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This year it’s the turn of the young American singer Lana Del Rey, whose enigmatic ‘Video Games’ was a hit at the end of last year. In the way of these things, many pop fans felt they had discovered this song for themselves, possibly on YouTube, via Twitter and Facebook. For myself, my trusty carrier pigeon brought news that this slightly blank young woman with the staring eyes was a significant new talent, with at least one song worth listening to. In the event, ‘Video Games’ was a riddle wrapped in a press release inside a marketing campaign. Although whispery and loaded with pent-up meaning, it did what pop songs are supposed to do: it made you like it on first hearing, and even more on second and third hearing. But it didn’t last. After a dozen or so plays, I only had to hear that doomy intro on radio and I wanted to scream. Pop music can be cruel that way. Something superficially similar, such as Kate Bush’s ‘The Man with the Child in his Eyes’, still gives me the shivers nearly 35 years on. Lana’s tune didn’t last as many days. It’s not her fault, but people are blaming her anyway.
The sheer irresponsibility of hype is something we all understand. It was a business decision to give little Lana the big push, based on one alluring song and, let’s be frank here, a number of alluring photographs. Then came the news that Lana Del Rey wasn’t her real name. Born Elizabeth Grant in New York City in 1986, she had already released albums and singles under other guises and made no impression at all. So she changed her style, her name and her facial expression and re-emerged as a different act. For some reason people feel aggrieved by this. I’m not sure that the world’s most famous pop star of the moment answered to the name ‘Gaga, L’ during roll-call at her New York school (if there was such a thing), but no one worries about that: they are too busy spreading scurrilous rumours that she was born a man.
There remains in pop music an ancient, visceral prejudice against musicians ‘not paying their dues’. If Del Rey had spent years gigging in sleazy dives, she might have acquired some of this vital credibility and authenticity. The Black Keys, who have also ascended to rock celebrity in recent months, have been plugging away for years and are much admired for this by sweaty boy critics. Whereas Del Rey has to spend most interviews denying that she has had her lips done. She is only 25, for God’s sake. There’s an element of cruelty in all this, fuelled, one assumes, by jealousy, bitterness and, of course, good old-fashioned misogyny.
But what of the music? I’m not sure it matters much. Her songs don’t do a lot for me, but nor does 97 per cent of the stuff played on Radio 1. The problem seems more fundamental than that. Young women are selling more records than ever before, but my word the crap they have to put up with. Anyone who has seen those old Top of the Pops shows from the 1970s will have marvelled at an era in which female singers actually wore clothes. Only last week, fashion troll Karl Lagerfeld handed down his severest judgment when he averred that Adele was too fat. It’s clear from her interviews that Lana Del Rey is horrified by all the abuse she has received, to the extent that she wonders why she is bothering. I sympathise. For the first time I can recall, the backlash has started almost before the career. Would a man be treated like this? Do we even need to ask the question?
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