Lana, Lorde, & Feminism

[moneypowerglory 372]

[AngelHeadedHipster 2,838]

U DONT SAY ?          

[PARADIXO 32,943]

Ugh... I hated when this happened. Lana fans vs Lorde fans was the worst thing ever.

[lazybooklet 575]

Lorde's opinion is shit cos it's a half-ass comment based on listening to Lana's music once and not actually know what she is singing about.

[Thunder Revenant 20,946]

Lorde's opinion is shit cos it's a half-ass comment based on listening to Lana's music once and not actually know what she is singing about.

Especially since the comments seem to be based on National Anthem and Without You (where she obviously didn't even get the lyrics right).

[Atom Heart 1,929]

Lorde's opinion is shit cos it's a half-ass comment based on listening to Lana's music once and not actually know what she is singing about.

boohoo

[CarcrashBandicoot 760]

I love time travel

[DominicMars 1,763]

We all know how silly children can be. Why insult another artist just because you are young and...go to parties that play good music? what's the point?honestly it doesnt matter because it makes her look like a cunt either way haha

[Artvilde 22]

Lorde is still an attention whore in 2015.

[leaked_version 10,499]

MODS, close this mess

[theeternalstars 4,576]

I just can't. Lana is releasing this Summertime Sadness remix by Cedric Geravais or however that dude is called. Such a sellout! I quit!

Yeah! The only thing shes doing at the moment is this song for the great gatsby film or something. Bet they paid her loads. She might as well then release a Cedric Geravas remix of THAT as well lmao

[brooklynbaby91 1,386]

In Lorde's Twitter likes, she has two essays about Lana and feminism saved. First she favorited this status with a link to a Pitchfork essay about how Lana is actually an empowering female figure because her determined sadness is a form of defiance in a world where women are expected to smile all the time:

 

https://twitter.com/lindsayzoladz/status/479699295608643585

 

Excerpt:

For girls who are aware that our culture expects them to be benignly happy, shiny objects—smile for me, baby—there can be a defiance in not only embracing sadness online, but cultivating a kind of ambiguity as to where the performed feeling ends and the "genuine" feeling begins.

 

Enter Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence—a record which seemed to emerge fully formed from this aesthetic. In almost every way, Ultraviolence is the most provocative thing Del Rey has done yet; when they were released in advance of the album, the song titles alone—"Sad Girl", "Fucked My Way Up to the Top", "Pretty When You Cry"—were enough to cause a minor internet sensation. Del Rey's 2012 debut, Born to Die, was sometimes criticized for glorifying a seemingly retrograde stance of feminine passivity, weakness, and empty titillation (her legion of diehard internet fans will probably never let me forget that I compared the record to "a faked orgasm" in my review). Rather than shrink from these criticisms, though,Ultraviolence finds Del Rey embodying all of these controversial qualities more fully—so much so that there's something unsettling and even brazen about it.

 

 

"They say I'm too dumb to see," she coos in a campy sexy-baby voice. "They judge me like a picture book, by the colors like they forgot to read." Is this exaggerated? Is it "real"? The joke's on anyone who insists on asking those questions—the whole point of Del Rey is that it's impossible to tell, and that perhaps there's even a strange power in that ambiguity. Ultraviolence has an air of "HI HATERS" drizzled out in gasoline, and an immaculately-manicured finger flicking a cigarette in slow-motion onto the ground.

 

Beginning with the languid, almost-seven-minute "Cruel World", the album is saturated with sad, its tempo rarely accelerating above "rolling tumbleweed." Del Rey often trails off mid-lyric and sometimes seems on the brink of disappearing; there's a moment in "Shades of Cool" when a guitar solo literally drowns out her words. Wistfulness, longing, and morbidity are present in every croaked note, but in its most genuinely poignant moments, Ultraviolence seems to suggest how unfulfilling it is to embody a male fantasy. I have become the perfect American girl just like you wanted me to, Del Rey seems to be saying, and I'm so lonesome I could die.

 

So it’s worth asking: In a time when "empowerment" is considered such a virtue for girls, why has Lana Del Rey become an icon? The best answer I've found comes from an essay by the French writer Catherine Vigier: "[Lana Del Rey] is 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 post-feminist world, but who find that real liberation and genuine satisfaction elude them."

 

 

The second essay is by the same writer but published on Slate and it's in praise of "bad feminists."

 

https://twitter.com/lindsayzoladz/status/545672828507664384

 

Excerpt:

 

Which is really to say it was the year I learned, quite unexpectedly, to stop worrying and love Lana Del Rey. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be saying this, I’d have thought you were crazy, but: I do not think there was an album I listened to this year more than Ultraviolence. Del Rey’s first album under that name, 2012’s Born to Die, didn’t appeal to me at all; it struck me as empty, thematically undercooked, and contentedly (and thus offensively) retrograde in its vision of the modern American woman. What changed between now and then? For one thing, Del Rey became incredibly adept at articulating the darkness of that vision—Ultraviolence found her slyly asserting that her American dream had been a nightmare all along. It is often bracingly, unsettlingly, confrontationally sad, the way Cat Power’s earliest records are. As I wrote earlier this year, Del Rey’s music is about the loneliness and even the horror of embodying a male fantasy. Ultraviolence represents the moment she was finally able to bottle that glacial chill that drifts atop the pedestal. (She even put it in the context of pop history on the album’s closer, a sumptuously glum cover of Nina Simone’s “The Other Woman.”) No, Del Rey does not identify as a card-carrying feminist, and I highly doubt she ever will (she is #TeamSpace), but to me she provoked more interesting and messily unanswerable questions about femininity than artists who are easier to champion.

 

So what do you think? Has Lorde seen the error of her ways?

 

Does she now think Lana is a feminist figure? 

Edited December 5, 2015 by brooklynbaby91

[hello moto 116]

Lorde did the worst thing which was jump on the bandwagon of hating Lana because she had a lot of backlash. the worst thing you can do is hate someone because a lot of other people do. Now that Lana is getting recognized in a more positive light it'd make sense for Lorde to speak of her positively. It does sound sincere though. I think she did change her mind honestly. Which i'm glad about; they could be a good couple of artists who should collaborate.

[Baby V Alex 2,859]

Lorde is a Taylor Swift BFF aka she will buy any white feminism bullshit

[Starsx 1,849]

You guys have to understand that Lorde is what like, 17? She literally doesn't know what she's talking about half the time. Did she even finish high school? Lorde doesn't knowing the meaning of being anti-feminist or being a feminist.

 

She's just following the Taylor Swift crowd because she's popular. seriously 

[renaissance 8,329]

You guys have to understand that Lorde is what like, 17? She literally doesn't know what she's talking about half the time. Did she even finish high school? Lorde doesn't knowing the meaning of being anti-feminist or being a feminist.

 

She's just following the Taylor Swift crowd because she's popular. seriously 

she's actually 19 but ok

[Creyk 11,699]

she's actually 19 but ok

That's even worse

[StealingTheMoonlight 278]

Wow, these are really interesting reads thanks for talking about them @@brooklynbaby91. As for Lorde, I don't really know. She was 17, maybe even 16, when she made those comments about Lana and between then and now there has been a lot of discussion in the media about feminism, and the different types of feminism other than the mainstream, "women stick together," so I think she's acknowledging that there could be something more to Lana than what she said those few years ago.

[naachoboy 7,993]

i h8 these 'feminist' celebs that are really only interested in white feminist bullshit like women having armpit hair

I see you Azealia, hiding behind that account... but i agree lol. Lorde was DUMB for that shit, like the bitch was like 15... 

[Sitar 22,213]

I can't care until she gives me some reprieve and drops album 2. Then we can burn Lana's discography together and straighten our hair