No, I’m Not ‘Anti-Feminist’ For Loving Lana Del Rey’s Music
My adolescence was a pitiful mesh of self-loathing and existential despair. The utopian mind-state of childhood unravelled like yarn; all colours muted, all darkness intensified. The care-free campness of school disco playlists had no place in this hormone-fuelled dystopia, so I was left to seek out my own soundtrack.
Naturally, I turned to the bands stamped across H&M t-shirts. Tumblr taught me to pour all parts of myself into their pain-soaked lyrics. Each bleak feeling could easily be defined by a line from a song. Nirvana, Joy Division, Radiohead, all different hues of the same blue. Then came the anthems for the heavy-fringed outcast; My Chemical Romance, Green Day, Linkin Park. For three minutes at a time, there was solidarity in our sadness. But it became apparent that my Spotify playlists were severely devoid of female voices and, for a teenage girl raised by a single mother, I was in desperate need of that sense of familiarity.
Cue Lana Del Rey’s ‘Born To Die’; a wide-eyed tale of what it was to be young and in love; a full-length feature of baroque-pop played out in glorious technicolour. Del Rey’s dewy vocals bounced like sunlight off the cinematic highs of orchestral synths, but it was her dying need to be defined by her lovers that drew me in at first breath.
