Forgot About Rey?
How one Eminem verse has the world siding with Lana Del Rey
Before this week—before Eminem so eloquently suggested he drag her head through an elevator door—the name “Lana Del Rey” most often elicited eyerolls and heavy sighs, an epidemic that spanned the length of the singer’s career. While Eminem isn’t the first to vocalize his contempt for Del Rey, he is the first to attack her on a song. The result was an unprecedented avalanche of support for Del Rey, an artist who at face value appeared to have no one on her side.
That’s partly because there is no “Lana Del Rey”; it’s a sobriquet fabricated by singer Elizabeth Grant by merging the name of a Hollywood starlet, Lana Turner, with that of automobile, the Ford Del Rey. Grant was a polarizing figure mainly because she always seemed so manufactured, even when using her real name. Her false start in the game happened as “Lizzy Grant,” a bubbly blond electro-pop fairie who missed the mark in an otherwise compelling category—the issue being the nature of Grant’s tale as an upstart. The neophyte was attending Fordham University when she inked a $10,000 deal with indie label 5 Points Records. She voluntarily moved into a trailer park in New Jersey for “inspiration,” releasing her debut EP Kill Kill in 2008, with production from the renowned David Kahne.
The trailer park tale feels all too familiar. But while Marshall Mathers’ legitimate residence there was the leverage he needed to kickstart his career, it didn’t quite work for Grant, whose hometown is actually Lake Placid, New York—home of the 1980 Winter Olympics. After slipping, her career was temporarily put on ice.
Two years later, she released her debut album, Lana Del Ray. It was an ill-fated project, showing an identity still in transition: the name “Del Rey” misspelled, and an “aka Lizzy Grant” tacked on for transition’s sake. Kahne maintained his heavy-handed production, and while the vocals were solid, the packaging still wasn’t. The white trash damsel in distress routine didn’t work for her.
It took another year for it all to come full circle. In 2011, Grant returned a brand new her, with the current alter ego “Lana Del Rey,” slightly old timey-meets-new-school-meets-retro-meets-the-future-missing-the-past; call it Tumblr Pop. Del Rey was the human embodiment of an inspirational meme, those ones with grainy sunsets and weirdly cryptic quotes about “letting go” or some Rumi wisdom misattributed to Kanye West. Reemerging as a brunette with fuller lips, donning tennis skirts and giggling for no reason during interviews and live performances, Del Rey evoked images of old Virginia Slims advertisements and sunny 60s beaches with a big sound full of violins and harps and anything else that wasn’t now. Her videos for early singles like “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans” looked as though they were run through a filter or shot on a Polaroid camera and turned into a flipbook. Her songs became favorites for ad agencies—both the University of Phoenix and Nespresso licensed “Blue Jeans” for their television commercials. Perfect alignment for a woman who named herself after a car.
Her second album Born To Die in 2012 debuted at #2 on the Billboard charts, hitting Platinum status and global sales in excess of four million. Two years later she released Ultraviolence, which debuted at #1 and has sold over a million copies globally since its release this past June.
Numbers don’t lie, as Del Rey holds the unique position of being a fan favorite for teens and their mothers. Sites like Teen Vogue consistently cover Lana, and teen-penned site Teen Ink wrote a whimsy op-ed piece titled “Stop Hating On Lana Del Rey” defending the siren (“Her album is actually pretty freakin’ good,” Noah99 wrote in the piece). Conversely, Del Rey is an Adult Contemporary radio favorite, proving she runs the gamut when it comes to age appropriate fans—both of which are clearly buying her albums.
Still, many critics despised Del Rey and her sepia-toned success. While her numbers proved solid sales, soon the purveyors of the hipster blog dynasty piled on, perhaps because Del Rey inadvertently held up a mirror to their congregation. Like Del Rey, hipsters revel in the aesthetics of generations past, claiming authority over eras that they could only access with a DeLorean retrofitted by Doc Brown from Back To The Future. In all actuality, few of them know what they hell they’re talking about. Lana Del Rey is no different from them, but since her own evolution from baby artist to constructed brand was public, it has been much easier to fire shots at her.
It was blind fury, really. The think piece pool was desperate to rip off her mask like an episode of Scooby Doo and reveal who she really was; to prove she was merely a figment of our Instagrammed imaginations. Lots of artists go through changes—Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Skylar Grey—but Del Rey was taken to task for it. Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone called Born To Die “dull, dreary, and pop-starved.” Edna Gunderson of USA Today called it a “letdown.” Jon Caramanica at the New York Times referred to Del Rey as “a meme of 2011” in his review.
While journalists frequently cloaked their insults in the form of album reviews, the real subject of their critique was Del Rey. She became a runway model for gender regression, as her personality seemed to reside somewhere on the spectrum between Mae West and Betty Boop. Her lyrics consistently reflected desperation to keep her man pleased, equal parts running mascara, empty martini glasses, and Percocet bottles, while she sang about drunken love. Maura Johnston wrote for the Village Voice that “her rise has sparked arguments over how ‘indie’ the ideals of femininity in ‘indie’ might be.” For a good long while, even I wrote her off as a musical housewife. The mystique felt contrived to me—where her cocaine cowgirl gazes, anxiously awaiting in kneepads for her husband to come home was insulting. I wasn’t alone in my feelings, and Lana did nothing to change our minds.
The insults from critics carried into her follow-up album Ultraviolence, as Jim Farber of the NY Daily News lampooned her “beautiful loser clichés” and “comatose vocals.”
In an interview with The Guardian this past June, Del Rey told writer Tim Jonze, “I wish I was dead already,” a remark that followed a reference to Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. The quote echoed throughout the Internet. Del Rey got blasted by none other than Cobain’s 22-year-old daughter, Frances Bean, who Tweeted to Del Rey that “the death of young musicians isn’t something to romanticize.” In a Rolling Stone cover story that followed, Del Rey expressed to author Brian Hiatt that she was baited into that Guardian remark, but then told Hiatt, “I find that most people I meet figure I kind of want to kill myself anyway.” At one point she even attempted to can the RS story by telling Hiatt, “I feel like maybe we should wait until there’s something good to talk about.” Is it ever good for Lana Del Rey? It’s been a non-stop bumpy ride, headed straight for career atrophy.
But then, on November 10th, Eminem released the video, “SHADY CXVPHER,” a 19-minute barrage of a cappella bars featuring various members of his Shady 2.0 regime, including Slaughterhouse and Yelawolf. In the track, meant as a promotion for an upcoming album, Em played cleanup with close to ten minutes of rapping, delivering this eye-popping verse:
I may fight for gay rights, especially if they dyke is more of a knockout than Janay Rice / Play nice? Bitch, I’ll punch Lana Del Rey in the face twice like Ray Rice / in broad daylight / in plain sight of elevator surveillance / ‘til the head is bangin’ on the railin’ / then celebrate with the Ravens.►
The lines were unsurprising. Eminem is always taking potshots at random women. But these sparked an internet brushfire, as celebrities and critics alike jumped to Del Rey’s defense. Azealia Banks led the charge, tweeting to @LanaDelRey: “tell him to go back to his trailer park and eat his microwave hotpocket dinner and suck on his sisters tiddies.”
Britt Julious of The Guardian writes: “Eminem’s attacks fit a tight mould: celebrity-directed, often homophobic, and usually geared toward women. Whether aimed at Aguilera, Kardashian or Del Rey in 2014, they are a quick grab at inserting himself into modern culture. These women are also, usually, reflective of major social changes, whether they be the rise of hypersexuality and teen pop (Aguilera), the public embrace of celebrity for celebrity (Kardashian) or the embrace of the artistic and weird (Del Rey).”
Artistic and weird: two adjectives relatively new to describe Del Rey, yet perhaps exactly what she’s been desperately looking to be called. Why now?
The irony is that for years Lana Del Rey has been pummeled into submission by the Internet, but when the threat of physical violence looms, human shields come to the rescue. There is no excuse for the audacity of Eminem’s line, but for me the shock lies more in the result of it: Lana Del Rey’s redemption.
When Eminem brought his signature breed of vileness to bars about Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera, people criticized him more for his general misogyny. But now, the critics are homing in on the fact that he’s picking on one particular woman. It’s an odd way to earn the respect of the room, as the fragile, submissive and weak attributes previously used against Del Rey are the very things she’s being protected by. Del Rey has always been one to defend her man, with lyrics like “My old man is a tough man, but he’s got a soul as sweet as blood red jam,”► from her song “Off To The Races.” She flagged herself as someone able and willing to be taken advantage of—something that turned off many people. But when Eminem put that into practice, the crowd moved to #TeamLana.
Eminem did Lana Del Rey the biggest favor of her career. His bullying finally ended her being bullied.
Sure, the kneejerk assumption would be that this lovefest for Lana won’t last, but it will. This will be referenced for the duration of her career as that time she was attacked for no good reason. Anyone who insults her risks being in a league with a misogynist.
Lana Del Rey has made a career out of crafting anthems that scream, “Love me!” while falling upon deaf ears. Thanks to one Marshall Mathers, Elizabeth Grant got the hug she’s been looking for from the world, and she didn’t even need an Instagram filter to achieve it.
