Explaining Why Music Critics Tried to Cancel Lana Del Rey

“All the good stuff is real but isn’t, myself included…I mainly let my imagination be my reality. Fantasy is my reality.” — Lana Del Rey (HuffPost, 2010)

“Peak Hipster” (2007–2014) was defined by gatekeeping in the arts: the blurring of lines between cultural preservation and cultural authoritarianism, e.g., agenda-driven music bloggers deciding which artists they would vilify (e.g., Lana Del Rey) or sanctify (e.g., Lorde).

Here’s a headline from 2012, the year LDR crossed over from “MP3-blog viral” to mainstream viral: “Why Hipsters Hate On Lana Del Rey” (Pacific Standard, 2012), which argued that music bloggers turned on LDR the moment they discovered she was once a blonde, All-American-looking pop singer named Lizzy Grant — an identity she had “wiped” off the internet (according to her own producer).

We’ll get back to #LizzyGrantGate, but for those of you too young to remember, back in 2012, the music bloggers had drawn clearly defined borders separated indie from pop, and LDR was border hopping. “Of all the upheavals in music over the last 10 years,” wrote Jayson Greene for Pitchfork in 2019, “perhaps none was broader or more…