Were you looking to kick off your Memorial Day by revisiting a controversy from last week? If so, then you might want to check out Lizzie’s Lana Del Rey’s Instagram. The singer uploaded yet another post addressing the controversy surrounding her comments about other successful female artists like Beyoncé, Doja Cat, and Ariana Grande among others. In a six-minute black-and-white video captioned “Nobody gets to tell your story,†Del Rey attempts to justify her comments about her position in the music industry and the glamorization of abuse which drew criticism on the internet for being tone deaf and racially insensitive.
“Hey, so I don’t want to beat a dead horse and I don’t want to go on and on about this post thing,†a defensive Del Rey says at the top of the video, effectively doing both things at once. “I just want to remind you that in that post, my one and only personal declaration I’ve ever made - thanks for being so warm and welcoming - was about the need for fragility in the feminist movement.†Ok. Del Rey goes on to clarify specific statements she made in her initial post, including what she meant when she wrote that “there has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me.†“When I mentioned women who look like, I didn’t mean white like me,†says Del Rey. “I mean the kind of women who, you know, other people might not believe because they think ‘Oh, well look at her she fucking deserves it’ or whatever.â€
Del Rey goes on to address “the women she mentioned†saying that while she considers them to be her “friends, peers and contemporaries,†she feels they are allotted more space for artistic expression than she is. “When I get on the pole people call me a whore, but when [FKA] Twigs gets on the pole it’s art,†she says, dragging yet another black female artist into this narrative. “The culture is super sick right now,†says Del Rey, “and the fact that they wan’t to turn my post, my advocacy for fragility into a race war… it’s really bad, it’s actually really bad.†Later in the video, Del Rey name checks former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and the importance of reparations to the Navajo and African-American community while claiming to be fundamentally “a girl’s girl.†“I think what’s really sad is that as a personal advocate, as a girl’s girl, as someone who wants the best for every culture, you know, when Marianne Williamson was talking about reparations to the Black community that never got done during the emancipation - that was why I liked her, because I always felt that way.â€
Del Rey, who unfollowed Ariana Grande on Instagram, ends her video by vaguely addressing the damage her post has done to her relationship with some of the women that she mentioned in her post. “I’m sorry that some of the girls I talked to that I mentioned in that post have a super different opinion of my insight especially because we’ve been so close for so long,†says Del Rey, not clarifying which of the girls she is referring to. Woof. Someone needs to get Elizabeth Woolridge Grant a book on intersectional feminism ASAP. And for the record, Beyoncé is nobody’s peer.