In the past decade, Lana Del Rey (Elizabeth Woolridge Grant) has emerged as a polarizing figure in contemporary pop music. In 2012, her live performance of the song “Video Games” on Saturday Night Live received an instant backlash from entertainment critics, with headlines wondering if Del Rey was maybe the “Worst ‘SNL’ musical guest of all time?” In 2014, Del Rey’s claim that “the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept” set the internet reeling. And she has regularly been assailed for her aesthetic appropriations of Native American, African-American, and Latinx culture. Yet despite such criticisms, Lana Del Rey has developed a diverse and devoted fan-base, as well as a rare position of artistic freedom (especially rare for a woman artist) from which to create a discography that has more literary references per RPM than perhaps anyone working in music today. Allusions to works by literary figures such as Vladimir Nabokov, T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, and Anthony Burgess punctuate Del Rey’s lyrical and retrospective imagination. This panel features papers that explore Lana Del Rey’s under-acknowledged intertextual poetic practice, inaugurating what might tentatively be called a burgeoning field of Critical Literary Lana Studies.

While the internet and popular media offers no shortage of commentary on Lana Del Rey, the extant peer-reviewed scholarship on the singer is scant, and virtually none of it addresses the literary aspects of her work. Critics have tended to focus on matters concerning Del Rey’s image, like the discourse of “authenticity” that has plagued her from the beginning of her fame (Usmar 2012, Vesey 2013, Vigier 2012), the racial and gendered dimensions of her performance of sadness (Mooney 2018), and her nostalgic representations of American culture (Aronoff 2017, Fetveit 2012). Catherine Vigier, however, expresses dismay at how the “backlash” that instantaneously met Del Rey’s rise to fame uncritically reproduced a sexist double standard whereby women musical artists are primarily judged by their appearance. Vigier's point echoes, nearly three decades later, feminist musicologist Susan McClary’s protest that scholars writing (even favorably) about Madonna tended to focus exclusively on her image while discarding her music from critical consideration (McClary 1991). This panel seeks, then, to displace the critical focus on Del Rey’s visual representation by giving due credit to her craft as an artist, while, nevertheless, critically assessing her artistic choices.

“The Passions of Lana Del Rey” will feature four 12-13 minute papers. We have included four papers because we feel that all of them are strong and warrant inclusion. We also want to make a persuasive case for further explorations into Del Rey’s music and lyrics so that the critical stress on Del Rey’s image might give way to a more nuanced discourse on her labor as an artist. The shortened time for each presentation will allow for the requisite 30-minutes of discussion. The panel will include the following:

Patrick Clement James (CUNY Graduate Center) will present “‘I Sing the Body Electric’: Queer Kinship In Lana Del Rey’s Eschatology,” a paper that turns to queer theory in order to think of Del Rey’s representation of utopia via nostalgic figures of American literary and pop culture. James sees a utopian kernel in Del Rey’s backward-looking take on Americana, as she places herself among a “paradise” of American queers.

Erin Kappeller’s (Tulane University) “Henley’s Back, and He’s Cooler Than Ever: Lana Del Rey’s Racial Imaginary” questions Del Rey’s reference to British poet W.E. Henley’s poem “Invictus” (1888) in her 2018 song “Lust for Life.” According to Kappeller, Henley’s poem has become a watchword for right-wing, white supremacists. Kappeller thus argues that Del Rey’s reappropriation of “Invictus” represents a retreat from a more radical relationship to whiteness and femininity previously articulated in the singer’s work.

Patrick Milian (U. of Washington) will present “Hollywood-la-Morte: Honeymoon and the Composer in Exile,” a paper that explores how Erich Wolfgang Korngold and the predominantly Jewish expatriate composers living in Los Angeles during Hollywood’s “Golden Age” have influenced Del Rey’s musical and performance styles. Specifically, Milian finds problematic the way that Del Rey’s attempt to situate herself among these composers erases the historical traumas that produced their music. Note: While this paper takes musical citation as its primary concern, its inclusion on this panel demonstrates the musical dimension of Del Rey’s citational practice while drawing religious identity into the criticism of Del Rey's appropriations.

Ryan Tracy’s (CUNY Graduate Center) “How to Dance to the Apocalypse: ‘Burnt Norton’ Between T. S. Eliot and Lana Del Rey,” argues that Del Rey’s engagement with the modernist poet, and her notoriously lackluster performance on Saturday Night Live (which spawned an internet meme of the singer stepping listlessly in a circle), articulates Del Rey’s decadent embodiment of what Elizabeth Freeman has called the “damaged time” of modernity. According to Tracy, Del Rey’s internet-breaking dance break can be read as a queer (and queerly feminist) critique of the “time present,” “time past,” and “time future,” of a neoliberal world order that just can’t stop imagining the spectacle of its own destruction.

The panel will be chaired by Shyam Patel (UC Irvine), a scholar working on the intersections of politics, poetics, and music in late-Victorian aesthetic cultures.

References:

Aronoff, Kate. “Lana Del Rey’s America.” Dissent, vol. 64, no. 4, Fall 2017, pp. 11-15.

Fetveit, Arild. “Death, Beauty, and Iconoclastic Nostalgia: Precarious Aesthetics and Lana Del Rey.” European Journal of Media Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2015, pp. 187-207.

McClary, Susan. “Living to Tell: Madonna’s Resurrection of the Fleshly” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp. 148-166.

Mooney, Heather. “Sad Girls and Carefree Black Girls: Affect, Race, (Dis)Possession, and Protest.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3/4, Fall/Winter 2018, pp. 175-194.

Usmar, Patrick. “Born To Die: Lana Del Rey, Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess?” M/C Journal, Vol 17, No.4 (2014).

Vigier, Catherine. “The Meaning of Lana Del Rey: Pop culture, post-feminism and the choices facing young women today.” Zeteo: The Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing, Fall 2012.