticise Del Rey for artifice? It’s a well drawn-out point that pop music is partly founded on re-invention, so to attack her for being inauthentic can be seen as a shallow critique.
What the past year has shown us is that pop music has reached a point where artifice is no longer necessarily a deception. Twitter and Instagram may be showing up our pop stars as normal people who drink Starbucks and have twee iPhone cases, but I don’t want to know what Lizzy Grant had for breakfast. I don’t want to know Lizzie Grant. Lana is Lana is Lana is Lana, and for the sake of pop, I hope she never takes a day off.
Quote:
The two sides have fought tirelessly and having gone from genuine intrigue with Video Games to us “discovering” en masse Lizzy Grant through an expose by Hipster Runoff, the ensuing comic derision has been an ever-present element in her story. This expose caused manifold unforeseen problems. When Pitchfork championed her last summer and rode the wave of interest , the backlash in part from her disastrous SNL performance meant that P4K went from support to reproach in a matter of months, eventually culminating in a bombastic editorial rejection of her by slating ‘Born To Die’ with a 5.5 and effectively using the rating as leverage to regain an element of their taste-maker status lost in the burgeoning meme storm.
Wow, I'm reading that hipster expose for the first time. For as much as they complain about mainstream being superficial, they're awfully superficial. If you like the music, why should you care that she was a failed mainstream artist that went indie?
Critics are just mad she makes alternative music at a big label calling her music fake when she wirtes it all/directs video and her breakthorugh song was a slow alternative song with a homemade video just like she did it before her breakthorugh
The critics are clinging to everything similiar to her haters
