Talking to Myspace as an upcoming artist in 2013, Lana Dey Rey mentioned that the “vision of making [her] life a work of art” was once what impressed her to create her song video for her leap forward unmarried, Video Video games (2011).
The self-made video, that includes outdated motion pictures clips and webcam photos of Del Rey making a song, went viral. It sooner or later led her to signal with a big report label. For lots of, the video conveyed a way of authenticity. Then again, upon finding that “Lana Del Rey” was once a pseudonym (her actual title is Elizabeth Grant), some enthusiasts started to have doubts. Most likely this self-made video was once simply some other calculated advertising scheme?
The query of Del Rey’s authenticity has at a loss for words many all the way through her occupation. Believe, as an example, the arguable Judah Smith Interlude from her newest album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Beneath Ocean Blvd? (2023). Each enthusiasts and critics – together with her sizeable LGBTQ+ fanbase – have been stunned and stricken by way of her determination to function the megachurch pastor Judith Smith, who’s been accused of homophobia.
Then again, the that means of Del Rey’s inclusion of Smith’s sermon soundclips, layered below a recording of Del Rey guffawing, is unclear. Is that this intended to mock Smith, and even Christianity itself? Or is it an unique expression of Del Rey’s personal spirituality? In the end, she again and again makes references to her “pastor” in the similar album’s opening monitor The Grants, about her circle of relatives in actual lifestyles.
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Sooner than she was a singer-songwriter, Del Rey received her philosophy level at Fordham College. It was once the mid-2000s, when the eminent existentialism student Merold Westphal would were on body of workers, so she most probably studied theories of authenticity by way of existentialists corresponding to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Heidegger spoke of human lifestyles as a “being-towards-death”. Or as Del Rey sings within the name monitor of her first major-label album, “you and I, we were born to die”.
In Heidegger’s view, to faux that we aren’t all certain to die is to disclaim the type of finite beings which we’re: it’s to disown ourselves and exist inauthentically. Conversely, to exist authentically is to simply accept our personal mortality and embody the best way we exist as finite beings.
The song video for Video Video games.
On this figuring out, to exist authentically does now not imply the expression of a few underlying “true self” or “human nature”. Relatively, it’s to simply accept the prerequisites of lifestyles by which we discover ourselves.
‘An obsession for freedom’
For existentialist philosophers, such prerequisites come with now not simplest mortality but in addition freedom – a theme in particular emphasized by way of Sartre.
As Sartre says in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, existentialism holds that “there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it … Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself”.
Jean-Paul Sartre in Venice in 1967.
Wiki Commons, CC BY-SA
Without a writer God or pre-established human nature to decide human future or function, Sartre teaches that human beings are “condemned to freedom”. We’re unfastened beings who’re at all times appearing freely – whether or not we recognize that we’re unfastened or now not. To faux that we aren’t unfastened is to be inauthentic.
Sartre suggests embracing our freedom way residing lifestyles in a fashion “comparable to the construction of a work of art”. In his view, in each artwork and lifestyles, we can’t come to a decision prematurely what movements must be taken: “No one can tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like; one cannot judge a painting until it is done.”
Lana Del Rey at Primavera in 2024.
Wiki Commons, CC BY-SA
Likewise, we can’t pass judgement on whether or not or now not a lifestyles is well-lived till it’s completed. We will have to now not predetermine how any individual will have to reside in accordance to a couple pre-established criterion of “human nature”.
As a substitute, we will simplest assess any individual’s lifestyles by way of taking into consideration whether or not they settle for that they’re unfastened, with the liberty and duty to create that means for his or her lifestyles by way of residing lifestyles as a murals.
Each freedom and making lifestyles a murals are habitual topics in Del Rey’s discography. They’re introduced in combination most likely maximum memorably in her much-loved monologue within the song video for Experience (2012):
At the open street, we had not anything to lose, not anything to achieve, not anything we desired anymore, to make our lives right into a murals: Reside speedy, die younger, be wild, and feature amusing. I consider within the nation The us was. I consider within the particular person I need to change into. I consider within the freedom of the open street.
Del Rey is any individual Elizabeth Grant was. As despite the fact that echoing Sartre’s comparability between making artwork and residing lifestyles, in her 2012 music Gods & Monsters, she sings of herself “posing like a real singer – cause life imitates art”.
For Del Rey, being a public-facing “real singer” comes to some roughly image-cultivation and even self-cultivation. No longer in contrast to how her song video for Video Video games is “self-made”, the very identification of Lana Del Rey may be “self-made”. The picture of Lana is a murals made by way of the artist, Del Rey herself.
Experience by way of Lana Del Rey.
To be an “authentic” or “real” singer is to simply accept that the character of a public determine is at all times inevitably curated. To mix Sartre’s slogan and Del Rey’s lyrics, the actual singer is at all times “condemned to posing”. To faux differently is to disown what it’s to be a “real singer” and to behave inauthentically.
Whether it is true that, as Del Rey sings, “life imitates art”, to render lifestyles as a murals is essentially the most unique factor that an individual can do. As a result of to reside lifestyles as a murals is not anything rather then authentically accepting lifestyles as it’s, one thing that itself “imitates art”. As she sings in Get Loose (2017), that is Del Rey’s dedication, her fashionable manifesto.
