Lana Del Rey is at it again, and by “at it,” I mean “posting without the assistance of a communications professional.”
On Sunday night, Del Rey posted a follow-up to Thursday night’s infamous Instagram screed decrying pop music’s definition of feminism, one that managed to criticize a slew of black women artists while arguing that there should “be a place in feminism for women who ‘look and act’ like Del Rey. Del Rey followed up with a long post on Friday, and re-addressed the backlash in an Instagram post early Monday.
She opened with:
I don’t want to beat a dead horse and I don’t want to go on and on about this post thing, but I just want to remind you that in that post, my one and only personal declaration that I’ve ever made—thanks for being so warm and welcoming—was about the need for fragility in the feminist movement. It’s going to be important. And when I mentioned ‘women who look like me,’ I didn’t mean white like me, I mean the kind of women who other people might not believe because they think, ‘Oh, well, look at her, she fucking deserves it.’...
She added:
I think it’s sad that the women I mentioned, and that they’d sing about dancing for money or whatever… the same stuff by the way that I’ve been singing about and chronicling for 13 years. That’s why I’m in that echelon. Yes, they are my friends and peers and contemporaries.
“The difference is, when I get on the pole, people call me a whore, but when [FKA] Twigs gets on the pole, it’s art. I’m reminded constantly by my friends that, lyrically, there are complicated psychological factors that play into some of my songwriting, but I just wanna say that the culture is super sick right now, and the fact they want to turn my post, my advocacy for fragility into a race war, it’s really bad.
Del Rey concluded, “I’m not the enemy, I’m not a racist, don’t get it twisted...so fuck off if you don’t like the post.”
OK!
You can watch the whole thing here if you have six (!!) minutes, though I’m sure there’ll be several more Instagram novels/videos added to this saga in the coming days. [Instagram]
It’s a banner day for celebrity non-apologies. Doja Cat, who over the weekend was accused on Twitter of taking part in racist video chats and writing a song titled with a racist slur in 2015, wrote an Instagram post on Sunday addressing the allegations.
“I’ve used public chat rooms to socialize since I was a child. I shouldn’t have been on some of those chat room sites, but I personally have never been involved in any racist conversations,” she wrote, adding, “I’m sorry to everyone I offended.”
[Vulture]