February 11, 2012
“watching LDR do this lyrical melodrama while rolling her eyes is…thrilling”

karaj:

militantmaudlinist:

It is possible for for someone to be highly intelligent, and yet have no information. This condition—usually associated with youth or prolonged adolescence—results often in boredom, the existential progenitor of nearly every significant art and cultural movement.[…] Boredom, a brililiant and brazen stupidity, is dazzlingly preemptive. When the bored youth is no longer young, he/she generally enacts his/her own early demise, or devotes him/her-self to acquiring information. Specificity preempts boredom. Like the incandescence of pop, boredom cannot be sustained indefinitely. 

Chris Kraus from Where Art Belongs

If I don’t announce this now I never will so I address, however belatedly, the entire tumblr feminist boredom community and professional LDR thinkers, whom I respected though for some time did not quite follow, when I say:

I get it. 

Something about being mired in anxious futurity dread, moving, multiple infestations, irritable bowel syndrome, and bad sexual decisions has brought me to this place of understanding. In said place watching Lana Del Rey do this lyrical melodrama while rolling her eyes is how else do I put this really thrilling. There’s a moment when you see life’s accumulated groans piled up on itself and suddenly there is nothing else to do but sit beside it. Yawning.

Anyway Lana Del Rey I’m not going to say your interviews aren’t slightly off-putting, they are (yet I like watching them?). I call you a role model ANYWAY. 

yesssssssssss. welcome. i totally get what got you to where you are today, with us. it’s true that i never want to hear her speak, don’t care about her background, nix all of the interviews. her art stands on its own.

A+++ feminist boredomming.

12:20am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSRIbyGDpJWl
(Notes: 15)
  
Filed under: ldr forever feminist boredom lana del rey ldr blogging 
February 8, 2012
"Lana Del Rey wants to tell you what she’s wearing. Sometimes, as on her break-out, heartsick single “Video Games,” it’s her man’s “favorite sundress.” Often—twice on her album Born to Die, out today—it’s a “red dress.” Elsewhere: leather tight around her waist, a white bikini, a red bikini, a “party dress,” ribbons for her hair, “glass room perfume / cognac lilac fumes,” nail polish, mascara. Elaborate descriptions? No. But what Del Rey puts on and takes off form a big part of what we know of her through her lyrics."

—

Lana Del Rey’s Regressive, Beautiful, Twisted Fantasy - Spencer Kornhaber - Entertainment - The Atlantic

This is more important than the author realises, and not in the way that he thinks.

9:42pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSRIbyG75tfU
(Notes: 31)
  
Filed under: lana del rey femininity 
February 7, 2012
all 4 u

theremixbaby:

Of course, my current problem with Lana Del Rey is that I literally can no longer trust any [heterosexual??] man to give a reliable reading of the image she is portraying. (Sorry guys, maybe stick to explaining how “Born to Die” sounds like Lovage; that one seems good).  Someone wrote the she doesn’t expect any men to like Lana, which… uh what? I mean, come on, that’s just not… it’s not how it’s happening. Have we forgotten that the initial response to Del Rey was essentially “a sexy dream girl who lets me play video games”? A lot of men really do like her (especially guys who aren’t music critics!). And a lot of men really really don’t like her. Either way the response has been mostly icky.

The issue is not that they won’t like it. It’s that they won’t get it. Inevitably, they will miss the point. And so both the male praises and critiques of Del Rey have been mired in patriarchal ignorance and barely-concealed sexism. I have watched the most well-intentioned feminist men stumble in trying to get “Born to Die” right. Bless their hearts. They never will. Being a girl in a patriarchal society means wanting things that are directly contrary to your own happiness and liberation, and that is something that I’m not sure privileged people can ever actually understand.

For the record, I strongly dislike most of LDR’s output musically (it’s like chillwave minus everything I like about chillwave!), so I’ve been loathe to comment on BTD. But as far as her image and lyrics go, I find her to be simultaneously offensive to me as a female and deeply relateable. It’s confusing for me, and I’m a feminist who took real life women’s studies classes and I spend a lot of time reading/thinking/writing/discussing these ideas. It’s got to be double difficult if you’re a dude and your experiences with feminism involve reading some lady-blogs now and then.

We want these fucked up things that don’t even exist—the sublimation of pure devotion, beauty which can make us interesting, the very ideal of the “bad boy” itself. We want them because we have been told every day that they will make us happy and they are our natural desires. That Del Rey is wrapped up in filmic tropes makes sense—these are lies we are told by pop culture, really. The thing that even the most feminist of men never get is, realizing that those things are lies, that traditional female gender roles won’t make you happy, doesn’t make you want those things any less, especially not on a nonconscious level. This is further conflated by the fact that sometimes being that girl actually can make you happy. Sometimes you want to wear his favorite sundress. Sometimes you’re in the kitchen with your heels #dinnertime and it feels great. There’s a type of sick smugness that takes me over when I am being that girl and play the game the way they told me to. There’s also a pang of feminist guilt. It’s very emotionally and intellectually confusing shit.

If I’m not explaining this clearly it is because it barely makes sense to me. Let me reiterate how much I don’t expect male music writers to get it, especially as it manifests itself in Del Rey’s music.

What I’m not sure on is how self-aware Del Rey actually is. Is she playing the traditional female role because she feels she wants to? Does she know the role in-and-of-itself is damaging? That her pain does not come just from the indifference of her lovers? Is she trying to explore the inherent contradictions found in modern constructions of femininity? Or is she simply trying to sell old-timey gender roles with 2012 sexy-baby imagery? Is she saying that it’s fun and cute to be the girl she plays on BTD? Or she saying that it’s romantic but ultimately self-destructive? Is it good or bad or just a thing? Do her intentions really matter?

The best conversation I had with someone of the male gender regarding Lana Del Rey was with an IRL friend who writes about music also. This was before the album, before SNL, etc. He told me that he liked LDR because he actually related to her. That he had tried to make these grand romantic gestures for girls before, but they were never returned. He at least understood how painful that can be. It’s disappointing that more male writers have not tried to actually empathize with Del Rey, but rather have tried to interpret her from a third person perspective. Then again, I don’t expect men to try to empathize with women; you are notoriously awful at it. It occurred to me, days after this conversation, that LDR is not unlike Drake. Take Care is fundamentally about a young man getting all the things he was told would make him happy, and then finding that he is more miserable than ever. That men I know have scoffed at lines like “I’ve had sex four times this week / I’m ashamed” shows how much they buy into their own patriarchal myths. It’s me, it’s me, it’s all for me.

In the end, I cannot like LDR’s image because it reminds me of the things I dislike most in myself and then makes those things seem sexy and appealing to men. But even then, most of my contempt lies in the guys who decided that Lana is either a perfect sexybaby dream girl or a dumb slut trying ruin things for “real women.” Certainly she’s neither. Now if only her music didn’t suck so much.

I clicked the little heart on this earlier, but wanted to reblog because this is great and very related to what I was talking about before. Being A Girl and Losing is important, but also those moments when you get rewarded for Doing What They Want, but you’re also still kind of losing, because then they can talk about you…well, the way they talk about Lana Del Rey.

4:07pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSRIbyG2eDEU
(Notes: 86)
  
Filed under: lana del rey feminism music being a girl and losing 
February 7, 2012
forever defending

supergalaxy:

“…as far as we understand the harshest criticism of Del Rey, it’s not that she’s “wanting and taking like a man,” it’s that she’s “wanting and taking” just like a stereotypical, anti-feminist conception of a woman: That is, she isn’t wanting at all; she’s existing only as an object of desire, completely in thrall to the male gaze.”

i really don’t expect guys to like lana. she hits on a nerve that is entirely coated in estrogen for me. the fantastical things she says make me sink into a subdued revelry that is so hard to explain.

it’s the feeling i get when i watch the hours or reread virgin suicides. they get whatever hard-to-pinpoint feminine struggle it is that sorta floats around like that cloud guy who chucks spiky turtles at you in mario games.

she’s like this odd swan that is just gooey with femininity. she’s a summation of female fantasies as well. she’s hardly racy—in fact, i find her quite elegant. and brash. i like both qualities. they make smoking and listening superbly fun.

maybe it’s just me growing into myself.

also, what wouldn’t be considered behaving in response to the male gaze? would she have to don turtlenecks, tattoos, unwashed hair? this isn’t meant to polarize, i really am sincerely asking.

i don’t know why i feel the need to constantly be on her side. mysteries!

I think it’s great that people are engaging with Liz Phair’s French Feminist WSJ editorial, but I really feel like having a dude write about it is kind of missing the point (sorry, Marc Hogan, it seems like you are engaging in good faith and whatever, but the casual way the Phair piece was framed kind of belies how complicated the conversation is about female subjectivity and desire in the heteropatriarchal world, and this is maybe something that might be hard for a lot of dudes to get, because it’s not as easy to explain as violence against women or the wage gap or even the male gaze), it’s just that I feel like the whole Lana Del Rey performance - and I’m basing this almost entirely on the epic beauty of “Video Games” which I have lived, and which I love, (I haven’t heard the rest of Born to Die yet because I’ve been traveling) - is so, so much about Being a Girl and losing. It’s basically “Why Don’t You Love Me” on downers.

8:20am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSRIbyG1haK9
(Notes: 60)
  
Filed under: lana del rey ecriture feminine obvi ldr is no beyonce but that's not the point 
January 18, 2012
"The song’s passivity and pretense come through in the music, too. Listened to once, “Video Games” is a catchy lullaby, but the production and performance is built around a host of small artifices, all backing up the big one. The backing swells when it’s called onto but mostly rests on woozy splices and cuts, synth washes, and chintzy plucking. Del Rey hits us with a studied, torchy voice that’s dropped for the record’s best, creepiest hook, slipping into faux-naïf Marilyn style when asking, “Is that true?” In other words, “Video Games” sounds classicist at first, “retro” in a vague way. But the closer it gets, the more obvious its theatrics become, even before you take Del Rey’s image-building into account. It’s uncanny valley pop about an uncanny valley love affair—almost convincing, but just wrong enough to chill and fascinate."

— Lana Del Rey Lights Up the Internet

5:36am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSRIbyEz57i2
(Notes: 7)
  
Filed under: lana del rey music 
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