Her last album also is one of self-awareness that revealed despair not quite conquered but certainly more contained. “My love wrecked you / You packed to twirl your skirt at the palace It hurt more than it ought to hurt I went to work to cultivate a callus / And now I’m hard, too hard to know / I don’t cry when I’m sad anymore, no no,” she declares in “Left Alone,” a tribute to solitude. In the song “Valentine,” she reveals, “I’m a tulip in a cup I stand no chance of growing up I’ve made my peace I’m dead I’m done / I watched you live to have my fun.” On the page, her words are stripped of the defiant blues she calls on to sing, making it difficult to convey in words here that this is something like triumph in her acknowledgment that she coexists with memories of these men rather than being haunted by them. When she turns away from the men who will not love her, she finally stops speaking of the sin that plagued her earlier music. It is her most successful to date in terms of critical appeal and chart success, and yet I can listen to it only as background noise; the piano and voice remain familiar but are no longer family. She is not the sister I once knew. She is too far from the oddly ecstatic pain of living under the surveillance of man and God. But Lana remains close.
“We both know the history of violence that surrounds you / But I’m not scared, there’s nothing to lose now that I’ve found you,” she sings in “Honeymoon.” It is a challenge and a capitulation at once. One gets the sense that this is the same man she watched playing video games and to whom she proudly declared her curses to God and at whom all of her sadness is directed across one album every year for four years. “I know what only the girls know / Lies can buy eternity,” Lana confesses in “Music to Watch Boys To,” the same track on which she declares, “I live to love you.” It is hard to tell if this is the lie that is buying her eternity or some other declaration on the track, like that nothing good can stay or that it’s all a game to her.
I am perhaps too eager to choose to believe that “I live to love you” is the lie she is using to manipulate the men she once deified. I want to believe that Lana has also escaped the paralyzing gaze of men whose shadows she found warmth inside of, these puny avatars for God who function as deciders of our fate nonetheless. But even if she is momentarily triumphant in lying about her love as a ticket to salvation, it does not stick. “Getting darker and darker / Looking for love In all the wrong places Oh my God In all the wrong places Oh my God,” Lana moans in “The Blackest Day.” She cannot help but cry out to him despite the emptiness of his promise and the cruelty of his gaze.
“I have found Lana Del Rey in the same moments that I have found myself the most dysphorically disenchanted with what I can do,” my friend Natasha told me after midnight in the early winter. Natasha is a force that men shatter against but that women can fold into like a blanket. Englishness seeps out in her accent and intonations, but her Russian heritage shapes the pure and terrifying wisdom that pours out of her mouth. Her gestures are massive and her body is minuscule, and she is one of several of my friends I’m still shocked occasionally to think have selected me. She is also one of many friends who share my affection for Lana Del Rey. “We like Lana because none of us are exempt from that which we are sold,” she said. And despite all the hand-wringing that went into the fallout following Lana Del Rey’s revelation as a persona, Lana is not a dangerous product we were sold. She is a reflection of a logical response to our inheritance. We will be surveilled under a masculine gaze whose warmth or coldness toward us will often be largely out of our control, whether we pass them on the street, surrender our names to them in marriage, or pray to them in the blackness of night. We might as well find love among the ones we can see.
Bearing witness to the vulnerability of Lana is what lets me cling to her when I have largely let Fiona go, confident that even if she has not escaped the memories of these men, she is at peace with them. I have a desire to protect and encourage Lana and women like her, those who suffer the cold but won’t step out of the shadows of those who keep them from the light. I want them to take a lesson from the playbook of Dolly Parton, the author of one of the greatest love songs of all time, “I Will Always Love You.” Many don’t realize that Dolly wrote it because it was made most famous by Whitney Houston—happy proof that its tender message and strength are transferable from one woman’s love to another’s. The song is not about wanting a man to return, but choosing to walk away from one. It is a bittersweet farewell certainly, but it is the resolute decision of the woman singing it. “I hope life treats you kind / And I hope you have all you’ve dreamed of / And I wish to you, joy and happiness / But above all this, I wish you love,” she sings, devoid of the resentment that so often characterizes breakup songs. It is an offering of forgiveness, and it is the act of mortal love that most closely resembles grace.
There Can Be Only One
On Lil’ Kim, Nicki Minaj, and the Art of Manufactured Beef
The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.
—Toni Morrison
PERCHED IN A SALON CHAIR that she commands like a throne, Lil’ Kim sports a heavy side part through expertly straightened hair that falls in a dramatic swoop over her left eye in a look reminiscent of Veronica Lake. She is being fussed over by a hairstylist, and as her interview begins, she puts on a pair of oversized red sunglasses that match the peacoat she wears buttoned all the way up. Keeping an eye on the stylist as the interview proceeds, it becomes clear that she is not actually doing anything substantive with Kim’s hair, which is already perfectly in place. But like wearing the sunglasses and coat indoors, the stylist is there for dramatic effect, the kind of decorative embellishment that amplifies the gravitas of a celebrity. The scene would be unremarkable if not for the fact that it takes place not on MTV but on PhatClips,1 an underground rap show in St. Louis. It is also early 1996, several months before Kim’s debut album, Hard Core, is set for release and is at the time still titled Queen Bee. She is still mostly known in the rap scene as the sole female member of Junior M.A.F.I.A., a rap crew headed by the Notorious B.I.G. But Kim is the kind of woman who dresses for the job she wants, not the job she has. And the title she’s after is the undisputed queen of rap.