Lana Del Rey's easygoing Americana is what we need
Lana Del Rey is going country. September will bring her new album, titled “Lasso”; in the meantime, her new “country-trap” ballad with Atlanta rapper Quavo is steadily climbing the charts.
“Tough” pairs acoustic guitar and Del Rey’s breathy crooning with Quavo’s tight verses and thick trap beats. The lyrics are also a mash-up, expressing a resilience in the midst of everyday adversity through imagery from both the rural and urban underclass: “The blue-collar, red-dirt attitude” meets “808s beating in the trunk in Atlanta.”
Above all, Del Rey exhibits the playful humor and patriotic attitude at the core of conservatism’s resurgence. If this kind of thing has 'crossover appeal,' then all the better.
It’s no surprise that fans have responded to the tune. The boundaries between country, pop, and hip-hop are more permeable than ever; Del Rey has played with elements of all three ever since her 2012 major-label debut, “Born to Die.”
The fact that that album – released midway through the Obama era – is currently surging in the charts is a testament to Del Rey’s staying power, her ability to hold onto pop stardom during a particularly volatile time for the music business. Unlike her fellow survivors, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, Del Rey has always remained aloof from the liberal cause du jour. Which, along with her throwback femininity, is enough to make her seem vaguely conservative. Contrast her with Swift, who alienated her early fans by trading her everywoman appeal for celebrity activism.
And yet musically, it is Swift who is more palatable to many conservatives, for whom hip-hop culture evokes DEI entitlement, sexual licentiousness, urban lawlessness, and probably twerking. For every fan on the right who applauds Del Rey’s self-consciously all-American aesthetic, there’s another who regards her penchant for genre-mixing as suspicious. Right-wing infighting? There’s nothing new under the sun.
Even the rural America Del Rey embraces — typically the last bastion of conservative identity in our pop culture — can’t escape scolding from the right. Witness the controversy surrounding 23-year-old Tennessean Hailey Welch, whose crude but innocuous comment made her a viral sensation.
Why? It's not as if there's a shortage of pretty young woman making vulgar jokes about sex online. Welch struck a chord because she (and her delightful twang) are recognizably from a real place.
At the time she was “discovered,” Welch was living — happily — in a place with a population about the size of Oberlin's 2024 graduating class. With her grandmother. She worked in a bedspring factory and had never driven on the interstate or been in an airplane.
Conservatives would normally applaud these markers of wholesome, small-town life — if they weren't too busy clutching their pearls at the temerity Welch had to monetize her fame and further degrade the culture.
Unlike the pundits, the people who made Welch go viral understand that it’s all in good fun. It’s doubtful that any of the passersby in the original video would’ve been scandalized by Welch’s off-color talk, either.
“Rich Men North of Richmond” singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony’s viral fame followed a similar trajectory. At first, conservatives loved his accent and the “Hillbilly Elegy” populism of his lyrics. Before long, however, he began failing the usual right-wing purity tests, mentioning “diversity” without a sneer and lamenting that his song was being “weaponized” by conservative-activist types.
Anthony may no longer be the partisan sensation he was last summer, but people still seem to enjoy his music, if the robust ticket sales for his current tour are any indication.
What the right might ponder is how to reach the kind of "barstool conservatives" who naturally identify with the likes of Welch and Anthony. These are people who are instinctively drawn to anti-wokeness without necessarily caring to engage in culture-war debates about "traditional values."
“Tough” may be something of a departure for Del Rey, but it conveys a theme that runs through all of her work: the freedom of embracing regional roots. Del Rey herself was born in Manhattan. And it is there she returned — after a childhood in upstate New York and a stint at boarding school in Connecticut — to launch her career. And yet in her music, she’s always gravitated to more remote American eras and locales.
Above all, Del Rey exhibits the playful humor and patriotic attitude at the core of conservatism’s resurgence. If this kind of thing has “crossover appeal,” then all the better. Worrying about whether any newcomers are “our people” betrays deep insecurity.
To search for signs of liberal creep in “Yellowstone” or Zach Bryan is to forget that their very prominence is a victory in itself. That alone should embolden conservatives. If the right really wants to claim a central place in the culture, it could start by emulating the graceful, confident cool of Ms. Del Rey and having a little fun.
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