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No, the Lana Del Rey imbroglio points at something potentially worse: an impatience with performance and a lack of trust in self-reinvention. Del Rey, after all, isn’t the first to take more than one shot at finding a pop persona that worked. Imagine a 1969 Internet reacting to David Bowie’s breakthrough with “Space Oddity”—a single as mannered, languid, and beguiling as “Video Games,” and a performer as in love with artifice and with plenty of past to dig up. Would his career have benefited from blogs tearing apart his inconsistency and torrents bundling his hit with “The Laughing Gnome”?
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Lana Del Rey Lights Up the Internet
Tom Ewing makes a very important point. Theatricality and reinvention are crucial parts of music and the arts — demanding “authenticity” is reactionary and mostly poisonous to creativity.
