I woke up this morning and saw that people on my Twitter timeline were talking about Lana Del Rey and it seemed juicy and dramatic, so I did a minute’s worth of research and found that Lana Del Rey wrote an open letter addressing her critics.
My firth thought was: this Lana Del Rey open letter is an example of an artist giving more value to negative reviews than to positive reviews. I don't think anyone accused LDR for glamorizing abuse recently, and also that's just a dumb take. And now she's dragging down and shaming a bunch of pop stars, most of whom are women of color, for no reason.
For all the talk about how she's firmly not a feminist (she'd rather think about Space X, lol) in the first sentence of this open letter she certainly sounds like a white-feminist throwing all these women of color under the bus in order to support her weak point.
I mean, I think the idea that her music glamorizes abuse is a dumb take. I don't know who said that, and I don't think it's a valid argument. (Edit: apparently people were making this argument five years ago, why she decided to respond to this now is extremely questionable)
Writing about your experience in an abusive relationship is not glamorizing abuse. Even if you say "he hit me and it felt like a kiss," which was originally a lyric in a 60s song by The Crystals, it's still not glamorizing anything.
Also, the point she's trying to make in her letter is a dumb take. She sounds jealous. She sounds like she's getting mad over nothing.
Who is actually making this argument, that Lana Del Rey has set women back hundreds of years for speaking on her traumatic relationships in her music? Who is Lana Del Rey railing against? She calls out “female writers and alt singers,” for criticizing her, but like I'm sorry, what is she talking about? Is she mad because she’s never had a number one song, and Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Doja Cat, and others have? It seems like it. It seems like a case of sour grapes. (Edit: again, these are old arguments that came out when Lana Del Rey first popped up into the mainstream and it seems to me that she’s holding on to these old criticisms and still reacting defensively because of them. Maybe I’m projecting here, but I can relate to these feelings and it’s unpleasant to let these feelings control your emotions and your actions. I think she’s reacting to feelings of insecurity.)
LDR fans love her sad and whimsical torch anthems. No one is trying to take your voice away, Lana! Why are you acting like someone is trying to get you to stop? You have a lot of fans, Lana! You’ve carved out a fanbase who love your sad girl shit. I am one of them! Your albums are the soundtracks of my summers, or when I want it to feel like summer. I listen to your albums when I write, and I aspire to create worlds with my words that give me the same feeling as when I bathe in your soundscapes and escape into your retro fantasies of musty motel rooms and staying up all night thinking about magic.
As Lincoln Michel pointed out on Twitter, “yeah her last album has an 87 on Metacritic, which is basically universal praise.”
I feel like she wrote this because she knew it would get attention, and threw Doja Cat, Nicki Minaj, and Beyonce in the mix because she knew calling them out (over nothing) would make her a trending topic.
She rejects feminism in the letter, and then says that there needs to be a place in feminism for women like her, “delicate women,” she says. I don’t think she knows what feminism is. There is a place in feminism for delicate women— feminism isn’t about your personal interests or the way that you like to dress or whatever. It would serve her well to read some bell hooks. She should learn what feminism is. I hope she realizes why what she posted wasn’t good. I see that she’s posted again, defending herself and also retorting to the claims that what she posted was racist. Maybe she will read and reflect. Maybe not.
Lana Del Rey has a new album out this fall. She's also publishing two books of poetry with Simon & Schuster this year. So yeah, this sounds like manufactured drama to get some publicity for her new work. But why did she do it this way? She comes off sounding gross and jealous, and if anything she made me less interested in whatever creative project she's working on now.