Lana Del Rey is 'bout that life

I have to be honest, I am a low key Lana Del Rey fan. I toss on her song "Florida" whenever I'm feeling a little sultry (and yes, I know the song is about drugs. Judge your mom, its a bop.) but, despite random happenings here and there, I did not know Lana was as political as she is. I just thought she was another sis who I could rock to and bop to on rainy days.

But I didn't know that Lana was about that life until this week. When Kanye decided he wanted more attention, posting a pic of his MAGA crap hat with a faux-deep post on what it means, Miss Lana emerged from some smokey speakeasy, tossed her long reddish brownish hair over her shoulder, whipped out her phone and stepped a no doubt heeled foot all in his Instagram saying the following:

"Trump becoming our president was a loss for the country but your support of him is a loss for the culture," she wrote. "I can only assume you relate to his personality on some level. Delusions of Grandeur, extreme issues with narcissism—none of which would be a talking point if we weren’t speaking about the man leading our country. If you think it’s alright to support someone who believes it’s OK to grab a woman by the pussy just because he’s famous, then you need an intervention as much as he does, something so many narcissists will never get because there just isn’t enough help for the issue. Message sent with concern that will never be addressed."


via GIPHY
Umm, ok, go off Lana. Accurate and to the point. It looks like we are all done with Kanye.

Mind you, Lana's song "Young and Beautiful" is perpetual cultural appropriator and another constant attention addict, Kim Kardashian's favorite song that she sang at the Kardashian-West wedding.

To be fair, Lana herself is not unproblematic. Yeah, her otherworldly music is immersed in bygone nostalgia where the American flag waves in the background and is saturated in old Hollywood glamour. She irritated people of color by donning sacred Native headdresses. Her videos and music often glamourize abusive relationships. A scrapped Marilyn Manson music video from 2014 showed a 27-second scene of Del Ray being brutally raped by Eli Roth, the man behind Hostel.

So yeah, she's got a problematic past herself.

But here we are, four years later and boy have the tides turn. Sure it took her a while to emerge as political, but are artists obligated to do so? Hell, so many of y'all caped for Taylor Swift and she just got on the political bandwagon 10 minutes ago.

Lana, like many of her white female counterparts, has awakened. Last year, she told Pitchfork that she feels “less safe than I did when Obama was president” and said about the current political administration, “when you have a leader at the top of the pyramid who is casually being loud and funny about things like that, it’s brought up character defects in people who already have the propensity to be violent towards women.” (given her past and the above examples, one wonders what must have happened in the turnaround.)

Point being made: when Lana Del Rey has to step up and be political, maybe its time for the rest of us who are just watching the Ye/Trump fest unfold to intervene.