Smoldering indie chanteuse Lana Del Rey is infatuated with death. And for at least one person taking note, that’s not cool at all.
In the days leading up to the release of her chart-topping second album, Ultraviolence, Del Rey talked with reporters twice about her weariness with life. In the U.K.’s Guardian, she said, “I wish I was dead already. … I don’t want to have to keep doing this.” She’s since indicated that the reporter somehow manipulated her into uncomfortable territory (a claim the Guardian has disputed by releasing seemingly chatty and friendly interview tapes), apparently trying to distance herself from those statements.
Still, that wasn’t the only time Del Rey mentioned wanting to die. In a separate interview with the New York Times, she reiterated that dark desire, saying, “I love the idea that it’ll all be over. It’s just a relief, really. I’m scared to die, but I want to die.”
In the wake of those comments, Francis Bean Cobain—daughter of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain—weighed in on Twitter, taking aim at how she felt Del Rey was glorifying taking one’s own life. “The death of young musicians isn’t something to romanticize,” said the 21-year-old, whose father committed suicide before Frances’ second birthday in 1994. “I’ll never know my father because he died young & it becomes a desirable feat because ppl like u think it’s ‘cool.’ Well, it’s f‑‑‑ing not. Embrace life, because u only get one life. The ppl u mentioned [Cobain and Amy Winehouse] wasted that life. Don’t be 1 of those ppl.”
Del Rey responded on Twitter, seeking again, it would seem, to distance herself further from the suggestion that she was romanticizing suicide. “It’s all good,” she tweeted to Cobain. “[The reporter] was asking me a lot about your dad. I said I liked him because he was talented, not because he died young.” Cobain has yet to comment to Del Ray’s somewhat disjointed attempt to further defuse her controversial quotes.
Lana Del Rey, of course, is hardly the first musician, artist or entertainer to dress up death in longing, lilting language. After German novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, Europe saw a spate of suicides involving young men killing themselves in exactly the same way the story’s main character had—so much so that this historical example of suicide contagion has come to be known as the Werther Effect.
Likewise, Kurt Cobain’s suicide prompted some fans to consider following in his footsteps, even if they didn’t go through with it. Writing on his blog Outside the Pulpit, Visalia, Calif., minister Chad Stuart reflected on the influence that Kurt Cobain’s self-inflicted death had upon him at the time:
Twenty years ago when I heard the news I remember being almost proud of Cobain. His suicide made him even more heroic to my teenage mind. I thought, “Cobain had had enough. Society had been ‘raping’ him so long and he finally said ‘that’s it, you can’t touch me anymore.”‘ (This was the language I would use in reference to his song “Rape Me”). Twenty years ago when I heard the news I remember being affirmed in my own desire to die. I thought going out like Cobain would be somehow satisfying, I was I guess you could say caught-up in the Werther effect or Suicide Contagion of Cobain’s death. Twenty years ago when I heard the news I turned on Nirvana and got high in honor of Cobain. Twenty years ago I gave no thought to the 2-year-old daughter Cobain was leaving behind. Twenty years later my perspective has changed.
For more than three centuries, then, we’ve had an awareness that media can influence people’s choices—sometimes tragically so. And Frances Bean Cobain, a young woman who’s paid a terrible price for her father’s own suicide, seems to have a better grasp than Lana Del Rey does on the reality that words and ideas have consequences. Namely, that impressionable and unstable fans might get wind of Del Rey’s embrace of death and be influenced by that macabre infatuation themselves.
Some have suggested that Del Rey’s supposed death wish is just another layer in her highly affected “act,” a dramatic and tragi-romantic component in the anti-heroine persona that the 28-year-old singer (whose real name is Elizabeth Grant) has carefully crafted. And since it’s all just a bunch of affected nonsense anyway, some critics say, it’s not worth getting worked up over.
There seems little doubt that much of Lana Del Rey’s stage identity is just that: a dramatic persona, not that different, really, than the ridiculous and scandalous role-playing we’ve seen from the likes of Lady Gaga, Madonna, Miley Cyrus, Nikki Minaj and even Beyoncé over the years (among many others).
The problem with that argument, however, is that many young fans may not have a clue that Lana Del Rey isn’t “real,” so to speak, but someone created by Elizabeth Grant in her quest for fame. (Her first go-around as earnest, aspiring singer Lizzie Grant didn’t go anywhere, hence the identity retooling.) Perhaps that’s why Elizabeth Grant is now having second thoughts about what her alter-ego has been saying about death. “Oh, yeah, that death business: I didn’t really mean that,” she might say.
Only Grant herself knows to what extent Lana Del Rey’s publically stated fixation on leaving this life is real or an attention-getting strategy (and a very effective one at that, as Ultraviolence’s strong first-week album sales indicate). But in the end, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s authentic or whether she’s a suicide poser, because the messages she’s sending about wanting to be dead are deeply damaging either way.
So kudos to Frances Bean Cobain for having the guts to call out one of the moment’s most popular singers for recklessly glorifying a dangerous message. And, kudos to her for suggesting that maybe Lana Del Rey should focus more on embracing and enjoying life’s rich goodness instead.
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