Who cared anymore if someone wasn’t “real”? That paled in comparison to other sins, like cultural appropriation. She benefited from a shift in the discourse, too: “Video Games” came out during indie rock’s dying days as a cultural force. Critics began giving her grudging respect, then actual praise. In Cedric Gervais’s throbbing remix of “Summertime Sadness,” she got her first and only Top 10 hit. The music got better, too, as she learned how to move between personae, from unapologetic gadfly (“Fucked My Way Up to the Top”) to unhappy recipient of the male gaze (“Pretty When You Cry”).
She was a musical Tarantino her overwhelming collage of references was the aesthetic. As she got more prolific, it became easier to understand what she was doing. If Del Rey was really so bad for women, why were so many of them buying her record? The French academic Catherine Vigier pinpointed the source of Del Rey’s appeal: She was “representing and speaking to a contradiction facing thousands of young women today, women who have followed mainstream society’s prescriptions for success in what has been called a postfeminist world, but who find that real liberation and genuine satisfaction elude them.”ĭel Rey released a follow-up EP at the end of 2012, another one a year later, then the album Ultraviolence six months after that. When Lana’s first proper album, Born to Die, debuted on the heels of that SNL appearance, the New York Times called it “album as anticlimax, the period that ends the essay, not the beginning of a new paragraph.” The public did not agree: Born to Die became the fifth-highest-selling album of 2012 worldwide. (The Village Voice called it “early-’00s singles bar music.”) Still, her image had real juice.
If writers paid more attention to her iconography than her music, well, that was partly because there wasn’t much music out there yet, and critics seemed to agree what she had released wasn’t interesting. “It’s just that the aesthetic references surrounding her are all already so pungent, evocative, and well worn that it’s hard to reshape them.”
“It’s not that there’s anything ‘inauthentic’ about Del Rey,” argued a Pitchfork writer. By the time you’d heard of Del Rey, you’d probably also heard she was a fake, an industry plant who put the “retro” in “retrograde.” Soon, though, there was a backlash to the backlash: Hadn’t plenty of male artists embraced alter egos? Critics noted this but remained unconvinced.
That hair! Those lips! Who could forget the press release touting her as a “gangster Nancy Sinatra”? Five minutes’ digging proved her backstory was not very gangster at all: She had a marketing-exec father and a well-to-do upbringing upstate, and had previously released an EP under her real name, Lizzy Grant.
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