College Nihilist.

So I normally don’t discuss popular culture, mostly because trying to keep current with it is a full time job, which I already have.  I occasionally peruse TMZ, and do find some of the stories amusing.  The latest one that caught my interest was the controversy about a young New York singer-songwriter named Lana Del Ray.  I had already heard her because of her song “Video Games” which, when it came on the radio, was such a shock I wrote down the name of the artist.  Listen to it and you’ll see what I mean, it’s unlike anything typically mainstream, and evokes a more indie vibe, a sort of girl version of Stevin Merrit (see below).

Del Ray gave what is, in all fairness, a bloody awful live performance on Saturday Night Live.  The backlash from the performance, however, I believe has deeper origins.  First, however, I want to take a relevant digression and talk about what I’m henceforth referring to as “Faux-Town;” a tarted up copy of mo-town cynically created in the wake of Amy Winehouse’s popularity.  The most recent examples are Duffy and Adele, to which Lana Del Ray is sometimes compared.

Adele is little more than a carefully manufactured Amy Winehouse clone, but whereas Amy Winehouse was somewhat  novel and a competent songwriter, Adele’s material sounds like she turned on the “Random MoTown Generator” filter in Garageband.  Adele is quoted as saying “I’ll never be ashamed to say I love the Spice Girls because they made me who I am,” I think that should pretty much tell you everything you need to know about Adele’s “music.”  Much like Duffy (remember her? No? didn’t think so), Adele is a cynical pastiche trying to recapture a time and express ideas and emotions which she herself has never experienced.  From what we gather from her hit album 21, Adele is, shockingly for a 21 year old girl, in the midst of incredible boy-angst, he cheats, he lies, and “rumor has it” Adele is the one he’s leaving the other woman for.  Yup, groundbreaking, a 21 year old girl who’s made her entire universe around a boycrush, what a novel concept.  The only thing that would consummate this union of kitsch and cliché is if that boy turned out to be Justin Bieber.

Lana Del Ray is doing something a tad less tried, she’s not writing about how those darn boys, the fact that “OMG IT’S FRIDAY,” how “we r who we r” or how sick she is of all the attention of the media whilst wearing a trollopy version of her old Mickey Mouse Club outfit.  Granted, Britney’s faced her fair share of reality in her journey through serious mental psychosis, but there’s no evidence she’s used her art as catharsis or transformed her personal demons into anything valuable.  In Britney’s defence she’s, in all likelihood, being propped up on enough zombifying benzodiazepines and puppeteering therapists that there’s probably a gesture you could make to get her to bark on command.  She’s made well enough to churn out “just one more” pop album to support the industry built around her career.   As usual, I digress, Del Ray starts by expressing sad emotions, she’s not giving you a song about getting laid in da club, how she’s a sexy bitch or her soporific psychodrama with boys.  She sings about death, boredom, and malaise.  That’s a real turn off for a lot of people enmeshed in a culture that peddles optimism and wishful thinking, and as a double whammie, it’s a girl!  I mean, this isn’t the script, isn’t this kind of stuff supposed to come out of a pensive Thom Yorke or classic Lou Reed, how dare she not “sing pretty!”  Herein lies the origin of the backlash she’s gotten.

What I think Del Ray’s controversy and infamy says, besides the usual opprobrium about misogyny in the media, is also how generally adverse people are to feel any negative emotions.  As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her book Bright Sided: “we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”  We’re still in the grips of a lot of “positive psychology” which, as Ehrenreich persuasively argues, was largely responsible for the financial meltdown that nearly brought down Western civilization.

You see, pessimism has many useful functions, not the least of which is to guard us from unrealistic expectations and the emotional outbursts that attend disappointment when your perfect world doesn’t materialize.  You should expect the worst, since the worst will eventually happen.  Lana Del Ray’s music is a welcome antidote to the flood of saccharine feel-good rubbish which includes a lot of the putatively “sad” emo nonsense; that being merely the angsty angry teenage boy equivalent of Adele. 

There’s a reason the Romans kept Memento Morii;  Forget Tony Robbins, The Secret, or 7 habits of Highly Successful People, there’s one fact that levels all of this tripe, and is the ultimate “motivator;” the sober realization that, as Del Ray puts it in her title song “You and I were born to die.”