Guest Posts

Lana Del Rey: how to kill an artistic persona in the social media age

Posted on October 21, 2021 | by Beatriz Negreiros

Lana Del Rey is back with her seventh studio release, ‘Blue Banisters’, tomorrow – and off social media indefinitely. A full decade after she blew up with her viral hit Video Games, it’s worth asking; can an artistic persona pull through the social media age, or is it meant to be destroyed by parasocial relationships (and rivalries) we form with the people behind them?

When I first heard the opening lines of Lana Del Rey’s 2019 record ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell!’, I was perplexed. God-damn man child, the Manhattan singer croons. You fucked me so good that I almost said, I love you. Wasn’t this self-assured narrator just singing about how he hit me and it felt like a kiss?

Around the time ‘NFR’, as it’s known, came out, Duncan Cooper of Vice boldly claimed that if it wasn’t for Lana Del Rey, there would be no Billie Eilish or Lorde. Many found Cooper’s article to be strangely venomous towards a certain Taylor Swift, but Lana’s admirers’ aggressive defensiveness may come from a place of near-trauma. That trauma was the early 2010s, and the way social media viciously tore into the decade’s first musical star – Lana Del Rey. Last year, Elizabeth Grant (Lana Del Rey’s given name) defended herself against a slew of critics that now adored her – in a puzzling, potentially career-finishing statement.

Long gone are the days of the mid-century nymphet singing about riches and fame; in 2020, the woman known as Lana Del Rey concluded her transformation into a real-life person, who makes music about the uncomplicated life of a waitress handling the heat. It’s as if, when she sang in ‘NFR’s The Greatest, back in 2019, the culture is lit and I had a ball, I guess I’m signing off after all, she really was.

Go play your video games: an (internet) star is born – and killed

Recently, in an act of revisionist history, Pitchfork rescored some of their past album reviews. Among them was Del Rey’s debut, 2012’s ‘Born To Die’, bumped from a 5.5. to a 7.8. Now that the singer has clawed her way into industry acceptance, it’s easy to forget that Pitchfork’s middling review was not an anomaly at the time; in fact, they were far kinder than others. Evan Rytlewski of the A.V. Club, for example, called ‘Born To Die’ shallow and overwrought, with periodic echoes of Ke$ha’s Valley Girl aloofness. Oof.

But, for better or worse, she was a trailblazer. When Cooper pinpointed Lana Del Rey as the predecessor of Lorde and others, he didn’t just mean as the first internet sad girl (something which YouTuber bambasalad broke down perfectly). Lana may have been the first pop artist to do what is now a weekly occurrence: to blow up solely on the back of online hype. That’s exactly the reason why Paul Harris of the Guardian was quick to call her an example of modern fame.
In October 2011, a video spread like a wildfire in the multimedia sharing platform Tumblr; it was simply titled Lana Del Rey – Video Games. The song was lush, grandiose, profoundly romantic; the video, an apparently homemade collage of old Hollywood fixtures, grainy home movies, and Lana herself. The next twelve months would be a whirlwind for Elizabeth Grant, the quiet singer who had been trying to make it for years – now Lana Del Rey.

A few months later, Lana Del Rey dropped her second music video, Blue Jeans. Her few live shows sold out. She was nominated for and won awards. Normally, this would signal a clear upward trajectory; but, as fast as she rocketed towards cultural adoration, she imploded on the very same place it had started – online.

The smoke started rising as the internet caught wind of Elizabeth Grant’s origins. An inspiring rags-to-riches story? Turns out she’s a millionaire’s daughter. A DIY music video and song? Apparently, she’s backed by Interscope, a major label. Even the reveal that her obviously fake stage name had been picked by her management read as betrayal.

But the true fire starter was an appalling Saturday Night Live performance in January of the following year, which was trashed by everyone from anonymous bloggers to NBC News anchor Brian Williams (who called it one of the worst outings in the show’s history). At the time, the singer lamented to Rolling Stone: there’s a backlash to everything I do. True, that. By the time ‘Born To Die’ came out, two weeks later, the public was already cold.

The culture is lit and I had a ball: from redemption arc to cancelation

How did Lana Del Rey survive such a disastrous start of her career, fuelled by one of the most ferocious (and, as many have pointed out, misogynistic) character assassinations in recent memory?

According to Reddit user gabachoelotero, it happened through sheer grit and fan adoration. These were crucial not just for Lana Del Rey’s progress, but for her triumph. Lana kept on releasing music, all the while continuing to hone her glamorous persona through sound, aesthetics, and fashion.

As Lana carried on the fantasy – draping herself in the American flag, double-cosplaying as Jackie and Marilyn, and playing the troubled nymphet – it continued attracting controversy. One of her critics was Lorde herself, who said the gloomy singer’s world was unhealthy for young girls. In a culture that increasingly pushed for self-awareness, Lana’s out-of-touch dreamscape made many uneasy.

Still, her fan base grew, steady and ferocious, until, in 2019, she got her due. ‘NFR’ was a certified critical darling. It nabbed the singer two Grammy nominations; Pitchfork called her one of America’s greatest living songwriters. But, with Lana Del Rey, there is always a twist.

The day is May 21st, 2020. Lana Del Rey takes to Instagram with a question for the culture…. In her text post, which garnered over 1.6 million likes in a day, she says she is disgruntled with how her music is being treated by the critics, in comparison to other female artists. She protests about how other singers found success with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, cheating – while she has faced backlash for singing about sometimes submissive or passive roles in relationships. Many noticed that the other artists she compared herself to favorably – Doja Cat, Camila Cabello, Beyonce, and others – were almost all women of color. It was – as Twitter put it relentlessly – a bad look.

To make it worse, Elizabeth Grant proved she had no awareness whatsoever of how the cancel culture machine operates, and later committed the cardinal sin; defending herself. Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever call me racist, because that is bullshit, she cried.

It was bad, really bad. Even I could tell her career was over.

Question for the culture: are we done with artistic personas?

Looking back at Lana Del Rey’s trajectory, it’s safe to say playing the part got to her – and to us. But she hasn’t quit; since her infamous outburst, she’s released a poetry book and an album – ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’, which garnered positive reviews. Now, she’s back with ‘Blue Banisters’. The album’s first single, Arcadia, sees her tally the usual; cars, hotels, heartache, and, of course, America – a word she has alluded to so often it no longer resembles anything real.

But there is something truthful here, as was on her last outing. In Arcadia, Lana Del Rey may still be singing her brand; but now she’s on the outside looking in. She no longer sounds cool and detached – on her chorus, her voice quivers. When she promoted the song on Instagram, she said; ‘listen to it if you listened to video games’. Then, she dipped.

Only Lana Del Rey herself can say until when she intends to chase her fictional muse; her new, unpolished sound makes it seem like she’s retired it for a new, permanently offline one. Maybe the only way to have an artistic persona nowadays is to disengage completely, or else your social media presence will find a way to break the veneer.

Revisiting Lana Del Rey’s magnum opus, Video Games, a decade later, I find it has now the same quality of a precious antique. It’s the product of a time where the internet was radically different, as was our relationship to the artists we listened to.

In 2011, all I knew about Lana Del Rey was what she told me; that she was an elusive ‘vamp of constant sorrow’, as Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone once profiled her. Hell, she might have not been a real person, for all I know – with no real intent, thoughts, politics. Now I know far, far too much.

Recycle, repackage, remix

Posted on September 6, 2021 | by Kaitlyn Davies

Perhaps this is overstating the obvious, but the music industry has seen some seismic changes over the last 18 months. Live gigging ground to a halt, and despite several false starts in attempts to reopen, shows little promise of returning to pre-pandemic levels any time soon. NFTs caught everyone’s attention, and then lost many of us in an open sea of whales and ballooning price tags. The influence of TikTok, criticism of Spotify, and the visibility of Bandcamp all reached critical mass. But lately, there’s another trend I’ve picked up on — one that’s silently crept onto playlists, internet radio broadcasts and record label catalogues: the remix album.

Remix albums aren’t new. It only takes a quick search through Discogs to find countless remix releases of Janet, Britney, and Mariah 1990s and 2000s radio hits. Underground producers have been reworking each other since the turntable entered into music consciousness. While remixes can offer artists the opportunity to collaborate across genres, or lend quantized kickdrums to songs you might not otherwise hear on club sound systems, it’s in the shadow of platform capitalism that I find myself increasingly critical of the format.

Platform capitalism, as documented in Nick Srnicek’s book of the same name, finds music consumption on grounds predicated by network effects and data mining. When music’s commodity form becomes one that is highly shareable, traceable, and monetizable, where do we draw the line between albums as means of artistic expression, and pieces of content to be upsold?

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Two remix albums that have particularly caught my eye in the last year come from opposite ends of the pop spectrum. In June, Kelly Lee Owens presented a collection of remixes from her 2020 release, Inner Song, with reimagined entries from Roza Terenzi, Coby Sey, and Lorraine James, to name a few. Here, the remix album is a testament to the community in which Owens is situated — the release speaks not to a single genre but to many, a prism refracting the many shades which have come to light up electronic music production.

On the other side of the remix rainbow is Dua Lipa’s Club Future Nostalgia, released at the end of summer 2020, and weeks before her Guinness World Record-setting livestream Studio 2054. The album, with remixers running the gamut from up-and-coming to big-room superstars, strikes me as not much more than a marketing campaign, a recycling of sounds to fuel the major label steam train. While I’m happy to see the likes of Jayda G and Midland score this level of visibility (and the large paychecks that surely followed), I can’t help but feel this release is more reappropriation than remix.

So, when does remixing become repackaging? When does community building become social climbing? In ruminating on answers to these questions I find myself, as I often do when thinking about the function of music as talisman of both financial and cultural capital, arriving at the conclusion that a one-size-fits-all consideration is not going to provide sufficient space to explore and be critical of the platformed music ecosystem. If Kelly Lee Owens and Dua Lipa represent opposing ends of a spectrum rather than diametrically opposed rivals, perhaps that allows us to situate Lady Gaga’s recent Dawn of Chromatica remix album somewhere in middle — an opportunity for her record label to gleefully send out Spotify push notifications, and an excuse to play LSDXOXO for my mom.

Developments in Web 3 technology also offer new opportunities for remix to break out of its commodified jewel case. Though attribution models on user generated content platforms have helped to mitigate and adjudicate copyright claims on unlicensed remixes, and licensed remixes are indeed becoming more widespread (case in point: this Eris Drew remix of Alanis Morissette’s recent single, or the B-52s, Britney Spears and Rob Zombie mashup that has taken TikTok by storm), both ameliorations are based on an ownership model which struggles to credit and compensate both the remixer and the derivative artist equitably. New decentralised ownership models, proposed by the likes of The Song That Owns Itself and Songcamp, renegotiate the relationship between a song and it’s owner, and propose meaningful integration of community into the commodity status of a song. What if remix albums started to look more like DAOs and less like marketing ploys? Platforms which rely on endless streams of individualised content might not be thrilled, but it sounds like music to my ears.

You can follow Kaitlyn on Twitter and learn more about her work with CO:QUO here.

Our changing relationship with music and its new practical function

Posted on August 18, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

back in my day music players

Music executives need to understand how shifting context and function have changed music consumers and their expectations.

Guest contribution by Thiago R. Pinto.
Portuguese version.

Part I

So, the music industry has changed. If you haven’t been living in a cave for the past 15 years you probably noticed. For those who need to catch up, here are the 3 main points that summarize it:

increased access to the means of production;
increased access to information;
democratization of distribution channels.

But some things remain unchanged by this digital revolution. Royalties distribution, for example. The correct distribution of copyright royalties is still a headache for composers, musicians and labels. Despite music having been practically dematerialised and living on networks where everything is trackable. Companies like Kobalt are trying to change this game, but we still have a long way to go until we get this right. This is an issue that deserves its own article, so I’ll leave it for now.

Among the lasting habits that have been practically untouched along these 15 years, my personal highlight goes to a mantra I hear in every conference, article and talk about music. It goes something like this: people’s emotional/behavioural relationship with music hasn’t changed. We still love music the way we always did.

Part II

A couple of weeks ago I was reading a report published by Vevo where in its introduction Erick Huggers, Vevo’s CEO, once again repeats the mantra:

vevo report

Well, I don’t know where Huggers and others are looking, but I can’t believe that they still don’t see something that it’s in everyone’s face. This relationship has changed! C-H-A-N-G-E-D. I would write it upside down if I could.

Before we move on with the subject, I just want to make one thing clear: yes, music still moves crowds of people. Yes, it is more listened than ever. And yes, artists still have a lot of influence. However that doesn’t mean people still relate to music the same way they used to.

Probably there is no other cultural activity that is so universal, that permeates, affects and shapes human behaviour as much as music, said Alan P. Merriam in The Anthropology of Music. However, music’s own definition evokes a variety of philosophical, cultural and even political questions. Musicologists suggest that its definition is directly related to the social context and function of certain behaviours in a particular culture. In my opinion, these two words — context and function — define a fundamental element, so many times forgotten, of the discussion: the formation of our musical preferences.

The changes in the way we build our tastes and preferences are the things that should be analyzed, so that we can understand why today music has a new function and also why we can no longer blindly support ourselves on arguments like the one above by Huggers, especially if it is presented in an music industry context. To understand context, function and how today these issues have altered people’s relationship with music, we must go back in time.

Part III

Music always had context and function. In the early days, when we were still just tribes, music used to have spiritual functions. Variety didn’t exist, neither was music entertainment. One’s tribe music was all that there was to listen to and it was directly related to celebration of the tribe’s beliefs. In other words, music was attached to religion. In this context, forget about music preference. People will listen to what the Chief says.

We evolved into more complex societies where we began to be divided into social classes. There were the nobles, the bourgeois, and the clergy. Then came everyone else. At this time the culture each one of these groups had access to, was a fundamental tool for social distinction. For the rich there were good instruments, good musicians, and concert halls. There was classical music. For the rest there were rudimentary instruments, self-taught musicians and taverns. There was folk music. In that context, musical preference was a status symbol and it showed to which social class one belonged.

2 hippies at a festival — Music had a fundamental roll in the formation of the hippie culture, being a tool for the creation of a collective identity.

During the 20th century the development of consumer societies gave new meaning to all goods produced. Especially after World War II, we started living in a society where for the first time supply was greater than demand. At this point there were a great number of companies offering very similar products and services. The technical differentiation between these goods gave space to brand personality construction and so we began consuming products not only for their quality but also because we identify with them. We started to use consumption as a way to build individual and collective identities.

In this process, cultural goods — specially music — were extremely important. Musical preference was a key element in defining ones personality, particularly among the youth. It was what defined which group a person belonged to, which ideology he or she followed, and in what values he or she believed in, independent of what was his or hers social-economical background. In that context, music preference was about identity.

Part IV

We arrived at the beginning of the 21st century and all these functions — spiritual, social and identity building — still exist. The difference is that now they’ve lost strength and no longer are the pillars that define our musical preference. The 3 key elements of the digital revolution (access to the means of production, access to information and democratization of distribution channels) created a new context to music consumption having a direct impact in the way new generations are building their musical preferences.

Never before in history have we had access to so much music, for such a low cost and at such a high speed. The access difficulty, which in my opinion was a key element in keeping our preferences so narrow, was eliminated from the equation. At 15 (in 1998) I had a proud collection of roughly 100 CDs as a result of the musical choices I made. Today a teenager with the same age has access to humanity’s music library only a few clicks away.

Part V

The platforms in which we consume music have also changed. The introduction of the iPod started transforming music consumption into a private experience which allowed people to try out new music genres without worrying about their social image.

Listening to music on the metro — Music consumption habits were strongly impacted by the introduction of digital portable devices and headphones.

Through the ease of access and popularization of new platforms, music started being ubiquitous. The frontiers to experimentation were then opened and brought new tastes and the permission for listeners to break up the social identity chains of each genre allowing the free flow between a variety of different styles of music. It was the beginning of the process that freed music from its function as an identity building tool. At this point a new function for music emerges: the practical function.

Part VI

Music started to be used according to the activities and tasks that listeners were performing during their daily routines. Like this, music preference that before was an almost immutable passion built through context, today looks like a chameleon changing from moment to moment.

We are living the age of “I love this music, but at the right moment”, we see the creation of a generation of eclectics that use music in very practical ways, a generation where the mood related to an activity is more important than genre. Need to study? Downtempo or classical. Going to the gym? EDM or hip-hop. Time for cooking? Indie folk or jazz. Going to a party? Techno or trap. In other words, the experience is not in the music itself, but in what we do while while listening to it. In this context it is interesting to realize how we can look at today’s music services with new eyes. Last.fm is a great example.

Last.fm was one of the first social networks to use music to establish connections between users based on their music preferences. It identifies all tracks and the related artists played by its users and utilizes this data to build a personal music history. The initial goal was that from this list of most played artists the user’s musical preferences would arouse. If a person listens to Beethoven, Mozart and Bach a lot then classical music must be his or her preference.

But following the aforementioned argument, that music today has a practical function in people’s life, we can not accept this conclusion so fast. Classical music today is consumed a lot by people while they work and, in this case, we have to also consider that classical may not be their preference, but just the genre that follows her main daily activity: work. If the tasks we perform during the day are what are going to define what we will listen, and not our musical preference for a specific genre, than we can say that today, Last.fm does not present the musical preferences of its users, but a list of the activities they engage the most in.

While in Last.fm’s case we can consider that this data is generated “accidentally” as a service sub product, to Spotify the perception of the new practical function of music was fundamental to the development of its UX.

Spotify was one of the first major services to understand that to this new generation of listeners, the stars of streaming services are not songs and artists, but playlists and moods. Spotify’s user experience is built around these two elements, because the company understood that its users do not solely use the service for contemplation, but use music as a fuel for another activity. It was the first time I saw a service put together moods and genres side by side, presenting a perfect mirror for this profound change in music consumption behaviour.

By focusing on moods and playlists, Spotify helps its users to quickly find a perfect selection of music to whatever activity he or she is engaging in, without having the headache of searching through 30 million songs to find the perfect ones for the moment.

Spotify workout playlists

Spotify mood playlists — Spotify and its long list of mood and activity playlists.

Part VII

Now that we‘ve gone through the new practical function of music, how it changed the formation of our musical preferences, how it changed our relationship with music and finally how we can have a new look on services and business strategies, I want to go back to the focal point to this article which is the mantra “we still love music the same way we always did”. I’ll once again quote Vevo’s CEO Erick Huggers to present my counterpoints:

“Music creates transformative experiences. It has the power to connect people in personal and meaningful ways unlike any other medium.”

No, it is not music that creates the experience. Music is the background that helps to set the mood. The activity which people are engaging in is what connects people (with themselves or others). It is the Saturday lunch with friends, the picnic at the park, the music festival with 40.000 people in the middle of the desert.

“For music fans, it’s an essential part of how they live their day-to-day lives.”

I believe this statement is true only if we understand that music is an essential part of this new generation of listeners, because it gives the key to the activities they will engage in and not because — like in the past — it was used to build their personal and collective identities.

“Finding the songs and melodies that speak to them directly and reflect their unique personas isn’t so much a desire, but a need.”

Here is the big issue. Music for new generations is not about reflecting their unique personas, but a mirror of the activity he or she is performing. Music was once a question of loyalty and identity. Today it’s a good consumed according to moments. So the musical preferences of these listeners is much more flexible and no longer the reflection of their identities.

Part VIII

Whether this new perspective is something bad or good for music is not up to me (or especially to this article) to say. What is important here is that this revolution cannot be stopped. It is a continuous process of gradual transformation where the individual is in charge. It is a self regulating revolution where it is not up to industries and businesses to control it, but to really understand its culture, values, rules and players. We should not perceive this new listener from a conservative viewpoint or as an enemy to the music establishment. We should analyze it from an evolutionary standpoint where the listener is the transformation agent in a radical change in the social consumption relations.

Futurism is a science that usually gets its predictions wrong because it is done in large by people who look at technology and numbers (and because it is just damn hard to see what’s coming). Technology can change people’s behaviour, but only if it is the right time for it, in the right context. Numbers can sometimes be misleading. If you only look at the big numbers you might miss the small ones which are the real indicators of transformation. The real challenge in futurism is to predict how our behaviour is going to change. Borrowing from Tom Vanderbilt’s excellent article:

“When technology changes people, it is often not in the ways one might expect.”

Technology changed the way we listen to music and as a result we changed the way we feel about it. We should start considering that people are no longer loving music, but that they just like it. Or are even just using it. But what is more important is that only when we understand these changes, will the music industry be able to create services, products and business models that are in tune with this new listener.

This is a guest contribution by Thiago R. Pinto.