Fiona’s first hit, “Criminal,” centered on confession: “I’ve been a bad, bad girl / I’ve been careless / With a delicate man.” She reportedly wrote the song in under an hour when she was seventeen years old. Record executives listened to the album in progress that would become Tidal and said she did not have any hits. And so, on command, she wrote them a hit. There is something perverse about a child writing a song implicating herself in the decline of a man, like the abused Dolores discovering that she had been Lolita all along, inadvertently hurting Humbert Humbert. Fiona declares early in the song, “And I need to be redeemed / To the one I’ve sinned against / Because he’s all I ever knew of love.” These lines could be read as a deification of the delicate man of whom she spoke earlier, but the lines “I’ve done wrong and I want to suffer for my sins / I’ve come to you ’cause I need guidance to be true” negate such a premise quickly with the hints of godly intercession. Fiona seeks redemption for her sins, unaware that she is not nearly so guilty as she feels. Lana, in sharp contrast, courts sin actively.
Lana’s first hit, “Video Games,” centered on seduction: “I heard that you like the bad girls / Honey, is that true?” Unlike Fiona, she is not a girl recognizing her own sin in penitential retrospect; she is a woman broadcasting it, perhaps exaggerating the authenticity of her own wickedness as sex appeal. Lana surrenders to man rather than God, begging to retreat to the shadows of the narcissistic but ordinary men whose toxicity seems to intoxicate her. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you Everything I do I tell you all the time Heaven is a place on earth with you Tell me all the things you want to do,” she sings. Her cry is desperate and real; you believe her when she says it is all for him, her passion momentarily letting her audience forget that this complete devotion to a man whose company she considers akin to that of God and the company of heaven is playing video games, of all the mundane activities in the world.
In the video-cum-short-film Tropico, Lana appears as both Eve in the Garden of Eden and as a retro 1970s version of the Virgin Mary in the first portion of the film, which is set to the song “Body Electric.” Before an audience of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Jesus Christ himself, she dances seductively with Adam before biting into the forbidden fruit and suddenly losing her footing. She falls not onto soil but onto the stage of a strip club, now wearing lingerie with a flutter of bills falling around her as “Gods and Monsters” begins. “God’s dead, I said ‘Baby, that’s alright with me,’” she declares, not so much an atheist as an apostate. Lana does not even make an effort to couch her rejection of God in euphemisms as she declares, “Me and God, we don’t get along, so now I sing.” She adds insult to injury when she sings, “In the land of Gods and Monsters I was an Angel Looking to get fucked hard.” The rejection of God is not enough for Lana; she must also replace him with a man, the less holy the better.
Before the world was treated to the harshness of Fiona’s self-flagellation or the defiance of Lana’s sexuality, Dolly gave us her first hit in “Just Because I’m a Woman,” a song centered on forgiveness. “Now a man will take a good girl / And he’ll ruin her reputation / But when he wants to marry / Well, that’s a different situation,” Dolly sings of the hypocrisy of a man who will ruin a woman’s reputation but not marry her, insinuating that premarital sex is the cause for his judgment. “Now I know that I’m no angel / If that’s what you thought you’d found I was just the victim of A man that let me down,” she continues, acknowledging what she sees as the sin of her own actions, but not without holding a man accountable for bringing her to that sin.
The presence of God in Dolly’s music is more obvious than in the songs of Lana or Fiona, but hidden under sparkling jumpsuits and bright blush, there is profound theological darkness. Dolly’s 1971 hit “Coat of Many Colors” recounts how her impoverished mother sewed rags together to make her a coat, the resulting garment more likely to be a clashing eyesore than Joseph’s dazzling robe from the book of Genesis that signaled his father’s favor. The young Dolly in the song tries to tell the Bible story to her classmates who ridicule her coat, but it falls on deaf ears among godless children. The narrative of 1971’s “Letter to Heaven” seems more at home in Flannery O’Connor’s macabre oeuvre than in Dolly’s. In the song, a little girl has her grandfather pen a letter to her dead mother, which she intended to be sent skyward toward God’s kingdom, only to be struck by a car and killed on her way to the post office to mail it. It closes, “The postman was passing and picked up the note Addressed to the Master and these words he spoke Straight up into heaven this letter did go / She’s happy up there with her mommy I know.” Were it penned by anyone but Dolly Parton, this song would sound like a crude and cruel joke. But in her capable hands and voice, the only cruelty is that of a god who renders our departed beloveds accessible only if we depart ourselves.
But God is not all inscrutability for Dolly. In “He’s Alive,” she places herself among the witnesses to the crucifixion and recounts her subsequent doubt that he has risen again. But upon seeing the risen Christ, she embraces him in an ecstatic relief. “And as I looked into His eyes / The love was shining out from Him Like sunlight from the skies Guilt in my confusion Disappeared in sweet release And every fear I ever had / Just melted into peace,” she sings. For Dolly, to be looked upon by God is an opportunity for a welcome surrender. The gaze of men, however, is less gentle in her world.