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Today’s song: “Off To The Races,” Lana Del Rey
1.
This was the first Lana Del Rey song that I heard that really stood out for me. I liked “Video Games” well enough — it’s a sad, pretty song, when you strip it of the controversy and context of it, and I always have room for that sort of thing — but “Off To The Races” felt like something a little different. It’s still full of the same sad prettiness, but it’s much more propulsive, with the pseudo-rapping in the chorus and the way the drums come in after the intro. It’s a cool song, and most of the real appeal of Lana Del Rey breaks down into the fact that she’s cool, highly stylized and important to the right-now. So it captures her well.
2.
I was listening to the song at my desk a week or two ago (it was on the EP she released to tease the album), and Kat came walking by and did her Lana Del Rey impression (she doesn’t like her). When LDR hit the baby-talk chorus — the “I’m your little harlot / blah blah blah” part, Kat jumped right into that register. It was funny, and it catches a lot of what people hate about her, too. The pandering, Annie’s-song-in-the-Community-Christmas-episode “sexy baby” thing she has going on. The lines that stand out in the song on first listen really do infantilize her: “Be a good baby, do what I want”; “I’m crazy, baby, I need you to come here and save me”; “kiss me on my open mouth, ready for you”; “keep me forever, tell me you own me”; “I’m so crazy, baby, I’m sorry that I’m misbehaving, I’m your little harlot”; “I’d die without him”; etc, etc — look at it in black and white, and it reads like exhibits A-F in The People Vs. Lana Del Rey’s Pandering To The Impulses Of Dudes Who Want A Servile Woman To Swim Around In A Bikini To Thank Them For Rescuing Her.
3.
In fact, this comes up a lot when talking about Lana Del Rey. Half of the criticism is the sort of basic slut-shaming that likes to see a pretty girl fail at something because she probably didn’t earn her success, and look at those lips, she totally get plastic surgery when Her People came in and took her and created this image and gave her this new name and identity, and she’s so inauthentic….
4.
Which is weird, right? Because, like, nobody talks about how A$AP Rocky is all inauthentic because he self-released some music that caught ears at a big label who decided to package him as the Next Big Thing. They don’t go on and on about his handlers and the people pulling his strings. They don’t talk about Skrillex like he’s some guy who wanted to get famous at any cost, who was kind of placed on a fame-carousel and when the first bite at the apple as a pop-punk guitarist didn’t work, the machine jumped to turn him into a hot-shit dubstep act. They don’t strip those dudes of their agency despite the fact that their stories are not really any more inspiring or authentic than “daughter of dot-com billionaire makes record under Disney-sounding real name ‘Lizzy Grant,’ then re-emerges a year later as Mad Men-inspired sexpot Lana Del Rey!” A$AP Rocky is the savior of hip-hop and Skrillex is mega-important, and neither of those dudes is a DIY act struggling under his real name without the machine of what remains of the music industry behind them. And that’s fine — James Osterberg and Robert Zimmerman and guys like that, they came from similar places — but it’s only Lana Del Rey who has a zillion angry posts coming from every direction about how she’s fake and sucks and a product.
5.
So anyway, there’s the other half of the criticism, which comes from feminism, or the feminist-minded, and it looks at the lines like the ones from “Off To The Races” and states — as this dude who’s friends with a friend of mine did when we were discussing her on Facebook — that “not since the mid-1960s has a female artist done more to roll back the clock on women’s rights in her music.” They dismiss with hasty derision, as this post by a dude who writes for Austinist does, the “bored theoreticians who will prop up her weak work by insisting she’s doing some kind of complicated gender dance, toying with power and submission,” and insist that “reality” is just that she sucks, and is selling out her gender by writing songs that appeal so blatantly to the male libido — that, ultimately, it’s all about dudes.
6.
Which brings us back to “Off To The Races,” which is a song I decided to spend more time with after hearing the baby-talk bits and getting sucked into the Lana Del Rey Drama of 2012. Like, I actually listened to the rest of the words to the song and stuff.
Here’s what I found: It’s a pretty by-the-numbers Chandler-esque noir story, really, but this time told from the point of view of the woman. She’s a Vegas girl with a dark secret, living on the run, and she’s hooked herself to some bad guy to keep somebody tough between her and the past. Not exactly the first rendition of this tale we’ve ever heard, but cool, and legit. It also means that, when she dips into the sexy-baby stuff, she’s singing directly to this fictional guy, and the character she’s playing in the song does this as a means of manipulation. It’s not really that complicated: the words are right here, and they’re pretty direct. It’s a Dashiell Hammett story about a femme fatale, but she’s the only character we get. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s not the same as a crass “boop-da-boop-de-boop SEX!” play on her audience.
7.
Which is what really gets to me about all of the Lana Del Rey stuff: the notion that she is this thing, this creation of the moneyed-up Music Industry Machine designed to appeal directly to the libidos of male critics (that’s nearly a direct quote from a now-deleted Tumblr post from Amy Andronicus, I think), as opposed to an artist, and a storyteller. Because she sings pop songs, and so she’s singing mostly in the first person to “a you that the singer sings to” (as Ani Difranco put it way back when), and so there’s not much audible difference between a song that sings to “you” from the singer’s point of view, and one in which the singer is playing a role. It all sounds kind of the same, and we have an easy time mixing it up.
8.
I mean, last week we all got super psyched about someone who claimed to figure out what day was Ice Cube’s good day.
9.
But obviously she is telling stories in her songs, because “Off To The Races” is about a girl who’s at risk of getting sent to Ryker’s Island for whatever bad shit she did in her past. Lana Del Rey is in no more danger of going to Ryker’s Island than Ice Cube is of spotting the words “Ice Cube’s a pimp” on the Goodyear Blimp, as J Smooth put it last week. So the notion that this isn’t any sort of commentary, that she’s not playing a role, is just weird. And — yeah — sexist.
10.
Because when Matthew Weiner creates a subservient, sexpot in early 60’s dress, nobody complains that he’s rolling back the clock on women’s rights for creating Betty Draper. Because we’re prepared to see his art — like that of A$AP Rocky, and Skrillex — as the authentic creations of a man who is saying something. But we treat the very notion that Lana Del Rey might actually have something to say, and a viewpoint behind her art, and some personal agency of her own, as theories created by bored people who are building complexity into the work that couldn’t possibly be there intentionally.
11.
And, you know, fuck that. Because “Off To The Races” is a pretty good song, and it may not be breaking new ground for gender equality or whatever, but since when is that a requirement of every woman who picks up a fucking microphone? That’s the thing about Lana Del Rey: she’ll never be considered in the same terms as an A$AP Rocky or a Skrillex — that is, as a musician — but only ever as a product, only ever as a statement. It’s always going to be about what she means, even if you’re defending her. And, yeah, I’m sure she’s crying about that all the way to the bank or whatever, but there’s something kind of fucked up about the fact that “manufactured” dude stars like those guys just get to rock shows and put out new music, while she has to either be selling out her entire gender, or she has to be defended in terms that elevate her above these things.
12.
Fact is, it’s just a pretty fucking good record. Compelling stories, strong melodies, sad-but-not-too-sad, well-produced and really easy to listen to. Maybe we can let the rest of that shit go, for a while, and just enjoy her music. Cool?
(note: while I was working on this, Jessica Hopper went live with a story with similar points for Spin, which features more actual reporting from people who know her and less swearing. You should read it. As for me, I’ll just be psyched to be in similar company to Hopper, who is a very smart writer.)
