Even more Lana Del Rey

Someone has leaked the new CD and now the battle begins again.

Ta-Nehisi Coates blunders into the truth:

I've gotta say, I've never quite understood the hate Lana Del Rey gets. OK, it's not cool to lie about being poor. But "Video Games"--an OK song, I guess--always struck me as kiddie music. It strikes me as something a young lady might play in those angsty years before she gets her driver's license and is imagining what adulthood is like.

Or you could put the thought more charitably as I did:

Like the Ode to Billy Joe, there is an experience here that speaks to millions of teenage girls. And that is what makes it pop music: if it doesn't speak to girls from 15 to 19 years old, it isn't pop music.

Pop music is defined by young girls and there is no point resenting that fact. Girls are just as entitled to a culture that speaks to them as anyone else is. (And if you are more than 25 years old you really should have started to look outside pop culture by now.)

The deeper problem here, as I argued in many previous posts on the subject, is that people don't like what pop culture is telling them about young girls. I mean, how dare they like all this princess stuff? It's supposed to be a brave new world for girls and they, damnit, haven't gotten the memo and insist on behaving like ... , well, like girls.

The last few years we've seen a  relentless attack on boys and young men for being boys and young men. Apparently it's now the turn of girls and young women to get the same abuse.


By the way, if you read only one book on the history of pop music, it should be How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll by Elijah Wald.