The Irony of Lana Del Rey’s BBC Interview
There are transgressions that precede it, but for all intents and purposes, we can trace the rocket-fueled decline of Lana Del Rey’s reputation back to May of 2020, when she hit upload on her now-infamous “question for the culture” on Instagram:
The original post–meant to combat (admittedly unfair) criticism Lana has received since the start of her career–is rough but not without its merits. There are two sentences in the whole statement that I think would have been completely fine on their own and made (what I interpret is) her core point without much backlash:
“I’m fed up with female writers and alt singers saying that I glamorize abuse when in reality I’m just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all over the world.
With all of the topics women are finally allowed to explore I just want to say over the last ten years I think it’s pathetic that my minor lyrical explorations detailing my sometimes submissive or passive roles in my relationships has often made people say I’ve set women back hundreds of years.”
Her entire statement, however, is full of weird extraneous claims in which she names multiple other women–all but one of whom are women of color–to imply they haven’t received the amount of criticism that she has (which is exceptionally untrue), describes the subjects of their lyrics in a belittling fashion (claiming they sing about “being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating, etc.” while she sings about “being embodied” and “feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect”), then says “there has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me,” i.e. “delicate” women.
Due to the dominantly-non-white women chosen as Lana’s opening examples, there were some regrettable racial implications that soiled much of her larger statement, but they were only implications that a decent follow-up could have clarified as misguided. Had Lana gone back online to apologize for her poor wording, made an effort to understand why people were upset with her, and acknowledge that she wasn’t the only woman who’s ever received unbalanced criticism or been accused of “setting women back,” she could have gotten out of the controversy without much damage.
Instead, Lana spent the next week on the defensive, saying her comments were being made into a “race war,” bemoaning the fact that some people were calling her a “Karen,” and eventually implying that she couldn’t possibly be racist because she donates to Indigenous organizations and supports reparations for the black community.
This incident wasn’t the first indication of Lana Del Rey being really bad at taking criticism. Lana’s been known for “clapping back” at any variety of disapproval that comes her way. Sometimes it’s funny and iconic, like in this Buzzfeed list of her responses to random, rude Internet strangers; sometimes it becomes the source of juicy celebrity gossip, like the time she told Azealia Banks via Twitter that she “won’t not fuck [her] the fuck up”; and sometimes it’s confusing and disappointing, like when she launched an attack on music journalist, Ann Powers, after Powers wrote a mostly complimentary review of Lana’s latest record just because Powers described some of her writing as “uncooked” (and I would argue that word is taken wildly out of context in Lana’s rebuttal).
Lana doesn’t take too kindly to people reporting on the things she says and does if they don’t paint her actions in an explicitly positive light. The earliest example of this comes from her interview with Tim Jonze for The Guardian, during which Lana made her now-infamous claim, “I wish I was dead already,” then proceeded to lambast Jonze (though mistaking him for a different writer in the process) for the simple act of publishing exactly what she said in his article. Jonze writes in a response to the controversy,
“Ultimately, the problem with Lana's complaint is that she doesn't seem to know what she's actually complaining about. She's not alleging that I made up her quotes, nor is she claiming that they've been ‘twisted’ or that we've printed them out of context. Instead she seems annoyed by the fact I wanted her to say interesting things and asked questions that caused her to do so. Well sorry, Lana, but that's just me doing my job.”
This phenomenon repeated again one week ago, though with slightly more nuance and greater credit on Lana’s side (but not by much), when Lana began receiving blowback from an interview with BBC radio host, Annie Mac.
On January 12th, Complex published an article entitled, “Lana Del Rey Doesn’t Believe Donald Trump Purposefully Incited Capitol Riot.” Complex published this article because that’s what Lana said, telling Annie Mac, verbatim, in her interview, “[Trump] doesn’t know that he’s inciting a riot. I believe that.”
Lana claims her words were taken out of context, but that point is a little debatable. Yes, Complex’s article title is a clickbaity, over-simplified version of her full statement, however, the clarification is written clearly in the piece itself, reading:
“Del Rey believes Trump is a symptom of a larger sickness in the United States: an epidemic of myopia, selfishness, and rage. As the avatar of all that, she doesn't think the president can see far enough beyond himself to know that his speeches might have consequences.”
Of course, many people don’t read full articles and will see the damning headline as Lana’s attempt to defend Trump’s involvement in the riot, but even in their context, her statements still don’t pass as being totally enlightened–she’s trying to make a point about sociopathy, but that undermines the specific threat Donald Trump and his supporters present over this country by excusing his actions as a diagnosable emotional deficiency that he bears no blame for because “it’s the culture,” or something. She says in a later video, “When someone is so deeply deficient in empathy they may not know that they’re ‘the bad guy.’”
To be honest, I can’t comment too much on what Lana is trying to say here because I’m not really clear on it myself. Like with her “question for the culture” (it’s gonna come up again so let’s just abbreviate it as QFTC), not all of the points she makes are inherently bad, but all of them seem more conceptually-based than rooted in concrete, easy to parse evidence: she blames narcissism for the riots but also says the riots happened because “we don’t know how to find a way to be wild in our world,” then makes some points about domestic violence increasing during the pandemic and blames this on “issues of delusions of grandeur,” which is maybe not an incorrect analysis, but still only vaguely gestures to a problem that tends to manifest itself in specific ways, making her statements easy to misrepresent.
Some of this comes down to how Lana articulates herself. She’s a talented writer, no doubt, but as a poet and songwriter, not an essayist which requires wholly different skills of communication. Her core ideas may simply be getting lost in the floweriness of her language, even if she’s making decent points along the way.
The problem is, it’s still Lana’s words that are getting reported. If there’s a mix-up in communication from how she’s presenting her own argument, that’s her fault, but very often, Lana seems angry at the mere idea that someone would criticize her actions because she perceives herself as a good person (or a “good girl who gets fucked in the ass by the culture,” in her words) with good “intent.”
Following the backlash from her QFTC, Lana even admits that more than one of the women mentioned in her original post didn’t approve of the message, but won’t entertain the idea that she did anything wrong simply because she didn’t intend to do anything wrong, saying in a later video:
“I’m sorry that a couple of the girls I talked to, you know, who were mentioned in that post have a super different opinion of my insight, especially because we’ve been so close for so long. But it… really makes you reach into the depth of your own heart and say ‘am I good intentioned’ and of course for me the answer is always ‘yes.’”
The implication here is: “I know the fallout from what I did was bad, but I didn’t mean to do bad so I can’t be held responsible for it.”
Lana’s been accused throughout her career of racial insensitivities: she donned a Native American headdress during one of her earlier music videos, appropriated Latino culture–specifically fetishizing Latino gang culture–in various pieces (most notably, her short film, Tropico), and recently dated a Blue Lives Matter supporting celebrity cop.
During her recent BBC interview, however, Lana over and over dismisses any notion that she has any valid criticisms to address on how she’s handled racial issues, saying, “I got a lot of issues, but inclusivity just ain’t one of them… It just isn’t. You just can’t make it my problem,” then to prove her point, says she voted for Biden because you can’t be racist if you voted for a democrat or something.
Maybe I’m being a little unfair with her comments given that her keyword here is “inclusivity,” and “inclusivity” and “anti-racism,” though related, are not totally synonymous, but Lana’s own awareness of that fact appears to be missing when she implies that any amount of criticism she receives related to race–still holding a grudge from her QFTC backlash–should be negated by the fact that she has an ethnically diverse group of friends and she’s not a straight-up republican.
This is further evidenced by one of her most recent public blunders, happening earlier this month when Lana preemptively clapped-back at haters for her upcoming album cover, writing in a since-deleted Instagram comment:
“And no this was not intended-these are my best friends, since you are asking today. And damn! As it happens when it comes to my amazing friends and this cover yes there are people of color on this records picture and that’s all I’ll say about that but thank you…We are all a beautiful mix of everything- some more than others which is visible and celebrated in everything I do. In 11 years working I have always been extremely inclusive without even trying to. My best friends are rappers my boyfriends have been rappers. My dearest friends have been from all over the place, so before you make comments again about a WOC/POC issue, I’m not the one storming the capital, I’m literally changing the world by putting my life and thoughts and love out there on the table 24 seven. Respect it.”
(We’re going to skip past the part here where Lana brings up “rappers” she’s dated as a defense for why she’s not racist, not because it’s excusable but because it’s so ridiculously offensive on multiple fronts that we simply don’t have time to get into it.)
While I’ve yet to find a comment criticizing her album cover for its racial inclusivity or lack thereof before Lana’s defense of it, Lana seems to believe that those comments not only existed but that they were dominating discourse enough she needed to make a sweeping statement addressing them. Also evident in her wording, these comments are making such wild accusations, she feels the need to verbally separate herself from the capitol rioters.
We can see this attitude again in Lana’s response to Complex and their clickbait title against her. She tweeted the day of the article’s release:
Complex, to be clear, never speculated on whom Lana voted for, nor did they give any indication that it may have been against Joe Biden. Her political beliefs were not mentioned in the article at all, but this is how much the criticism has escalated in Lana’s head: if you frame something she said in a somewhat negative light, you’re accusing her of being both a racist and a Trump supporter. Her defense against this is to not only defend the specific actions she’s being accused of but to appeal to her own sense of goodness–i.e., her good “intent,” her racial “inclusivity,” or her political voting record.
There’s a dangerous Manicheistic attitude here, where Lana portrays herself as good and good-intentioned and so can’t see the nuances and grey area of her somewhat contradictory actions or their consequences. To her, any criticism is an attempt to make her “the bad guy,” which could explain why, in many of Lana’s historical clap-backs, she indicates a refusal to reckon with the notion that some of those criticizing her also do still like her.
With The Guardian interview (the “I wish I was dead already” incident), she hit back at Jonze in a since-deleted tweet, writing,
“I regret trusting the Guardian. I didn't want to do an interview but the journalist was persistent. [Jonze] was masked as a fan but was hiding sinister ambitions and angles. Maybe he's actually the boring one looking for something interesting to write about.”
After Ann Powers’ review, she tweeted at Powers,
“So don’t call yourself a fan like you did in the article and don’t count your editor one either – I may never never have made bold political or cultural statements before- because my gift is the warmth I live my life with and the self reflection I share generously.”
Even with the most recent BBC controversy, Lana’s attack against Complex might stem dominantly from the betrayal she perceives from their slightly negative spin on her words despite their previously amicable correspondence. In a direct reply to their tweet of the article, she begins her response by saying, “OK complex not that our 10 year relationship matters I guess,” then opens a follow-up video saying,
“I just wanna talk about… some of the articles that are coming out today about me thinking that Trump didn’t mean to incite the riots. I think it’s cute that that’s the little takeaway that Complex gets from that, especially with our relationship over the last ten years completely disregarded.”
The irony is, the way Lana talks about Donald Trump and the problem of sociopathy in this country doesn’t feel all that inappropriate being applied to her own struggle to accept criticism.
I’m not saying Lana is as bad as Trump or that she’s a sociopath, she’s obviously not. Whatever faults Lana has, she likely has more compassion than the man separating families at the border, and also Trump could never write anything as profound and incredible as “The greatest,” so there’s that too.
But Lana’s claim about Trump having delusions of grandeur so intense that he can’t see the consequences of his actions and can’t recognize himself as “the bad guy” isn’t incompatible with what I kind of think about Lana Del Rey.
We know she thinks very highly of herself and her contributions to the world. During her QFTC, she implied that her music “paved the way” for other women to “stop putting on a happy face”; when she defended her album cover, she wrote, “I’m changing the world by putting my life and thoughts and love out there on the table 24 seven.” Lana has said so much to convince herself that she’s “the good guy,” she hasn’t left any room to consider that she may be making plenty of noteworthy mistakes along the way. Any criticism she receives, specifically on the issue of race, isn’t just a criticism of her actions, it’s a criticism of her as a human being and completely in contradiction with the person she’s sure she is.
Most ironically, she says right before her Trump-riot comment in her BBC interview:
“If you’re a jerk and everyone tells you that you are and you have no idea that you’re a jerk, it’s like now we have to finally address this big issue in the world of, what do we do with people who don’t know that they’re hurting other people?”
I am a white woman. It’s not for me to decide if Lana Del Rey is a capital-r “Racist,” but it’s not for Lana to decide either, and a lot of people–especially people of color–are not happy with how she’s represented her own whiteness, where every criticism lobbied against her is met with claims of “good intentions” or sentences like, “You just can’t make it my problem.”
When everyone around Lana, including her own friends and fans, is saying there might be a problem with how she’s addressing these issues and she still refuses to acknowledge a problem, should we have hope that Lana might ever start making meaningful changes in how she interacts with these criticisms?
Signed,
A genuine Lana Del Rey stan
(no matter what you might think if you ever read this, Lana)