It's you, it's you, it's all for you.

25th January 2012

Post with 21 notes

It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you.

In the last 24 hours I got pretty angry about two things. First, the ongoing Lana Del Rey fiasco, which was probably my own fault for reading her lyrics for about an hour last night, but which was reinforced by walking to into my office and hearing her album on the speakers this morning. It sounded nice - I’m pretty sure it’s going to get some decent reviews. But the memory of what I’d read made me sad and angry all over again.

The other inciting incident from was the Chuck Klosterman essay in which he strangely and unsuccessful posits that tUnE-yArDs is a flavor-of-the-week indie artist who, along with her gender ambiguity, will fade into the buzzy ether soon enough. This bothered me on a pretty personal level. Merril is an inspiration and hero to me, as someone who is also a woman, musician, ukulele player, singer and believes in questioning gender norms, and her records and live performances have had a huge impact on me over the last few years.

Talking to a friend about our growing desperation in the face of the unending success of the LDR meme, I thought of a piece another friend wrote about her - one of the few that stuck out from the onslaught over the past few months:

What I didn’t understand was why [she] bothered me. But then I watched the videos and realized that for me, the problem was that I simply am not the intended audience.

…in Del Rey’s thus-far oeuvre, the intended audience is a lover who constantly needs to be re-engaged, re-compelled with forever fulfillment, reassured: “You can be the boss, daddy.” The lover/observer, not the artist, is creating the rules, but both are watching so very very closely. To love these songs, I think, requires an exhausting level of interest.

Though these observations were directed towards LDR, I think they can be applied to the Klosterman “controversy” as well. He simply isn’t tUnE-yArDs intended audience. Instead of recognizing that, coming to terms with it, or trying to understand what makes that so (hint: being a professionally grumpy white straight dude might have something to do with it), he assumes that because one minute piece of culture is not all for him, the artist in question must have a limited relevance, and the people who care about her must be suffering from some sort of temporary delusion.

We all make this mistake on occasion, assuming that because we don’t fit in an artists audience their music is bad or of little consequence (and sometimes it’s true, too). What bothers me is that in both of these cases, the parties involved (Chuck Klosterman and LDR’s audience) represent a demographic that is CONSTANTLY pandered to. For the concerns of those outside that group to be treated as silly or delusional (a stereotypical accusation), is all the more proof that sexism is alive and well, and even a distanced nostalgia for a time when it was socially acceptable (which LDR’s music displays) is worse than reversing what marginalized people have been working towards since the days of Ellen Willis, it’s spinning car around and flooring it in the opposite direction.

Tagged: lana del rey writing criticism music chuck klosterman tune-yards feminism sexism

like a pair of bottle rockets

It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you.