My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

katherinestasaph:

I would have fucking loved Lana Del Rey when I was 15, and I half-love her today, but her album hates my guts. There, it’s out. Fuck you, fuck me, fuck her, fuck them, fuck everything.

(Underneath a cut for those sick of reading about her and/or who don’t want to read about my grappling with musical objections. I wasn’t planning on writing about this, but somehow, a few points managed to go unmentioned. Rrrgh.)

Read More

After the onslaught of LDR coverage yesterday (some of which cracked me up, some of which I found wonderfully insightful and clever yet still problematic*), I’d pretty much sworn off reading any more analysis except for Katherine’s, since she’d been threatening it for a while, and I figured it’d be good (it is!).  And now I find myself writing about LDR. 

Goddamnit.

Just to add to Katherine’s ways in which the album actively trolls, I can’t understate how much this album bugs me off as a Nabokov fan. It’s not just that it misunderstands the figure of Lolita, because we’ve been doing that for decades (see Graham Vickers’s Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again), but that it seeks to affirm this notion of the character via the novel, itself, in “Off to the Races” (“Light of my life / Fire of my loins”), the blatant misunderstanding of which is made clear by the lines that follow (“Gimme them gold coins / Gimme them coins”).  I’m a big believer in cultural borrowing and appropriation, but this is deliberate misappropriation: I’m going to borrow something with a built-in powerful cultural meaning and misunderstand it as hard as I can.  That’s hardcore trolling (the lit equivalent of this scene from The Office in its better days [see the last 30 seconds]).

What’s odd is that Born to Die sort of blows its opportunity to callously exploit what M. Gigi Durham calls “the Lolita Effect” or the sexualization of young girls, because, despite all of the ostensible transformation going on here, it’s never clear that the character Lana Del Rey’s fumbling sexy baby talk is coming from anything other than a woman in her early/mid-20s.  She drinks PBR, she’s money-obsessed, she has “a past.” She’s not really a Lolita figure in either the Nabokovian sense or in the prevailing cultural sense that’s displaced it (of a knowing, “baby nymphomaniac,” to use Durham’s term).  Even taking Lizzy Grant out of the equation, Lana Del Rey the construction is a grown woman dressed as a teenager’s idea of a sexy adult.  And, actually, that’s less challenging—less controversial, certainly—than just owning the skeeviness of the Lolita Effect conceit.  Maybe the fact that she didn’t take it that far is a sort of trolling, in itself?

* Primarily in point XII, in which Jonathan correctly acknowledges that there’s a potential audience for every act of pop artifice, no matter how poorly executed. I think this is meant strictly as cultural contextualization and not critical defense, but it comes close enough to the latter that it might conceivably serve as more material in the already enormous barricade protecting Born to Die from simply being evaluated as a piece of music—”well, the kids like it, so it has value.” Entirely true, but the discursive formations surrounding critiques of this album had been set up well before anyone had even heard it, so I have an aversion to any additional parameters that critics feel obliged to account for, add caveats for, etc. (e.g., how many more critics need to explain how authenticity is a myth in pop music?)?