Lana del Rey, not a patriot: I dont feel like, Rah, rah, America! F that sh-t
These are photos of Lana Del Rey performing live in Dublin and London, which is shocking to me because after her disastrous turn on “SNL,” I would think that live performances were permanently out the figurative door. I gather from this new interview in the Summer 2013 issue of Electronic Beats (which describes Lana as a “divisive pop phenomenon“) that Lana is still pulling wool over the eyes of international audiences. Which could explain her apparent distaste for her native U.S., but we’ll get to that in a moment.
This interview is much like Lana’s other discussions in recent years where she calmly and unironically claims that her work is important and she deserves respect, but she clearly has not paid her dues thus far. And despite Lana’s emphatic declarations that her pu–sy tastes like Pepsi and that should be enough, I’m not seeing any true artistic integrity. Lana has also notoriously claimed that she wants to be like Angelina Jolie in the humanitarian sense, but in this interview, she sort of admits that all of her “good deeds” are community-service based for the drug and alcohol rehabilitation that followed her teenage diagnosis of alcoholism. So in a sense, Lana appears to claim enlightenment from something that was essentially the product of a plea bargain.
Am I being too harsh in my assessment of Lizzie Grant’s fakeness? At least Lana has paid some societal dues without argument (unlike Lindsay Lohan), but she’s still pretty clueless about her place in pop culture. Whatever the case, Lana would like us all to know that her daddy is not rich and did not buy her a record contract (or a Vogue UK cover) as certain rumors would suggest. Here’s more strange claims from this interview, if you can handle it:
She’s, like, a gypsy: “I haven’t talked to an American journalist in, like, forever. I think America is amazing for its landscape and its history. California is beautiful, New York is beautiful, but when you’re a gypsy at heart, it probably suits you to be traveling. I don’t feel that way as much as I used to. I actually don’t feel that way that much anymore, but when I was younger I used to really want to have an unpredictable life where I could feel free and travel anywhere I wanted to, whenever I wanted to. I actually really like California now, although I’ve never lived there before. I like the idea of living in one place now. I grew up in Lake Placid, New York until I was fifteen, and then I went to boarding school for three years in Connecticut. Then I moved to the Bronx when I was almost eighteen.”
Everything you’ve ever read about Lana is wrong: “The first day that anyone ever wrote about me, as soon as I put ‘Video Games’ up. Everything they wrote was f*ing crazy. Like about my dad, about me, like having millions of dollars, and all this sh-t. I was like, ‘Really? I thought I was supporting everyone!’ Everything was not true. As soon as the first person wrote about me, the articles became just blatant, all-out lies. I consider it slander. If I cared more, I’d kill them. Yeah, but none of it’s true. I spent the last ten years in community service and writing folk songs. I don’t give a f–k about what I look like. Saying I came from billions of dollars is crazy. We never had any money. I feel, as a person who grew up reading about and being inspired by other figures with integrity, to kind of be turned into the antithesis of that is not what I planned. It’s the way it’s going right now, but I deal with it as it comes.”
Lana does politics: “Well, it’s complicated because everything has changed for me. Before I had no money. And now everything I make, I lose. So I don’t have money again, because I lose half. Healthcare reform–that needed to be addressed. I still don’t have health insurance because I haven’t been back to the United States since the time when I couldn’t afford healthcare because it was seven hundred dollars a month.”
She feels unloved by American media: “Well, no one was really asking me for interviews, so there wasn’t really a reason to stay. Musically, I wouldn’t really work there because I wouldn’t know where to sing. I had a million shows lined up here, so that’s kind of why I went. And I didn’t really have any shows there. I mean, I could play on Sunset Strip and stuff. I could go back to New York . . . I think that my love for America has now become contained to the more specific things I appreciate about it. Like driving up the coast from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara–simple stuff like that. In terms of what I maybe thought it stood for, I don’t know. But other than that, I don’t feel like, ‘Rah, rah, America!’ F— that sh-t [laughing].”
She’s proud to be white trash? “I did move into a trailer park when I made my first record. I got ten grand from Five Points Records and moved into Manhattan Mobile Home in New Jersey. And I was happy, because I was doing it for myself. There was a white trash element in the way there was a time that I didn’t want to be a part of mainstream society because I thought it was gross. I was trying to carve my own piece of the pie in a creative way that I kind of knew how. And I thought it was cool to be living by myself and working with a famous producer. I was excited about the future at the time.”
She’s so not mainstream: “And now, still, I’m in my own world. It’s kind of like neither here nor there–musically and socially, and whatever. Me and Barrie [-James O’Neill, her boyfriend from band Kassidy], we don’t have too many friends in music, or people that we know who are kind of doing the same thing. We do our own thing. It’s all about the writing. It used to all be about the service work through the drug and alcohol rehabilitation, which I haven’t worked in in two years now. But it’s always been about the art.”
There is hope on the horizon: “I’m not that interested in putting out another album.”
[From Electronic Beats]
Here’s the thing — I have no problem with Lana being critical of the United States if she has a valid argument or even explains one single, solitary reason for her position. Yet all she’s talking about here is her distain for “flyover country,” which doesn’t wash. So what if she loves California and New York and nothing else, but she needs to provide a rationale, or I shall merely shrug my shoulders.
Photos courtesy of WENN
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