Lana Del Rey vrs The Guardian: Frances Bean Cobain wins
YOU may have missed it, because she’s so tragically dull, but Lana Del Rey recently said she was tired of living and basically glamorised singers who had died too young.
She said these words in the Guardian, which she then refuted by saying she was lead-on. The Guardian then published the audio of the conversation, which shows she wasn’t.
And that’s the long and the short of it.
However, saying you want to die; that’s catnip to anyone with a passing interest in outrage. A series of op-eds have appeared and everyone is tying themselves in knots. The real winners are Lana Del Rey’s publicity drive for her new album and The Guardian, who find themselves in a minor ‘NME/Richie Edwards/4REAL‘ scenario.
There have to be losers though and, in this case, it is Frances Bean Cobain, the daughter of the late Kurt Cobain.
Frances Bean, rightfully pointed out (on Twitter, natch: The new celebrity confessional booth now that rehab is old hat) to Del Rey that it isn’t quite so glamorous when you never got to know your father.
Del Rey said she had been asked “leading questions” when she was quoted as saying “I wish I was dead already”.
Frances Bean wrote to Del Rey, saying “the death of young musicians isn’t something to romanticize”. “It’s all good,” she said to Bean on Twitter. “He [the interviewer] was asking me a lot about your dad. I said I liked him because he was talented not because he died young.”
“The other half of what I said wasn’t really related to the people he mentioned. I don’t find that part of music glam either. I regret trusting the guardian- I didn’t want to do an interview but the journalist was persistent.”
“Alexis [Petridis, the newspaper’s music critic] was masked as a fan but was hiding sinister ambitions and angles Maybe he’s actually the boring one looking for something interesting to write about.”
“His leading questions about death and persona were calculated.”
Del Rey has since deleted the tweets, with Tim Jonze (the interviewer) replying: “Besides the fact Lana doesn’t remember who actually interviewed her, there are a number of things about her statement that sound a bit iffy to me.”
“She can hardly complain about the subject matter: she’d been talking about her icons all dying young, she named her debut album Born to Die and had spent much of the 50 minutes previous to this point telling me how miserable she was.”
Who is right? Who is wrong?
If we’re going to side with anyone, it is Frances Bean Cobain who could’ve turned all this into a hysterical shriekfest, but didn’t. She’s the one who showed the clout to take a step back and say “what kind of bullshit is this anyway?”
You get the feeling her dad would approve.
Posted: 30th, June 2014 | In: Music Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
