Lana Del Rey announces new album, defends "submissive" lyrics, and lashes out at other female artists
As reported by Pitchfork, Lana Del Rey has announced a new album, her follow-up to last year’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, with a wide-ranging Instagram post that is actually mostly about her opinions on other female artists and what she sees as an unfair double-standard to how her lyrics are treated in comparison to music from “Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani, and Nicki Minaj, and Beyoncé.” She says they’ve all “had number one songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating, etc.” while she’s “crucified” for writing songs about “being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money.”
She says she’s “fed up” with “female writers and alt singers” saying she glamorizes abuse when she’s just “a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all over the world.” The post goes on to say that she’s “not a feminist” but that there “has to be a place in feminism” for women like her who “[say] no but men hear yes” and who “are slated mercilessly for being their authentic, delicate selves” but have their stories and voices “taken away from them by stronger women or by men who hate women.” Del Rey concludes the post by saying that she’ll cover these topics in her next two poetry books as well as her new album, which comes out on September 5.
That, as you can probably expect, is not the end of this. Del Rey’s post is getting absolutely dragged on social media—especially by fans of the artists she criticized—with Uproxx gathering up reactions like, “Lana’s post would have been fine if she hadn’t compared herself to a group of mostly black women with the clear tone that she thinks she’s been treated worse by the media when that’s observably untrue.” Others note that being successful hasn’t stopped any of the women she mentioned from being criticized unfairly, and yet Del Rey is setting herself up as “a martyr for the cause.”