Explaining Why Music Critics Tried to Cancel Lana Del Rey (Part 1/3)

My name is Art Tavana. I was an indie music journalist from 2013 to 2020, when I wrote for VICE, The Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, Billboard, Obscure Sound, Coachella Magazine, Ultimate Classic Rock, Playboy, Tom Tom Magazine, The A.V. Club, MTV Hive, Consequence of Sound, Spin, Paste, and Pitchfork. In 2021, I published a cultural history of Guns N’ Roses, which had a chapter on Lana Del Rey; that’s when I became interested in her mythology and lore.

The TL;DR is that LDR’s meteoric rise and the backlash it produced (and continues to produce, in many ways) is a flashpoint for online culture wars that foreground aesthetics, morality, feminism, gender, class, race, and the California dream — the one Joan Didion wrote about — and the devastating consequences of what happens when that dream falls apart.

The following is the first part in a series of posts that revisit LDR’s “problematic” zenith and nadir (from 2011 to 2021), with each post zooming into the cultural crime scene that produced her now notorious “Question for the Culture.” Along the way, I’ll address LDR’s critics: indie music journalists who tried to problematize and delegitimize her as “anti-feminist” and “uncooked.” I’ll also interrogate my fandom and role as a critic who has chosen, for whatever reason, to defend LDR. But to be clear, my…