A Google search of “Lana Del Rey American flag” turns up about 572,000 results, from handmade iPhone cases to song lyrics to a Tumblr account dedicated entirely to photos of Lana with American flags. Whether the “National Anthem” singer still sleeps wrapped up in the stars and stripes, as she once claimed on “Cola,” we’ll never know. Though you won’t see her dancing around in front of one when she tours her new album Lust for Life. You can probably guess who is to blame.
In a revealing new interview with Pitchfork, Lana gets deep on a question many of us probably pondered on July 4: “Is it harder to be romantic about America when Trump is the nation’s biggest celebrity?” It’s clear Lana is no fan of the current president, having endorsed a mass hexing of Trump organized by witches around the world in February. There was also that song she wrote about escalating tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, a country she had not previously explored in her abstracted lyrics. Turns out fans of the flag Tumblr probably have Obama to thank for most of the photos.
“I feel less safe than I did when Obama was president,” Lana explained of turning to protest songs and meditations on war. “When you have a leader at the top of the pyramid who is casually being loud and funny about things like [assaulting women], it’s brought up character defects in people who already have the propensity to be violent towards women. I saw it right away in L.A. Walking down the street, people would just say things to you that I had never heard.” The singer, who has (often unfairly) drawn criticism for not labeling herself a feminist, voiced particular concern about the defunding of Planned Parenthood.
“It’s certainly uncomfortable,” she said about romanticizing America in the current political climate. “I definitely changed my visuals on my tour videos. I’m not going to have the American flag waving while I’m singing ‘Born to Die.’ It’s not going to happen. I’d rather have static. It’s a transitional period, and I’m super aware of that. I think it would be inappropriate to be in France with an American flag. It would feel weird to me now — it didn’t feel weird in 2013.”
Another thing you won’t get from the woke witch of the West? A word-for-word rendition of her 2012 hit “Ultraviolence,” which contained the controversial lyric, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss.” “I don’t like it. I don’t. I don’t sing it,” she said of singing the song in 2017. “I sing ‘Ultraviolence’ but I don’t sing that line anymore. Having someone be aggressive in a relationship was the only relationship I knew.” It’s great to hear that Lana is finally happier in her personal life, even if we do have to buy new iPhone cases.
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Text Hannah Ongley
Image via YouTube