I NATASSIA ZOLOT
The trouble with accusations of trolling isn’t that they’re inaccurate, it’s that they don’t close the case. Of course she’s trying to provoke a reaction; so is anyone who makes a record, writes an article, or makes eye contact when walking down the street. The question is whether she’s any good at it; and judging by the extense and intensity of the reaction, she would appear to be. Perhaps she should have been trying for a different reaction; or perhaps the one she got wasn’t the one she thought she wanted; or perhaps both the attempt and the reaction are toxic to reasonable discourse and healthy conditions for making, distributing, and getting paid for music — all legitimate complaints. But “trolling” isn’t a dismissal; it’s a descriptive. Dismissals take more work.
II LISA EVERSMAN
“Hipster” isn’t even a descriptive; almost always an insult, its primary purpose is to distinguish the authenticity (of taste, of emotion, of appearance) of the speaker from the exhaustingly, endlessly artificial and posturing chasers after cool, novelty, and obscurity who will do anything for attention as long as they can convince someone it’s ironic. These are straw people; their unreality doesn’t matter as much as the social marker of distancing oneself from the idea they represent. So when Lana Del Rey is called a hipster, or is claimed to make “hipster music,” it has nothing to do with the woman herself, or even the sounds on the record, and is really about the drive to mark her as part of an out-group, one in which authentic values like honesty, meritocratic recognition, and “being yourself” are ignored or mocked.
III BETTY JOAN PERSKE
The first thing you notice when you listen to Born to Die is its deep infatuation with the lyrical iconography and sonic ambience of classic Hollywood: the smoky, soft-focus, entirely artificial world created on sets and soundstages and sculpted out of fabric swatches and mood lighting — everything centered on dramatically made-up faces unrelated to the shape and coloring of the faces the actors were born with. When she sings in her low, throaty register, she recalls both the everything-withheld sultriness of the young Lauren Bacall and the flat affectlessness of Veronica Lake, women whose paralyzing, gut-clenching nervousness was willfully read by the camera and audiences alike as not giving a damn, and were loved for it.
IV HELEN CLARE SCHROEDER
The second thing you notice is the other register she uses, the one that overpowers the low sultry one in memory and on record, the girlish coo or baby-voiced squeak, part Betty Boop and part Britney Spears. Or perhaps part Clare Grogan and part Liz Fraser; depending on the hipness economics of the scene she’s trying to crash, acknowledging Britney Spears as an antecedent could be either fatally obvious or simply the tribute due a reigning monarch. But much of the furore surrounding her could be reductively restated as the category error of a pop singer being judged by non-pop standards; the sexualized baby voice is a trope older than pop.
V EVERETT LESTER MCKENZIE
Performances of femininity are maybe better understood as drag; just because the person performing femininity is a woman doesn’t necessarily make the performance any more authentic to the way she understands herself. There are many kinds of femininity, both socially-recognized and not, and no two women either experience it or perform it in exactly the same way. Complaints that Lizzy Grant does not comfortably inhabit her Lana Del Rey persona may be missing the point. The discomfort can be read as a critique of a certain kind of feminine performance; a reading which allows male consumers both the satisfaction of being pandered to and the self-regard of seeing through it.
VI DOLORES HAZE
Masculine attention is both the keynote of the Lana Del Rey persona and, unexpectedly, almost entirely absent from the album. While she spends plent of time singing about men, it’s about how they make her feel; by the end of the record we know no more about the man (men?) she calls “daddy” and “her old man” than we know about the title character in Nabokov’s Lolita. The narrators of both may be unreliable in a larger sense, but they’re reliably self-centered in every sentence. Which may be a problem of morality or ethics; it is decidedly not a problem of pop.
VII MARINA HANTZIS
On the other hand, being grossed out by certain Humbertish reactions to the persona, whether they manifest as nakedly sexualizing or patronizingly concerned, is not only legitimate, it’s unvoidable. It’s the Problem of Porn recapitulated in different language: women fulfilling their sexual appetites and exercising their capacity for seduction is a good (or at worst neutral) thing, but the briefest encounter with the average member of the audience makes it clear that they’re not interested in female empowerment, except perhaps as a fig leaf. Which doesn’t mean women should be afraid to broach the subject, or be shamed into taking a different tack than the one they’re interested in.
VIII HATSUNE MIKU
Unreality persists: from disassociative performances to come-ons repeated until they turn mechanical to charges of body modification and voicelessness, towards the end of the record she slips deep enough into the Uncanny Valley that questions of authenticity take a back seat to ones of personhood. Artificiality is the keynote of modern pop, of course — if there’s no AutoTune here, it’s less because she’s too good for it than because it would destroy the straw house of retro signifiers she’s built — but for most pop stars, force of personality pushes against cyber-assimilation. What is Lana Del Rey’s personality?
IX ONIKA MARAJ
The few times the lyrics on Born to Die stand out from the general atmosphere, it’s because they echo themes found in modern pop, which is to say hip-hop. “Money is the reason we exist/Everyone knows that it’s a fact, kiss kiss,” from “National Anthem” is only a Real Doll™-voiced update of “C.R.E.A.M.” — which presents its own complexities. Black singers and rappers are allowed to speak economic truths, as are whites in genres identified with the poor or working classes; country, roots rock, punk, hip-hop, club. But in the voice of Lana Del Rey, who has gone out of her way to present herself as the picture of WASPy privilege, there’s a frission of 1% amour-propre, a destabilizing of the conventions. Again, the question of whether she’s incorporated hip-hop artfully, or to worthwhile effect, is legitimate; but that she has is, of itself, no cause for complaint.
X BETH GIBBONS
Attitude and image and catcalling and even lyrics aside, Born to Die’s most consistent point of musical comparison has been to a fifteen-year-old UK scene that, while stylish and effective in its time, drifted into adult-contemporary irrelevance around the turn of the century, or at least that’s the story told by hipness economists. Trip-hop’s — specifically, early Portishead’s — combination of noir soundscapes, dusty beats, and a woman crooning in multiple voices was undoubtedly due for a comeback sometime around now, and the fact that a rather overstated pop chancer was the one to actually put it across, rather than more respectably-lineaged members of various bass or step scenes, could be infuriating, if that were the sort of thing you got infuriated by.
XI ANNIE CLARK
The most righteous accusation is the one that she’s bringing down the sisterhood. Women still get less respect, less attention, less devotion, and less hard cash, even in nominally progressive and utopian spaces llike indie rock, than men do; that Lana Del Rey can half-ass her persona, her writing, her singing, her music, and her record and still suck up all the conversational oxygen in the room is a betrayal of all the women in similar spaces who are working hard, stretching themselves compositionally and technically, being adventurous and emotionally vulnerable and kicking ass. St. Vincent’s “Surgeon” even evokes the same narcotized retro glamour, but instead of circling around muddy zither samples, her sharp guitar-funk breaks open the world — not to mention tUnE-YaRDs, PJ Harvey, Wild Flag: with smart, confident, brave (and entirely incidentally gorgeous) women like them, who needs Del Rey’s simpering mope?
XII STEFANI GERMANOTTA
Whoever finds a use for it. Even when sensible grown-ups, like we are, dismiss her as hackneyed, dull, repetitive, preposterous, tackily flamboyant, and overly obsessed with physical presentation, there’s always the kids coming up from behind, the ones who don’t know who her 90s predecessors are, or who know and don’t care; who see themselves, or want to, in her big-eyed, skinny-bodied vulnerability; who close their eyes and enter a world different from the painful or stupid one they know, a world made new through her fragmented images and glossy beats. When you’re young, the fact of someone else, someone public, trying on new identities and covering a beating heart in a femme fatale exoskeleton, is in itself talismanic. All pop stars are allowed the dispensation of a false start, whether it’s playing piano on the Lower East Side, appearing on reality television in Nashville, or recording a Christian album in Santa Barbara.
XIII ELIZABETH GRANT
The fifth or sixth time through as much as the first, the album sounds less like a cohesive statement than like a smart, passionate teenage girl’s Tumblr, full of reblogs of things she likes, things that speak to her, and that she doesn’t quite realize, or if she does realize doesn’t care, aren’t the coolest or the most original things to be fond of. Studio portraits of long-dead glamour girls, gauzily filtered photography, quotations that pop with the sort of naïve sincerity she’ll be embarrassed by in a years’ time, fragments from here and there, pictures of herself trying out postures, scowls, pouts, swoony songs that sound nothing like what her dumb meathead classmates listen to, midcentury poetry that makes her feel tough-minded and wise, pictures of boys that make her feel gooey and fluttery, nothing too revealing, nothing too definitive. It’s the Internet; categorical statements are an error. Be big and dramatic, but also cool and reserved. Be flirty and naughty, but also shrewd and mocking. Be whatever you want to be, nobody’s watching, nobody’s keeping track. Everybody’s performing, all together. It’s intoxicating. And then, abruptly, it ends.
