Your Favourite Patriarchal Princess Sucks
Dear Diary,
Today I am going to do something I wanted to do for years and I am going to be super unapologetic about it. It’s gonna be mean and bloody and I’m probably lose some friendships about it but I have to do it. For the greater good. Because people need to hear the truth, even though it means I’m going to have to shove it into their mouths without their consent. They need to know they’ve been conned and, as long as my name is [CENSORED], I will fight to get the truth out there, whether they like it or not. I’m totally gonna do it.
This could have been my entry journal on this fateful day of December 1994 when I decided to drop the mother of all truth bombs to a bunch of five year-olds. I didn’t do it because I wanted to be the bad girl, I did it because I had to. I felt like it was my duty as an honest little five year-old to say what adults hid to us in the most despicable ways. See, I’ve never really been good at lying and I always hated being lied to. I knew I was being fooled and I was so angry about it. In my mind, it was unfair to do to people what you wouldn’t do to yourself or anyone, for that matter. My mum always taught me to be honest and that’s what I did that day, causing me a lot of problems and a dip in my popularity. I did an unforgettable thing but I did it knowing I will sleep better at nights because I did what I thought was best for everyone: I told an entire class of pre-schoolers just before the Christmas break that Santa wasn’t real and that they all got their gifts from the local Toys R’ Us store. BAM! I regret nothing!
This quest for truth has given me a reputation in my hometown and not a glamorous one. But I didn’t care if I was ruffling a few feathers if it meant that I did the right thing by being honest. My unfiltered honesty got me a lot of enemies, back in the day. They are all trying to snoop on my Facebook profile but they get jack because I don’t let them anywhere near me, just like they did in Year 9 when they were ignoring my arse. An eye for a eye, a headbutt in your teeth.
That’s how I roll, party people. I have no time for diplomacy, I got shit to do and truths to reveal — which explained why I wanted to become an investigative journalist from a very early age, getting into the bottom of dirty things, understanding the flaws of society and expose all the bullshit by any means necessary, it is literally a kink of mine. Nothing gets me more excited than a political or historical documentary or knowing I was right about a particular someone the whole time. I call it “gotcha thrills” and it’s GOOD. So, when I heard about your problematic sweetheart songstress, Lana Del Rey, being busted for showing her true colours (and quite ugly ones, I must say), my “gotcha thrills” got super intense.
When Elizabeth Grant decided to become a pop star, she decided to get the annoying persona of Lana del Rey, an oversexualised version of your grandpa’s mistress back in the 50’s, you know the one who threw her car into a cliff edge after drinking too many Shirley Temples. Stealing her looks from an ersatz of a James Ellroy book and her vocal traits from Elysian Fields singer (and my worst singing nightmare) Jennifer Charles, Lana del Rey became a staple of the so-called “counter-culture” since her debut album “Born To Die”, released in the early 2010’s. The whole thing is supposed to look like a lomography picture book of a bygone era or a Super-8 clip of your childhood holidays in a beach resort in Wales and everybody was buying it, calling it a masterpiece and whatnot. Everybody? Well, not everybody, since I have seen this tomfoolery for what it was straightaway. But I digress. You have to remember that it was a time where retro became hyper fashionable. The late noughties / early twenty-tens was a time where there was a lot of throwback in pop culture. Adele was singing about her golden years in London, Duffy was swinging ballads like it’s 1965 again and Amy Winehouse was making doo-wop bops that got us hooked. It was a time where we were all shopping in thrift stores, talking about your ever growing vinyl collection and reminiscing a time we have never lived. And then, that bitch comes up and moans about being a lolita engaged in a toxic affair with a married man as if he was Don Draper. I saw Mad Men, I watched that show religiously, no reasonable woman would have never settled for a broken man like him, it’s a recipe for disaster and you know it. But Lana doesn’t know it and she doesn’t care because at the end of the day, she’s just going to whine over her vintage telephone whilst living her vintage Marilyn Monroe fantasy.
How about NO?! How about HELL NAW! How about doing your little research about domestic violence before promoting it in songs like “Get a little bit of bourbon in ya. Get a little bit suburban and go crazy”? Even Marge Simpson would call bullshit on this and she’s been married to a lazy alcoholic idiot for over 30 years. There are so many things that are wrong about Lana Del Rey and the fact that she is still revered as a once-in-a-generation voice is making me sick. It’s like saying that Kathleen Hanna is a feminist icon or that racism in the United States stopped with Barack Obama’s presidency. It is ludicrous at best and just plain wrong.
Number one: singing about Eisenhower’s America is not glamorous one bit. It was a time in America when Jim Crow laws were still rife, where the country was embroiled in brutal wars they ended up losing and where women were second class citizens. She also sings about being a bad bitch that every white man is obsessed with. I’m sorry to break it to you, fam, but that happened with Rita Hayworth and Vivien Leigh and it wasn’t worth it. Rita gave up on her career as her alcoholism prompted her Alzheimer and Vivien suffered of severe mental illness towards the end of her life. That’s not glamour to play a role of a broken woman if you end up being one, it’s highly dangerous and history proved it to us too many times. Dependency is not sexy and this whole shtick got to stop because it is toxic. Enabling this by supporting her “art” is like saying to all misogynists to start hitting on their spouses because it’s fun. It’s not. People die because of domestic violence, people suffer because of domestic violence, it creates a vicious circle that contaminates everyone in the household from the little boy who grows up being a wife beater to the mother whose psyche is being turned upside down as she is convincing that, maybe, it was asking for it. How can this be the new normal? It’s crazy that she uses he stardom to promote this infamy. In the fucking 21st century! We’re supposed to have grown out of this, we’re supposed to be better than this and yet, she’s still selling millions. Go figure.
Number two: stating things like “The issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept” is not only an insult to feminism but also an insult to women in general. It is insulting because it means that the struggle that women and trans women are relegated to the simple status of a whim. That shows how privileged and entitled she is. Just because you don’t understand the concept of gender equality doesn’t mean that gender equality is a bad thing at all. It is essential that women keep fighting for equality of salary, for more parity in the workforce, for having more women in the sphere of power, of politics, of the media. How dare she consider all those things not interesting? How dare she dismiss the work of thousands of activists working to make our lives better, as women, as queer women, as bona fide equals? It is insulting to all of those trailblazers who breaks glass ceilings on the daily basis so she can pout her lips in front of the cameras for a living. Even though we are aware of the cold war between Jackie Kennedy (later Onassis) and Marilyn Monroe, these two women fought their way to the top by becoming so much more than glam icons. Marilyn Monroe fought all her life to be respected instead of objectified and that’s how the younger generation remembers her for now. Samesies with Jackie Kennedy who went beyond her status of First Lady and First Widow to do charitable work throughout her later life. Do you think that if Audrey Hepburn had that attitude, she would have gone to become a philanthropist? No but then again, Audrey Hepburn was a smart woman working on being smarter. Lana Del Rey is just a spoiled bitch, nothing more nothing less.
Number three: dissing your counterparts of colour because they choose to sing about empowerment instead of pity is a blatant display of white feminism at its ugliest. When she posted her infamous essay on Instagram a few days ago, she directly attacked artists, who also happen to all be women of colour — namely Cardi B, Kehlani, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Ariana Grande, Doja Cat and Camila Cabello. I’m gonna be honest with you: I don’t know Kehlani or Doja Cat and I’m not a fan of Camila or Ariana but I respect all of these women for being highly successful in their field, selling out records and filling out arenas like crazy. Cardi B has been one of my favourite rappers of these past five years, she hustled her way to the top by being unapologetic about her stripping years, her famous coupling with Migos’ Offset and how she is handling motherhood at the height of her stardom. She raps about things that are relevant to so many women around the world and how she’s ensuring her daughter’s future. Beyoncé is the epitome of freedom. She’s free to embrace her feminism while insisting on being called Mrs Carter and ‘Lemonade’ is in my view, THE album that every brown skinned girl should listen to. I love the fact that people like Lizzo or Hayley Kiyoko are talking freely about being sexual beings who love their body and nurture their souls and million of others. Even a band like Little Mix, that is far from being my thing, gives me life by singing about the different million ways to be a woman. All of this should make any of Lana’s statements irrelevant and yet, I’m writing this piece while I could have just played on my favourite app, QuizzLand or getting ready for that social on Zoom with my work colleagues as I really miss my work colleagues. Defending your poor choice of words by saying “don’t call me racist”, “I don’t see colour”, “I’m just talking about my favourite singers” is a low blow. That’s Karen Bingo 101 for you (thank you Shantell Ray for this). We have to be honest with ourselves and question her pseudo-argument right here. What does she mean by “…there has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me”? Biiiiiiitch, there is already a place in feminism for women who look and act like you and it’s call the dump. We can no longer afford in this day and age to have a feminism that excludes women of colour, queer women, trans women, disabled women, fat women, etc. Feminism HAS to be inclusive, it has to grasp all the complexities of the convergence of struggles between the different type of women that exist just like it has to do a serious soul searching on why some patriarchal princesses like Lana Del Rey continue to shun the conversation constantly. If people like her are incapable of admitting their flaws, they can never deconstruct themselves and be their best selves. I wished Lana del Rey understood how horrendous it is for a woman of colour to still be depicted as a Hottentot Venus or to be told by a homophobe that one should be raped by a real man so one can stop being a lesbian. If she made that effort to recognise that empowerment doesn’t mean acting like a man but being your better self in your heart, your mind and your body, maybe I could reconsider listening to what she has to offer. Unfortunately, all she offered with that post is her twist on systemic racism. As Brittney McNamara beautiful argued in her Teen Vogue article “feminism does not mean women are exempt from criticism when they are wrong. And, it definitely does not mean ranking your own story and experiences above the ones of women of color as a way to excuse yourself of your problematic past”.
I remember having to study Jane Austen’s Emma at university as part of my BA in Communication and English. It wasn’t a good university and I hated 90% of the people I was in class with because they were very immature and shallow, going on bullying, backstabbing and shit talking about one another. It got me incredibly frustrated because I thought that I left that stuff in high school — even though I was appreciated in high school and had no substantial ego issues with anyone in the two placed I’ve been. So you can imagine how someone like me could be atrociously annoyed with studying a fucking long novel about a girl who spend the whole time mistaking bitchiness for mischief. I remember also having an argument with my classmates about history not remembering women who baked cupcakes instead of fighting for their rights to be. It was a waste of time as I got called names right after but I still stand by my words. Well-behaved women don’t go down in history, gutsy ones do. Nobody remembers Angela Davis because she did a mean Black Forest gateau.
My point here being that you have the right to be a delicate precious thing if that’s what you’re into but it doesn’t have to be the norm and certainly it’s nobody’s duty to impose it as a lifestyle. Having a go at “female writers and alt singers” for setting “women back hundreds of years” is coming a bit rich from her and downright hypocritical, especially when you take in account some of her lyrics going along the lines of “Yo soy la princesa, comprende mis white lines? ’Cause I’m your jazz singer and you’re my cult leader” or “My boyfriend’s in the band. He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed. I’ve got feathers in my hair. I get down to Beat poetry. I’m a Brooklyn baby.” Yikes!
Lana Del Rey is not what pop culture deserves right here and right now and the fact that there are still people out there cheering and rooting for her is baffling me.
There is nothing beautiful with suicide, there is nothing beautiful with being left behind by a man who disrespects you, there is nothing beautiful with flirting with death because it makes great songs. None of this makes her an artist with a capital A, it makes her a fraud, a con, a scam even. There are so many ways to scream your love for a man you are crazy about that doesn’t have to be over dramatic. Best Coast does it well. Sia encapsulated that in her first solo records too, and when she does it, it’s touching. Nina Simone did it well. Aretha Franklin did it so perfectly. And many more. Lana Del Rey’s nostalgia bit is a toxic one, just like Stevie Nicks’ witchy gimmicks were at the time. It’s so obvious like a bad dubbing of a Colombian telenovela, it gets really embarrassing in the end.
Let’s end the embarrassment there and be real.
Let’s embrace real pain and real despair, real heartbreak, raw emotions that only a woman can feel when she’s in love. Let’s be embody our inner Barbra Streisand or Celine Dion and ugly cry singing “Tell Me How I Am Supposed To Live Without You” because that’s also that, being a feminist: it’s accepting that it’s okay to be a lovelorn wreck but admitting it won’t last forever, because we’re better than that.
But until then, and in the words of Mark Mosley and Tyler Mahan Coe, if your favourite singer is a patriarchal princess, your favourite patriarchal princess sucks…
