Lana Del Rey: A Star Is Born And Scorned

There’s something about the way Lana Del Rey has constructed herself that feels both totally artificial and completely genuine, which might be the only way to be famous anymore without losing your mind. She arrived fully formed with the Lana Del Rey persona—the old Hollywood glamour, the sadness, the self-destruction aesthetic—and people couldn’t decide if they were looking at art or a marketing campaign. Probably both. She made drowsy cinematic pop songs when that wasn’t fashionable yet, when sad girl music still needed to prove itself, and she had the taste to make them sound expensive and doomed.

The scorned part is real. There’s always been something about her that makes people angry—maybe because she’s a woman who’s unapologetically sad and glamorous instead of empowering, maybe because she’s wealthy and doesn’t pretend otherwise, maybe because she’s too aware of her own mythology. The accusations, the debates about whether she’s authentic or a constructed persona, the criticism that followed her everywhere. She took it all and kept making music that sounded like cigarette smoke and champagne and regret.

What I keep coming back to is that she’s one of the few pop stars who understood that sadness itself is beautiful, that you don’t need to resolve it or overcome it to make art about it. The songs just sit in that feeling and refuse to move. Whether that’s a choice or a compulsion or some combination of both feels almost beside the point now.