Lana Del Rey just published some stuff on her Twitter that’s going to raise a lot of eyebrows. I’m going to talk about it, because I think it’s similar to something I’ve seen before.
She called out some of the other people who just turned themselves into eye candy for more clicks on spotify or whatever streaming platform. Some of the biggest stars today are that way because they just go on and on about stripping and fucking. It wasn’t a totally unreasonably complaint, and yet, she got herself into a lot of trouble because the vast majority of the names she named were colored people.
So here’s the conceit of “indie” music. What I’ve come to think is that a lot of the time, in American popular music, it’s the black people who were on the cutting edge. You could think about Elvis as being some kind of a bridge, who blended country music with some of the innovations from black people’s R&B music, and brought “rock and roll” to the masses. And then in 1960s, people started getting into “rock” music, as opposed to “rock and roll”. Essentially, it was rock and roll, but stripped of certain black elements.
It usually followed a pattern: you had white people doing their version of the hip thing. There’s nothing inherently racist about wanting to carve out a niche for yourself, and filling in the space that better reflects your background. But then it started alienating the black peoples’ audience, so that wasn’t really cool. That was the strange story that Jimi Hendrix was instrumental in helping to push rock in a direction that was harder, more like heavy metal (although I don’t know if it would go that far). And inadvertently, the rise of “rock” would create a genre that all but excluded black people or black bands.
And take for example, indie music. In the beginning, it felt like some kind of a freedom and liberation from music making machines, collectives that mass produced hair metal, motown and Philly. But when you looked closer, it was some kind of a white privilege, that you’d have an audience, even though you were rough and unpolished. You could be more “literary”, ie you made the music more about culture than about the music qualities. Of course, as an impressionable teenager, I was taken in by many of the mystical qualities of indie bands. But eventually I did suss out that the ones that I really liked were those who had great musical qualities, and that 99% of indie bands simply either suck or are mediocre.
In contrast, people like Prince and Michael Jackson had to pull out all the stops for their show. They had to be flashy, they had to write and perform everything, they had to put up incredible shows with great props. And in the face of all that vast amounts of effort, they got labelled as “sell outs” and “too commercial”. I used to disdain the flashiness of Michael Jackson around the time of “Dangerous”. But when you compare it to that other famous album that came out around the same time, “Nevermind” by Nirvana, of course he put a lot more effort and craft into it. “Nevermind”, notwithstanding that it had a few genius songs, was made by a guy who had a needle in his arm half the time he was making it.
So I remember Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins saying in an interview, “Michael Jackson has sold 10 times more records than us. Does it make him better than us?” Notwithstanding that I’d agree that “Siamese Dream” (the current Pumpkins album during the time of that interview) is just a wee bit more of a classic than “Dangerous”, which was Michael Jackson’s last hurrah, but now when you think about it, there’s just a lot of resentment by a white guy that some black dude got ahead of him.
I would say that the vast majority of indie artists aren’t going to be prejudiced against “other types” of people. But it does embody some kind of privilege that one would associate with being white. You just had to celebrate your own culture, celebrate who you were, and in many ways, it would be enough. You just needed a few thousand people to buy your latest record, and it would be good enough. Good storytelling would be enough. Being rough around the edges would be enough. Being “literary” and maybe a little oblique when it comes to your intentions. Being unique and being yourself. There aren’t a lot of coloured people who have that kind of privilege!
You knew that you were already accepted, and you could just have a lot of leeway to experiment how you like. Whereas if you were a black person, you just had to be that much more conservative about what you put out. If you’re Asian, well you’re almost invisible. Well all this was maybe up to around 10, 15 years ago. These days, everythings a little more mixed up… and yet it makes things even worse because, let’s face it, an endless exploration of the various nuances of your identity, and doing all that semiotics doesn’t really substitute for making great music.
So Lana Del Rey did sound like she was getting a little upset that a lot of people out there were twerking their fit and perfect bodies and their tight little asses to the top of the charts. It wasn’t completely wrong to think that it was crass, and wonder what on earth the music scene had come to. But the implication that some kind of commercial success is owed to you because there “should” be a more discerning audience out there just comes off as being quite sour to me. I’m not surprised that she got attacked for being another “Karen”. But she was just clueless that some kind of privilege that she used to have was gone. Yes, it’s nice to harken back to some era a few decades ago when you didn’t have to be eye candy and totally common denominator to reach a large enough audience to fill your rice bowl. It’s nice to be able to do something more literary and sophisticated and leave the sex out of it. If only she were operating right in the middle of the Lilith Fair era, when you could have a reasonably OK existence making plain, barely passable music that spoke to the Karen identity.
I sympathise with her when I think about how one-dimensional music has become, although, truth be told, she’s not talented enough to stand on the pantheon with other geniuses like Bjork, Kate Bush or Joni Mitchell. But yes, point very well taken about the depressing state of music in 2020.
Look, Lana Del Rey, if you want artistic freedom, true artistic freedom, you’re just going to have to contend with being an “indie” artist. Even when times were good, people very rarely got to have both artistic freedom and financial freedom. Too bad you’re not operating in the 90s.
Music Composition 