"The conversation surrounding Lana Del Rey has underscored some seriously depressing truths about sexism in music. She was subjected to the kind of intense scrutiny— about her backstory and especially her appearance— that’s generally reserved for women only. But the sexual politics of Born to Die are troubling too: You’d be hard pressed to find any song on which Del Rey reveals an interiority or figures herself as anything more complex than an ice-cream-cone-licking object of male desire (a line in “Blue Jeans”, “I will love you till the end of time/ I would wait a million years,” sums up about 65% of the album’s lyrical content). Even when Del Rey offers something that could be read as a critique (“This is what makes us girls/ We don’t stick together ‘cause we put our love first”), she asks that we make no effort to change, escape, or transcend the way things are (“Don’t cry about it/ Don’t cry about it.”)"
Lana Del Rey: Born to Die | Album Reviews | Pitchfork
At this point, I don’t really care about whether or not Lana Del Rey is ‘authentic.’ While she has obviously been unfairly criticized because she is a woman, we need to focus on the unhealthy vision of femininity that she presents.
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katiechow posted this