Lana del Rey and the transgressions of conservatism
Normcore in widescreen
A question which has come to me repeatedly of late is this: If the arts sector is overwhelmingly progressive, how can there be anything transgressive about producing art with a progressive message? A progressive artist is about as rebellious as a libertarian tech-entrepreneur.
This is not to say that there is anything more disruptive about being a committed contrarian. This just becomes its own form of conformism after a while; it is only to identify that there is a disjunct between seeing one’s art as a challenge to society yet also producing art in utter accordance with the values of the social milieu which surrounds its maker.
Often, perhaps as a way to avoid this question a debate is carried out as to whether it’s even possible to be a conservative artist – whether the act of creativity itself is so intrinsically progressive as to make producing art with conservative politics an inherent contradiction in terms. As well as being obviously erroneous – there are plenty of conservative and even right-wing artists, with the novel a particular stronghold of the romantic reactionary – this mistakes the politics of an artwork as being the same of the politics of its creator.
We’ve seen before that creators often seem only dimly aware as to the politics of their own artworks create; there was a particularly absurd discussion a while back as to whether Kate Bush was a ‘Tory’ given her stated admiration for Theresa May, ignoring that the values of Kate Bush’s art have always been exemplarily progressive in a way not reducible to the position its creator takes in regard to electoral politics. In living progressive values, writing ‘Kashka from Baghdad’ in 1976 might count more than say one’s views on the pension triple lock.
You could argue that the positions can also be inversed; that a radical artistic stance can be used to mirror or obscure the essential conservatism of its creator. One of the UK’s most genuinely radical and experimental artists of the last fifty years, Mark E Smith of ‘The Fall’, always made media appearances in a spirit of paradigmatic reactionary conservatism. And you could argue that attitude, so off-putting to many a liberal arts journalist, was just the mirror of the transgressive formal content he was producing in the art itself. I suspect, though, that in his personal life Smith was just the grumpy reactionary he portrayed himself as being, or that as is typical his performance and person merged over time.
The logic of that would be that there were artists progressive in their personal politics who produce works of innately conservative messaging or instincts. Which brings us to the singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey.
Del Rey’s public presentation is as a relatively normy, reasonably contemporary liberal. In her work, we certainly couldn’t say that Del Rey is purely conservative in formal terms; although her ballads have always leant into classic widescreen Americana, with sweeping strings and melodies, they’ve also always consistently incorporated disruptive elements of trap beats, odd samples and expletives. Starting an album named after Normal Rockwell with
Goddamn, man-child
You fucked me so good that I almost said, "I love you"
doesn’t exactly scream of the 1950s mores the title references. The album is after all called ‘Norman fucking Rockwell!’. At the same time, conservatism is present in even her music’s most modern elements, such as her overlaying of beats on a sermon on her latest album; the most discordant sounds of her record are fused with its most conservative messages. I suppose you could say that Del Rey is trad in the same way as most people are trad these days, i.e., not really.