Podium | Belgian GP 2023

Somewhere between Britney and Billie Eilish, liberated by social media and their direct relationship with fans, millennial and Gen Z women claimed the right to be complicated pop auteursRead all of the essays in the decade retrospective

📷 Laura Snapes Mon 25 Nov 2019 13.12 GMT 174

While Billie Eilish has reinvented pop with her hushed SoundCloud rap menace, creepy ASMR intimacy and chipper show tune melodies, there’s also something reassuringly comforting about her: as a teenage pop star, she has fulfilled her proper duty by confusing the hell out of adults. It’s largely down to her aesthetic: a funhouse Fred Durst; a one-woman model for the combined wares of Camden Market. Critics have tried to make sense of it, but when editorials praised Eilish��s “total lack of sexualisation”, she denounced them for “slut-shaming” her peers. “I don’t like that there’s this weird new world of supporting me by shaming people that may not want to dress like me.”To Gen Z’s Eilish, not yet 18, it is a weird new world. She and her millennial peers have grown up in a decade in which pop’s good girl/bad girl binary has collapsed into the moral void that once upheld it, resulting in a generation of young female stars savvy to how the expectation to be “respectable” and conform to adult ideas of how a role model for young fans should act – by an industry not known for its moral backbone – is a con. “It’s a lot harder to treat women the way they were treated in the 90s now, because you can get called out so easily on social media,” Fiona Apple – who knows about the simultaneous sexualisation and dismissal of young female musicians – said recently. “If somebody does something shitty nowadays, a 17-year-old singer can get on their social media and say, ‘Look what this fucker did! It’s fucked up.’”📷 Lunatics conquering the asylum ... the Spice Girls. Photograph: Tim Roney/Getty ImagesFemale musicians have been subject to conflicting moral standards for longer than Eilish has been alive. Madonna, Janet Jackson and TLC knew them well – but the concept of the pop “role model”, expected to set an example to kids, solidified when the Spice Girls became the first female act to be marketed at children. In the 70s and 80s, idols such as David Cassidy primed girls for a monogamous future. By comparison, the Spice Girls were lunatics conquering the asylum. But, given their fans’ youth – and the sponsors that used the band to reach them – they also had a duty of responsibility. Their real lives – the all-nighters and eating disorders – were hidden so effectively that Eilish, born in 2001, thought the band was made up, actors playing the roles of the group in Spiceworld: The Movie.In the late 90s, kid-pop became an industry unto itself: Smash Hits and Top of the Pops magazine pitched younger; CD:UK and America’s TRL aimed at Saturday-morning and after-school audiences; Simons Fuller and Cowell built empires. The scrappy Spice Girls preceded the cyborgian Britney, who was a far sleeker enterprise – until she wasn’t. She was pitched as a virgin: cruel branding that invited media prurience and set a time bomb counting down towards her inevitable downfall. Britney’s 2007 breakdown revealed the cost of living as a virtuous cypher and being expected to repress her womanhood to sell to American prudes. Her shaved head and aborted stints in rehab prompted industry handwringing, and so an illusion of the music business offering greater freedom and care for pop’s girls emerged in her wake. Advertisement Major labels abandoned the traditional two-albums-in bad-girl turn (a la Christina Aguilera’s Stripped). Social media-born artists such as Lily Allen and Kate Nash were swept into the system and framed as the gobby antithesis to their manicured pop peers – until their resistance to exactly the same kind of manipulation saw them cast aside. And if Kesha, Lady Gaga or Amy Winehouse burned out, their visible excesses would distract from any behind-the-scenes exploitation, inviting spectators to imagine that they brought it on themselves.📷 Reclaiming the hard-partying values of rock’s men ... Kesha. Photograph: PictureGroup / Rex FeaturesAt the dawn of the 2010s, social media surpassed its teen origins to become an adult concern, and an earnest fourth wave of activists brought feminism back to the mainstream. Like a rescued hatchling, it was in a

pathetic state to begin with – dominated by white voices that tediously wondered whether anything a woman did was automatically feminist. Is brushing your teeth with Jack Daniel’s feminist? Are meat dresses feminist? Is drunkenly stumbling through Camden feminist? Are butt implants feminist?Pop culture became the natural test site for these ideas – especially music, where a new wave of artists challenged this nascent, often misguided idealism. Kesha reclaimed the hard-partying values of rock’s men to embody a generation’s despair at seeing their futures obliterated by the recession. Lady Gaga questioned gender itself, as one writer in this paper put it, “re-queering a mainstream that had fallen back into heteronormative mundanity”. In a career-making verse on Kanye West’s Monster, Nicki Minaj annihilated her male peers and gloried in her sexualisation. MIA, infuriated by America’s hypocritical propriety, flipped off the Super Bowl and proved her point by incurring a $16.5m fine.📷 Infuriated by hypocritical propriety ... MIA gives America the middle finger during her Super Bowl performance in 2012. Photograph: Christopher Polk/Getty Images Advertisement As a former Disney star, Miley Cyrus stepped the furthest out of bounds. In 2008, aged 15, she had posed in a sheet for Vanity Fair. “MILEY’S SHAME,” screamed the New York Post. She apologised to her fans, “who I care so deeply about”. But in 2013, she torched her child-star image by writhing in her knickers on a wrecking ball, twerking against Robin Thicke, being flagrant about her drug use, appropriating African American culture while perpetuating racist stereotypes.Cyrus’s 2013 transformation bore the hallmarks of a breakdown – especially witnessed two years after the death of Amy Winehouse, who was then perceived as a victim of her own self-destruction. But Cyrus was largely intentional about her work (if, then, ignorant of her racism). She had waited until she was no longer employed by Disney to express herself. Earlier in her career, she said, she struggled to watch her peers. “I was so jealous of what everyone else got to do, because I didn’t get to truly be myself yet.” Despite apparently smoking massive amounts of weed herself, she didn’t want to tell kids to copy her. But she knew the power she offered her peers such as Ariana Grande, who that year left Nickelodeon to release her debut album. “I’m like, ‘Walk out with me right now and get this picture, and this will be the best thing that happens to you, because just you associating with me makes you a little less sweet.’”Pop did get a little less sweet. Sia and Tove Lo sang brazenly about using drugs to mask pain. Icona Pop’s I Love It reigned (“I crashed my car into a bridge / I watched and let it burn”) thanks to its inclusion on the soundtrack of Lena Dunham’s Girls. With its aimless characters and their ugly behaviour, the show mirrored pop’s retreat from aspirational sheen, and the culture’s growing obsession with “messy” women and “strong female characters”: flawed attempts to create new archetypes that rejected the expectation of girls behaving nicely.📷 An explicit rejection of role-model status ... Beyoncé performs at the Super Bowl in 2013. Photograph: Ezra Shaw/Getty ImagesA new cohort of young female and non-binary critics shifted the discussion around music: in 2015, when the documentary Amy was released, they questioned how Winehouse was perceived in death compared to Kurt Cobain. They also pushed aside the virgin/whore rivalries of old. In an earlier era, Beyoncé and Lana Del Rey might have been fashioned into nemeses, one sexualised and powerful, the other gothic and demure. Instead, their respective mid-decade self-mythologising showed that female musicians could be pop’s auteurs, not just the men in the wings. Advertisement Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 album was an explicit rejection of her role-model status. She was 15 when Destiny’s Child released their debut album. “But now I’m in my 30s and those children that grew up listening to me have grown up,” she said in a behind-the-scenes video.

The responsibility she felt to them “stifled” her. “I felt like ... I could not express everything … I feel like I’ve earned the right to be me and express any and every side of myself.”It was the first of her albums to reveal the breadth of her inner life – the coexisting kinks, triumphs and insecurities, showing the complexity of black womanhood. The critic Soraya Nadia McDonald wrote: “Mixed in with songs about insecurity, grief, protest and the love she has for her child, Beyoncé manages to present her sexuality as a normal part of her life that deserves celebration.” “It doesn’t make you a bad mother. It doesn’t make black people look bad, and it doesn’t make you a bad feminist, either.” When Beyoncé emblazoned “FEMINIST” on stage at the 2014 MTV VMAs, she helped reclaim the word from middle-class white discourse.Like Beyoncé, Del Rey countered the idea that female pop stars were major-label puppets. She had struggled to make it as an indie artist but found a home at Polydor – a detail that caused detractors to question her authenticity. Her shaky debut SNL performance revealed the flaw in their thinking: if she was manufactured, wouldn’t she have been better drilled? Her project was potent, but startlingly unrefined. More intriguingly, she opposed fast-calcifying ideas about how feminist art should look: Del Rey’s lyrics revelled in submission and violence, in thrall to bad guys and glamour. It wasn’t feminist to want these things; but nor was it feminist to insist on the suppression of desire in the name of shiny empowerment.📷 Exposing industry machinations ... Azealia Banks at the Reading festival in 2013. Photograph: Simone Joyner/Getty Images Advertisement Del Rey’s lusts and designs were her own – pure female gaze – a hallmark of the defiant female pop stars to come. Rihanna said she was “completely not” a role model, a point driven home by the viscerally violent video for Bitch Better Have My Money. Lauren Mayberry of Scottish trio Chvrches refused to be singled out from her male bandmates and wrote searingly about the misogyny she faced online. Janelle Monáe and Solange rubbished the idea that R&B was the only lane open to young black women.They started revealing their business conflicts. In 2013, 21-year-old Sky Ferreira finally released her debut, six years after signing a $1m record deal. She was transparent about her paradoxical treatment: “They worked me to death, but when I wanted to input anything, it was like, ‘You’re a child, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’” When Capitol pulled funding for the album, she financed its completion: it was widely named an album of the year. Facing similar frustrations, rapper Angel Haze leaked her 2013 album, Dirty Gold, and Azealia Banks wasted no opportunity to expose industry machinations.The rise of Tumblr and SoundCloud put young artists in control of their own artistic identities, forging authentic fan relationships that labels couldn’t afford to mess with. Lorde was signed age 12, but her manager knew he had to follow her lead because she knew her audience better than he did. Halsey was already Tumblr-famous for her covers, hair colours and candour about her bisexuality and bipolar diagnosis when she posted her first original song in 2014. It received so much attention that the 19-year-old – who described herself as an “inconvenient woman” for everything she represented – signed to major label Astralwerks the following evening.A new type of fan arrived with them. The illusion of intimacy led to greater emotional investment – and with it, an expectation of accountability. Social media was being used to arbitrate social justice issues, giving long overdue platforms to marginalised voices, and establishing far more complex moral standards for pop stars than the executives who shilled Britney’s virginity could ever have imagined. In 2013, Your Fav Is Problematic began to highlight stars’ missteps: among Halsey’s 11 infractions were “sexualising Japanese culture” and allegedly falsifying her story about being “homeless”.Musicians, particularly of an

older guard, were unprepared. Lily Allen’s comeback single Hard Out Here, released in late 2013, satirised the impossible aesthetic standards expected of female musicians – a bold message undermined by the racist stereotypes she invoked to make her point: “Don’t need to shake my arse for you ’cause I’ve got a brain,” she sang, while black and Asian leotard-clad dancers twerked around her in the video. The backlash was swift. There was the sense of a balance tipping.📷 Refused to let terrorists suppress girls’ joy ... Ariana Grande at One Love Manchester, 4 June 2017. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/One Love Manchester/Getty Images Advertisement Over the decade, female pop stars steadily self-determined beyond the old limited archetypes. But the most dramatic identity shifts were still a product of adversity, women battling for control.In 2015, Ariana Grande provoked mild outcry when she got caught licking a doughnut she hadn’t paid for and declaring: “I hate America.” Two years later, a suicide bomber attacked her concert at Manchester Arena, leaving 22 dead. She went home to Florida in the aftermath, then returned to stage benefit concert One Love Manchester. A victim’s mother asked Grande to perform her raunchiest hits after the Daily Mail implied that the bomber had targeted the concert because of her sexualised aesthetic. So she did. By prioritising her mental health and refusing to let terrorists suppress girls’ joy and sexuality, she set a powerful example for fans that ran counter to the moralising of commentators such as Piers Morgan.Grande appeared to emerge from this tragedy – and the death of ex-boyfriend Mac Miller – with a renewed sense of what was important, and what really was not. Her next album, Sweetener, defiantly reclaimed happiness from trauma; she swiftly released another, Thank U, Next, abandoning traditional pop release patterns to work with a rapper’s spontaneity. “I just want to fucking talk to my fans and sing and write music and drop it the way these boys do,” she said.Kesha had helped instigate this decade of greater freedom for female musicians – or so it seemed until October 2014, when she sued producer Dr Luke, making allegations including sexual assault. (In spring 2016, a judge dismissed the case; Luke denies all allegations and is suing Kesha for defamation.) She claimed she was told she had to be “fun”, an image that Luke’s label intended to capitalise on, revealing how revelry could be just as confining as its prim counterpart. In 2017, she released Rainbow, her first album in five years. Addressing her trauma, it got the best reviews of her career – a response that also seemed to reveal something about the most digestible way for a female artist to exist. But her forthcoming album, High Road, pointedly returns to the recklessness of her first two records. “I don’t feel as if I’m beholden to be a tragedy just because I’ve gone through something that was tragic,” she said.Taylor Swift’s refusal to endorse a candidate in the 2016 election, and the fallout from a spat with Kanye West, saw her shred her image of nice-girl relatability with her 2017 heel-turn, Reputation. But she rebelled more meaningfully when she leveraged her profile to expose the music industry, alerting the public to otherwise opaque matters of ownership and compensation. She joined independent labels in the fight to make Apple Music pay artists for the free trial period it offered consumers. Earlier this year, she despaired at her former label, Big Machine, being bought – and the master recordings to her first six albums with it – by nemesis Scooter Braun, an option she claimed she was denied. Now signed to Universal, and the owner of her masters going forward, she hoped young musicians might learn from her “about how to better protect themselves in a negotiation”, she wrote. “You deserve to own the art you make.” Advertisement Swift’s formative politesse came from country music, an industry that emphasises deference to power and traditional gender roles. In 2015, consultant Keith Hill – using a bizarre metaphor about

salad – admitted that radio sidelined female musicians: they were then subject to endless questions about tomatogate, as if they had the power to fix it. But that blatant industry disregard freed female country artists to shuck off obligation and make whatever music they wanted. In recent years, Miranda Lambert, Ashley McBryde, Brandy Clark, Kacey Musgraves, Ashley Monroe, Maren Morris, Brandi Carlile and Margo Price have all creatively outstripped their male peers.📷 ‘Just me existing is revolutionary’ ... Lizzo. Photograph: Owen Sweeney/Invision/APTheir situation resonates beyond country: greater personal freedoms for female musicians haven’t equated to greater commercial success. Just because a wave of female pop acts have refused old industry ideals, that doesn’t mean control is consigned to the past. There will be young women enduring coercive music industry situations right now – whether manipulation or more serious abuse. Some may never meet those impossible standards, and fail to launch. Others may quietly endure years of repression before potentially finding their voice. There are high-profile female pop acts working today who control their work yet are still subject to grinding suggestions that they change to meet market demands, and noisy women from this decade who have been sidelined. The tropes of the self-actualised female pop star are so established that labels know how to reverse engineer “real” pop girls beholden to a script.But the emergence of a more holistic female star will make it harder for labels to shill substitutes. Their emotional openness has destroyed the stigma around mental health that was used to diminish female musicians as “mad” divas. Charli XCX said she would never have betrayed her vulnerabilities when she was starting out in her teens. “If I’m emotionally vulnerable,” she thought, “people won’t take me seriously … Now I just don’t care.” Robyn spent eight years following up her most successful record because she needed time to grieve and unpick the impact of her own teen stardom. Britney – who in 1999 told Rolling Stone, “I have no feelings at all” – this year cancelled her Las Vegas residency to prioritise her mental health. 📷 More to the floor: the decade the dancefloor was decolonised Read more Advertisement They’ve relentlessly countered the male gaze. Chris refused to simplify queerness for the mainstream; Kim Petras stood for “trans joy”; Rihanna challenged the idea of skinny as aspirational by creating inclusive fashion lines and candidly discussing her own shape. “Just me existing is revolutionary”, Lizzo has said, while Cardi B refused to let anyone use her past as a stripper undermine her legitimacy as a powerful political voice.Where unthinking messiness was valorised at the start of the decade, now imperfection only gets a pass as long as nobody else is getting hurt. This summer, Miley, now 26, apologised for the racial insensitivity of her Wrecking Ball era. Soon after, she posted striking tweets in response to rumours of her cheating on her husband. She admitted to having been hedonistic and unprofessional in her youth. But she swore she hadn’t cheated in her marriage. “I’ve grown up in front of you, but the bottom line is, I HAVE GROWN UP,” she wrote. (To a degree – not long after, she found herself called out again when she implied that queerness is a choice.)In their fallibility and resistance to commodification, the women who have defined this decade in pop look a lot more like role models than the corporate innocents sold to girls in the early millennium. They’re still learning, working with what they’ve got rather than submitting to what they’re told. “I don’t know what it feels like not to be a teenager,” Billie Eilish said recently. “But kids know more than adults.” … as you’re joining us today from South Africa, we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s high-impact journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5

million readers, from 180 countries, have recently taken the step to support us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.With no shareholders or billionaire owner, we can set our own agenda and provide trustworthy journalism that’s free from commercial and political influence, offering a counterweight to the spread of misinformation. When it’s never mattered more, we can investigate and challenge without fear or favour.Unlike many others, Guardian journalism is available for everyone to read, regardless of what they can afford to pay. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of global events, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action.We aim to offer readers a comprehensive, international perspective on critical events shaping our world – from the Black Lives Matter movement, to the new American administration, Brexit, and the world's slow emergence from a global pandemic. We are committed to upholding our reputation for urgent, powerful reporting on the climate emergency, and made the decision to reject advertising from fossil fuel companies, divest from the oil and gas industries, and set a course to achieve net zero emissions by 2030.

(Incomplete) Review of Lust For Life

This is the first half of my unfinished review of Lust For Life by Lana Del Rey written on my Wordpress (canwetalkaboutthatthing) which I’m trying to convince myself to finish. Also, all of the written things are my opinion AND I haven’t proofread or anything!

You would only have to know me for ten minutes to discover how much I love Lana Del Rey and her music. Despite the criticisms she has received for things she has said and the glorification of drugs, violence and death, I personally feel there is more to her than that; positives that outweigh the negatives. I feel she is a talented artist - musically, lyrically and visually - and she has a spirit as beautiful as her voice. However, I don't allow this worship of her to halt my own opinions of her music - ones that may differ from the mainstream critics that have already dissected her record - which leads me to this badly-introduced post on her newest album (forgive me, I'm rusty).

When she released Lust For Life this year I felt blessed with her new offering of music - and opinionated. Listening to her album on near-repeat throughout the end of summer and entirety of autumn has given me the chance to pull apart each track and decide precisely how I feel for them. Some I became hooked on immediately - I sang along, I cried and I recognised the familiar 'Lana Del Rey' vibe she consistently has in her previous albums. Others I felt unsettled with, as I couldn't connect to them nor did they have the traditional 'Lana' vibe. Not to say that they're bad songs, nor to say that they are objectively the lesser songs on the album, but in my own personal opinion some were not as favourable as others.

Beginning with the opening track, Love - her first release for the album - I was pleasantly and wonderfully surprised. Whilst it had some new additions to it (directing the song towards her beloved fans, referring to us as 'kids', the pleasant vibe which is rarely seen in a Lana Del Rey song) it still had the familiarity of her vaguely retro music and the lyrics including her favourite "vintage music". It's a beautiful song, easy to get into and gives you a warm vibe. Paired with the futuristic video of shooting stars, floating cars and a beaming Lana, it is a purely joyful and reflective song, paying homage to the fans that, like her, are just young and in love. It's the essence of the majority of her music - to be in love, to fall out of love. Love is a central theme for most of her songs and lyrics. This track takes a positive approach towards it, introducing the album with a lust for life.

This continues into the second single and second track of the album - Lust For Life - her first duet out of the five. It is still Lana with a hint of something new - the familiarity of the doo-wop music and the Americana references to Hollywood go beautifully with her ecstatic joy for life rather than the consideration that we're all really born for death. Once again Lana croons with The Weeknd (previously in Prisoner, Stargirl Interlude and at the end of Party Monster in The Weeknd's albums Beauty Behind The Madness and Starboy) and it's impossible to deny that their voices are made for each other. Both sweet and swooning, silken to listen to, they're a musical match made in heaven, and it makes the line "my boyfriend's back and he's cooler than ever" that much more adorable. Lyrically, the song is about the joys of being with that special someone, seeing the wondrous hope in the world and enjoying being alive, just stripping down and taking off your clothes to only enjoy one another's company - or perhaps "taking off" the serious wall around our true emotions and selves after the worrying events of 2017, an idea that's more believable due to the politically-aware theme of the album. Comparing Lana's almost spoken, low verses with a hint of smiling in her tone to her swooping, sing-a-long choruses, it's another track to make you feel good inside and want to twirl around on the H of the Hollywood sign with the person in your life.

Both of these tracks - happy, and featuring Happy Del Rey - are soon followed by the return of traditional Lana: a cinematic, sweeping opening, a quote from the vintage film (Carnival Of Souls) and devastated confessions of how it hurts to love someone but you can't help yourself: 13 Beaches. Once again, Lana has given us a song to cry over, to lie back and envision the gorgeous imagery she invokes throughout the song - sunlit beaches, dripping peaches and ballroom dancing (as randomly as it sounds). Though it is a song dedicated to the impossibility of being alone when you're famous, and the complicated relationship with fame (loving it and hating it), it can still be taken as a sweet song for a lost lover, and it's these interpretations that make her music on the whole so much more enjoyable for each person individually. It's pure Lana Del Rey, just as brilliant and upsetting as The Blackest Day, Pretty When You Cry or Blue Jeans - though feels slightly disconnected to a real love interest due to the roots of who it's really for: fame.

The fourth track, and one of the shortest, is decidedly my favourite. It's a song that fills me with so much joy as it does sadness that I can't resist it at all. It's a song I frequently listen to and sing along to as there are so many elements that make it so fabulous. Firstly, once again the Lana-isms return: stunning imagery of cherries, wine, rosemary and thyme, and the difficulty in loving a dangerous man who is no good for you. Secondly, the music itself - I think it's a fun and sexy song, especially when you see Lana perform it live - and it makes it that much more enjoyable to sing and dance to with friends. Thirdly, its connection to the previous song: In 13 Beaches, she delicately references to eating "dripping peaches", a stunning image. However, in Cherry, she informs us that her peaches are "ruined". It's a beautiful link, and she has often reused and linked lyrics in many songs before. In this album, peaches, black beaches and summer bummers are recycled in the first few tracks, linking these opening songs together - and connecting them further is the vibe. Moving onto the fourth thing I adore about Cherry is the swearing. Between verses and choruses, and at the end of the song, she exclaims a muffled "Fuck!", and peppers the latter half of the song with "Bitch". It's spiteful and sexy, a comeback that both deals with the emotions and ruin as well as calling out the one who made her snap. The insults honestly make it more fun, especially when you can shout them out loud when no one is around and imagine you're a sneering Lana looking down upon the man who destroyed the things she loved.

White Mustang, the second short track, takes a slightly different turn. Rather than being directly insulting towards the ne'er-do-well, she instead laments over him. He was a big man with a big car, clearly a dangerous man like the one who made her feel as if she was "smiling when the firing squad was against [her]" - the "revving"/"lightening" brings to mind danger and potential damage. It's a gentler song, with a soft piano throughout and slower choruses. This song is definitely a close favourite for me, keeping in line (once again) with recognisable Lana Del Rey imagery (cars/horses) and the dedication to a man she loved who she couldn't keep up the pace with. The switch from white Mustang the car to white mustang the horse is swift and cute, and my favourite part of the entire song is the whistling at the end. It brings along the slightly Western vibe, of a typical American cowboy which contrasts perfectly with the modernised addition of racing car sound effects. I just basically enjoy all these little things - subtle sounds and shifts that only layer it and add to the imagery.

"Summer"/"bummer" was a rhyming couplet in White Mustang and it only foreshadowed her next track (surprise, surprise, Summer Bummer). Her second duet and first of two with Asap Rocky (and Playboi Carti) begins with an entirely different piano vibe - a dark, quick paced throb of built-up energy which Lana flawlessly introduces. It feels big and explodes into a brilliant track starring Rocky in the second verse and in the backing vocals, but Lana has her own way of rapping: delicately listing "white lines and black beaches and blood red sangrias" to give it the summery vibe. This hip-hop track feels guided away from the usual Lana Del Rey but it's fresh and cool as a summer salad cucumber, her lazy vocals woven with her wavering warble towards the end of the track. It's not my favourite and I often prefer to skip Rocky's part (sorry) but it's still a great track.

Locky return with Groupie Love, my most likely close second on the album. I have to take a moment to mention how much I adore this song: the first time I listened to it, and most of the times following, I cried. I find the sweet lyrics, the gentle, bubbling music and the adorable, adoring tone so overwhelming. In some ways it's a parallel to White Mustang: both songs repeat their title over in the chorus, though whilst White Mustang sounds unhappy and longing, Groupie Love sounds radiant. It's a song that chokes me every time and returns to the theme of the follower of a brilliant man but this time rather than losing him or yearning for him, he returns his love to her. Rocky is sparkling on this track, his rap more low-key than his previous song, and their voices together remind me of the National Anthem video - the kisses they blew and the way they held each other as Jackie and John F Kennedy. The sweetest moment? The way they both sing "You and I, til the day we die." Lana and Rocky have sung together before (obviously on Summer Bummer but also on Ridin', an unreleased track) and they compliment one another wonderfully. Where The Weeknd and Lana share a similar voice that can drip like honey, Lana's lighter vocals oppose Rocky's harder, deeper tone, but it's just as beautiful, especially in a track so cute.

This to me is the where the best part of the album ends - seven strong tracks, definitively Lana Del Rey, each of them some of my favourite songs. When In My Feelings begins, I feel like the record takes a slight nosedive. In My Feelings is a song that I always feel is out of place. It doesn't feel quite like something Lana would sing to me, and whilst I understand she may experiment with styles and it's a song many fans favour, I can't connect with it. Does it have her smokey, filtered vocals? Of course, and they're as pretty as ever. Does it have the incredible imagery? Definitely: cigarette smoke, guns and coffee to name a few. However, it feels sort of empty, not quite with the rest of the album. It's a strong song aimed at a certain someone, warning them that she may be a beautiful rose but she's anything but delicate, unafraid to get her thorns out, and I can't say I don't enjoy the "tough bitch" she is expressing. But for me it just falls flat and doesn't quite feel right, especially when the bridge becomes a messy demonstration of her high notes that make it difficult to hear the lyrics. It's not a bad song but it's not the best.

Coachella - Woodstock In My Mind. I've been debating about this track for a while in all fairness. It has its positives but also its unmissable negatives, and usually I just skip the track rather than debate with myself whether or not I enjoy it as much as most of her other work or not. The message is excellent, where she sings of festivals and wondering about the future generations, and I like how Lana is taking the opportunity to use her music as a message to her impressionable fans - and get them thinking too. However, it doesn't feel quite polished and finished, the trap beats too heavy and the chorus a bit messy when it layers with several vocals. It feels like a hurried track, not yet ready for release out of production. I will say though, it did have heightened meaning to me following the Manchester terror attack this year, and after the tragic event occurred I found myself listening to Coachella at a whole new angle. I just can't consistently get into it as a song itself, nor can I relate to it.

God Bless America - And All The Beautiful Women In It is yet another song that just doesn't feel right to me. I'm not saying it's bad - it's quite beautiful - but it doesn't have the same vibe that made me fall in love with Lana's music a few years ago. Of course, she changes over time, and experiments, but to me I can't quite feel like I'm listening to a Lana Del Rey album. This is the point where you take the first few tracks and realise it doesn't sound anything in the same line as them; the music itself is different, a gentle guitar strum that brings to mind ABBA each time I hear it.

To be continued

I do love all of her music but this is an *attempted* non-bias, objective (ish, it hasn’t worked, I still gush about her) review of her music from my opinion.

UPDATE: -> Complete review <-

Christening with Celluloid

My husband does this thing whenever we move: we don’t rest until almost everything is unpacked and put away. We usually put our space together within 24 hours of arriving in a new home. As someone who is an absolute pig, this stresses me out in the short term. (In the long term, I think he’s a genius who knows that a clean space equals a peaceful mind.) By the time we haul our movies and books and furniture into our abode, I desperately need to unwind. The last two moves we’ve made (from Sioux City to LA and back to Sioux City), I did this by watching a movie. And each movie set the tone for my aesthetic, my expectations, and my journey in that home.

Upon arrival in Glendale, a San Fernando Valley suburb located literal blocks from Los Angeles proper, I settled down in my husband’s “gaming” chair and watched my Criterion BBS Story copy of the New Hollywood classic, Easy Rider. Not a new-to-me viewing, as I saw the movie before on the big screen thanks to the now defunct Film Train series at Sioux City’s cheap seats, the Riviera. (To whoever ran the Film Train: please bring it back, I promise I’ll attend more regularly, we took you for granted and I’m sorry!) The story resonated with me, not because I related to the two free-wheelin’, drug-dealin’ motorcyclists making their way to New Orleans, but because I had recently become acquainted with the diverse scenery of the United States.

The year before moving to LA, I visited the paternal side of my family’s home in New Orleans and my mom’s cherished white beaches of Pensacola. I spent days traveling between Iowa and California, driving through the American West for the first time, and I fell in love with the land in a way I didn’t know possible. Canyons and mountains and deserts and water, I experienced all the landscapes our beautiful country has to offer those lucky enough to travel it.

During my time in (and leading up to) Los Angeles, I grew more entranced by the Californian pop art of Ed Ruscha. I felt a sense of longing for the architectural institutions of the West (gas stations, the Hollywood sign, swimming pools). I also listened to Lana Del Rey non-stop, driving along the PCH and pretending the roads weren’t packed bumper-to-bumper, like in the days when Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim threw epic parties in Malibu, and further back still, when Salka Viertel hosted literary salons in Santa Monica. Something about Easy Rider also captured that bittersweet emotion of longing for the past of the West. (Though the film’s bikers’ violent end brings me back down to earth and ugly realities.)

I started my LA experience with an outdated perspective of California, a perspective built around the desert and Joni Mitchell and independent films directed by Dennis Hopper. I learned quickly from my short time there that my beloved vision of California exists on celluloid and in my heart, but the real city of Los Angeles thrives on industry types and naive people like me, desperate for stardust and working away for minimum wage, just for the luxury of living in the footsteps of the past. The world of Easy Rider can’t be found in the cities, but on the roads that lead to them.

Once I returned with my husband to Iowa, in order to start our beautiful family with a strong support system, we did what I’ve now grown accustomed to: we moved all of our stuff into the house and unpacked it within a single day. And once we had our living room reasonably arranged , we ordered pizza and I ran to RedBox to pick up a title praised out of Sundance but shunned by audiences during its theatrical run: Patti Cake$.

Danielle Macdonald went on the star in the Netflix original Dumplin’, but she gave her first crowd-pleasing, hype-generating performance as an aspiring rapper from New Jersey in Patti Cake$. I don’t know what Sony Pictures Classics did to mess up this release, but as far as I can tell, no one outside of film-centric circles even heard about this movie pre-release. Which is ridiculous, because Patti Cake$ isn’t arthouse or slow-paced or anything difficult to sell to the masses. It’s fun and also brought me to joyful tears by the end. (I still have a hard time listening to “Tuff Love (Finale)” without tearing up at the memory of Bridgett Everett’s character’s reaction to hearing the song.)

The movie focuses our sympathies on Patti’s longing for the glamor and success represented by the lights of the big city, just across the water from her hometown in Dirty Jersey. (Her choice of descriptor, not mine. I have nothing against Jersey.) She falls for and collaborates with the noise metal performance artist Basterd (a charming performance from Mamoudou Athie of Brie Larson’s directorial debut Unicorn Store) and makes killer beats with her lovable bandmate, Jheri (Siddharth Dhananjay). I still listen to the fire soundtrack; the songs hold up outside of the film’s context.

Every actor onscreen brings their A-game, but none as much as New York’s living legend and cabaret artist, Bridget Everett, as Patti’s bitter mother, Barb. In her youth, Barb sang with a hair metal band and had the pipes to make it big. (I haven’t seen the movie in a couple years now, so I don’t remember why she didn’t.) Her past emotional injuries keep her from supporting Patti in her dream of making a living in the music industry. Everett turns in a heartbreaking performance, so even when Barb says nasty things to Patti, like “act your race [white],” we still don’t hate her for it, because we understand she’s coming from a place of deep hurt and projecting that onto her daughter.

Patti Cake$ helped me usher in a new era of my life, an era of self-discovery and self-improvement. I see a lot of myself in Patti, like most audience members probably do, longing for city lights and big dreams. My story doesn’t end like hers. In fact, I don’t consider myself having reached an ending at all. I admire the passion and creativity she puts into her art. I hope to carry that flame from the screen and into my real life. Since moving back to my hometown, I’ve achieved things I never thought possible for me: I’ve written scripts and stories and put my words out into the world, I’ve turned in performances of roles I never dreamed of playing, I achieved more at my day job than I thought possible. While I could allow myself to wallow and feel stuck in this relatively small city, I’m going to follow Patti’s lead and make the art I want.

What movies have you christened homes with? How do they reflect on that period of your life, if at all?

Dark Paradise

Dark Paradise by Lana Del Rey

Spencer, Spencer, Spencer.

I woke up to find Aria shaking me.

“Spencer. Spencer!” she called as my eyes snapped open. I groaned when I saw her, Hanna, and Emily around me.

“What are you guys doing here?”

“You know today is the first day of school, right?” Emily asked. “We have half an hour before school starts.”

I just groaned again. I closed my eyes again, just so I could see his face for a split second longer. I sighed as I opened my eyes once more. I didn’t know how I was supposed to endure this day while thinking about him all day. Ten minutes later, I had on the outfit I laid out the night prior and was putting on my makeup.

“Who are you getting dressed up for?” Hanna asked softly as Emily and Aria were getting my breakfast ready downstairs.

I blanched. “What?”

“Are you trying to impress someone?” she asked earnestly.

I looked down at the outfit I had on. I was wearing a pretty blue sundress. It was something I’d never wear. My hair was also done with some effort. I hadn’t realized it, but I was dressing for him.

“No,” I insisted as I put my makeup back on the vanity. “We should probably go now.”

Hanna was about to question it further, but before she could, I grabbed my bag and walked downstairs. Emily and Aria were waiting in the kitchen with a muffin and a coffee.

I closed my eyes quietly as I listened to the song.

It’s all for you. Everything I do. I tell you all the time, heaven is a place on earth with you.

It was like I could hear him singing it to me.

Tell me all the things you want to do.

There were a lot of things I wanted to do with him.

It’s better than I ever even knew. They say that the world was built for two; only worth living if somebody is loving you. Baby, now you do.

Now I knew.

I let my body melt into the very hot bath water. It reminded me of summer and the ocean on the shore. It was our spot. That was our song of our summer. It sounded that way every time he sang it.

I missed him. He was all I thought about as I closed my eyes and sank lower and lower into the water. I didn’t want to be with anyone except for him. Every time I closed my eyes, it was like I drifted off into memories of the summertime. It was like my skin was soaked in that dark sunshine. Thinking about it now made it feel like a dark paradise; paradise because he was there and dark because all I had now were the memories.

You’re fine. Just breathe. Breathe, Spencer. Breathe.

I took strangled, shallow breaths. Sometimes, I just wanted to let myself sink completely into the water, never to come back up again. Sometimes, I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again. I was always scared that when I opened my eyes again, he would be gone; his memories and his voice wouldn’t even be a memory.

You’re fine. You’re perfect, Spence. Just perfect.

I didn’t feel perfect. I didn’t feel fine. I knew I wasn’t fine. I wished I was dead. His voice just kept echoing in my head, saying everything was alright when I knew it wasn’t.

“Spencer, this guy doesn’t sound like he was any good,” Aria insisted as she ran her fingers through my hair as I told all the girls about him.

I shook my head. “No, he was amazing,” I responded. I would never find anybody like him.

“Even if you thought you loved him, it was just a summer fling,” Emily insisted. “Why are you staying faithful when you only knew him for a few weeks?”

“It was love, Emily,” I answered a bit harshly. I knew in the bottom of my heart that it was love. You don’t just turn your back on love.

Aria stopped combing my hair. Emily stared in either confusion or judgment. Hanna just looked at me sadly. I closed my eyes.

I love you.

Sometimes, I wondered if it would’ve just been easier to forget about him. There was no way I could just force myself to forget. His face was like that old song you remembered as soon as you heard the lyrics. Then, as soon as you remembered, the song would never leave your head.

I moaned as I felt him kiss my neck. A few moments later, I was about to scream out, but I had woken myself up to find that I was alone. He wasn’t there with me. I could’ve sworn that I had felt him touching me, though. He was there in my dreams. He was there, kissing me.

You’re fine. Baby, you’re fine.

I didn’t feel fine. I didn’t feel relieved anymore. I felt like he—or his spirit—was lying to me. While I didn’t want to wake up from those dreams, I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. Everyone was rushing me, trying to get me to wake up and be away from him. Didn’t they realize that it wouldn’t help? I was never out of his reach. I loved him so much, but sometimes, his presence felt like torture. It was like a dark paradise.

Nobody would make me forget about him. There was no release from a memory.

Some days, I wanted to get up and call him. But I couldn’t call him. He had no phone. He had no home. The only place he was was with me. His voice and his presence lived in my soul. He wasn’t anywhere else to be found.

He only existed in my dreams now.