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From Austin Scaggs’ interview with Lana Del Rey in the new issue of Rolling Stone.

I read this about an hour after reading David Moore’s essay about Lana Del Rey, which he posted yesterday. When I read that post, I got to the point where he said “Paris Hilton’s album, in the scheme of the entertainment industry, neither cost nor brought in very much money. It was a modest flop. I imagine the same will be true of Born to Die”, and my first thought was that I should buy a copy of Lana Del Rey’s record. I probably won’t—I’m making barely enough money to pay my expenses these days, and when I spend money on entertainment, I try to stretch it as far as possible. But the fact that it was my first instinct resonated with Moore’s earlier reference to Frank Kogan’s 2007 essay “Paris Is Our Vietnam,” which is about the way one can feel compelled to defend something by the shitty behavior of its detractors.

I’ve said before that I can’t take Del Rey’s lyrics to “Video Games” at face value, that they seem more to me to be critiquing the impulses they describe than endorsing them. Elsewhere in the Rolling Stone interview, Del Rey refers to those lyrics as “me in song form,” which isn’t helping my case. The denial of agency mentioned in Moore’s essay, though, is at the root of a lot of what I hate about what’s being written about Lana Del Rey (both positive and negative). While both Jessica Hopper and Michelle Myers have written things about Del Rey that rang true and came from a respectful place, things which I could appreciate regardless of whether I agreed with their take on Del Rey’s actual music, it’s been hard to find much else that does so.

While the quote I started this essay with might be most immediately noticeable due to the seemingly demoralized way in which Del Rey reacts to the fact that she’s being interviewed for Rolling Stone at all, what stuck out to me the most was that she referred to her current music as “this project.” This seems like a strong piece of evidence in favor of the argument that Lana Del Rey knows exactly what she’s doing, that her current public presentation is something she consciously designed and adopted. If anything, she just seems sad that it isn’t working out like she planned, that even though she is getting a lot of attention, it’s mostly not because people like her songs.

I admit it: I do like her songs. I’ve heard three and I liked them all. I would probably have heard more if the constant arguments of the last month or two hadn’t led to an instinctive desire to avoid the fracas. And yet I can’t entirely let it go, either, because it seems like everyone on both sides of the question is forming their judgements of Lana Del Rey based on unfair reasoning. I feel the urge to buy her record because I legitimately do like what she’s doing, and the thought of her having a high-profile flop makes me sad. I kind of want to do my part to prove the haters wrong. I’m not sure that instinct has well thought-out reasoning behind it, or whether it’s pure emotion that doesn’t make any rational sense. Nevertheless, it’s there.

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