BeckoningCat

I just read some of these posts and I don't even know if I belong here. I love Lana/Lizzy as a person and I pity her burn-out, which she expresses on NFR. If she never gave me one more thing, she gave me a lifetime. I don't care about selfies, or if she performed a certain song, and I'm starting to think there isn't a place for people like me. Maybe my joining was an impulse I needed to vent.

What I feel for Lana is a mixture of admiration, curiosity, identification, and lust. But it's not really lust, because I am not impressed by her in a "celebrity" way. I find some things about her very cringey, like I do about myself, and sometimes I think I am more in love with her mind (through her voice and videos) than her body. I can honestly say I never felt this way about a celebrity. There were men like Henry Miller where I fell in love with their mind (he's an amazing 20th century writer for the uninitiated) or Jared Leto or Joaquin Phoenix where I fell in love with their moral character and their bod (Oh he's a great human being, and also gorgeous). Lana confuses me. Because I fell in love with her immediately. She didn't have to earn my trust. I saw. I heard, and I just knew. Like when you're in high school and you make a best friend and you think "this person understands me" like that. Of course I'm an adult woman now so I have to examine it. But what endears me to her is that I think she understands. I think Nabokov was her Henry Miller. She gets the feelings I feel, and that's a safe place to explore emotions and fantasies. Imagine, a famous person, telling you they also fall in love with famous people or use their art as inspo. I would never approach her. I saw her at small shows back in the day, but I feel very self-conscious about approaching people with fame because of living in Los Angeles. I think they're just people who want to live their lives. I've never tried to hug her or take a selfie with her. I would rather sit down at dinner with her or something. Anything less than that feels futile and fake to me. I can't tell you who I am or what you meant to me in a crowd at a concert. I don't want to be a fan but good lord I am. I feel weird about it sometimes. How does this person I've never met touch me so much. She reminds me of me, but she also reminds me of people I've loved. Then there's the feeling of being smothered. If I live in the Lana world too much I feel like I'm going under. Like living in a dream world, but also being smothered by another person's feelings, wants and needs (like you do in a long-term relationship that's kind of co-dependent). Then I understand why some of my friends don't like her. She gives off the smothered feeling to them immediately, I'm surprised they even like me! My sister once said "I don't like her voice" and I tried to explain her multi-octave range, and she was like "I can't do this, I can't do this sound." That's fair. But even as an over-enthusiastic fan sometimes I feel smothered by what Lana creates. It's irresistible or exhausting. It's like a relationship. I felt that the first time I saw her in 2014 in a small show too. That she had a relationship with her fans, or was projecting intimacy in some profound way. She stood pretty still, this was before she had dancers, but her intensity was just there. I made sure I was sober for that show so I could feel every minute of it. If Bernie Sanders is my once-in-a-lifetime presidential candidate, Lana del Rey is my once-in-a-lifetime artist. There will never be another Lana.

Probably my favorite is from Ultraviolence (which I listened to from beginning to end several times a week for several years). Money, Power, Glory where she says "Alleluia, I wanna take you for all that you got." I thought she was saying "Oh LA....something something" ("through the yard"? And I would laugh about it, because I knew she wasn't actually saying "through the yard" I just was sure she was saying "Oh LA"). Then she made the NFR album which is like Los Angeles in musical form, and I learned to stop hanging on to those crumbs.

I'm a grad student who has been a Lana fan ever since late 2011-early 2012 (I don't remember the exact date but it was BEFORE the January 2012 SNL thing everyone had a popcorn party with, so I am pretty sure I was a Lana fan since I saw her "unreleased" music on YouTube in 2011) ...my unpopular opinion is that a lot of it is a myth or construct grounded in her personal experience. I've read articles or theses of other people who graduated with a Master's in Lana Del Rey (actually Women's Studies, or Sociology or something) and I agreed with what they were saying, though I am actually focused in environmental science and anthropology. 1) Lana is embodying different feminine characters, or different manifestations of Goddess, so it's not always necessarily "her." 2) Lana's running commentary on America, men, hetero-normativity, and pop culture is an inner conflict (part of the "war in" her "mind") I am a firm believer some of her songs are ironic or outsider perspectives on American ideals or heteronormative ideals. An example of this is that the NFR cover is ridiculous. The man in it is objectified as a person staring off in the distance, as she vaguely holds his waist, but reaches for you. 3) I have never believed that she is actually straight. I think this is fool's errand. She's not lesbian, but she's something like bisexual or pansexual, evidenced by videos like Summertime Sadness, photos of her kissing women, and a kind of sharp irony towards heteronormativity that makes LGBTQ fans quite comfortable, including numerous young gay men who came out with Lana's "support" through her music. Because she is also queer in some way. Duh. 4) I'm pretty sure I have more to say about this (I could write my own dissertation) but I want to impress you with how SMART she is...some of the references she makes are to classic literature or philosophy, and her openness, that exciting lack of boundaries she has, that authenticity, is countered by an intellectualism where she's not just putting on a show for you, but she's telling you stories about the culture you live in or grew up in, and she's doing it in a detached way that has little to do with her personal life.