I have no problem with Lana's music, in fact I like two of her songs. "Young and Beautiful," "Blue Jeans," they're great songs. It's her image I have a problem with. She's the epitome of the Forever 21 style "rebel" that's running rampant these days.
Oh, you've seen them. They wear Ramones, Run-DMC, Ice-T, Rolling Stones, various Norwegian black metal band shirts with not a single clue of any of the aforementioned bands' songs or members. They wear fake flower crowns and smoke joints while loudly proclaiming that they are, in fact, smoking a joint. They wear thin flannel-style screen printed shirts and then complain that they're cold despite their "flannel". They used to be the Ugg-boot wearers, the yoga pants devotees, only now they've been reborn into "adults".
As someone who was born to a reformed groupie, who was nicknamed after Joey Ramone at a young age, and who was raised on Aerosmith, Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, the Rolling Stones, and Rob Zombie, I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to see these girls worship pop singers while looking like they fell out of the early nineties. It doesn't match up and I hate inauthentic people.
Lana likes to take pictures smoking a joint and it comes off as 'so mysterious,' 'so cooooool,' 'so rebellious.' Smoking weed is not a new thing and it boggles the mind as to why mainstream media continues to sensationalize it. How can you be rebellious while doing something the majority is already doing?
She made wearing the American flag as clothes popular again. Yup, flag desecration, super cool to me! I totally want to see my country's flag stretched beyond recognition over some basic girl's ass, the frayed hem barely covering her hoo-ha. I'm glad my grandfathers and sister protected it so you could wear the flag as a fashion statement.
Lana's videos, her with the stickers on her cheek to look like teardrops because playing as a convict is apparently cool. I'm not sure where she lives, but in all the cities I've been in, faking those tattoos gets you a one-way ticket to a curb stomp. Also, her comments that she wishes she were 'already dead' because her idols Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain died at 27 and she is apparently upset she made it to 28 without tragically dying.
Bitch, are you fucking stupid? This is where I lose my temper completely, because she obviously overlooks the fact that these two were people with families and lives and friends and only cares about the legacy they left behind. She wants that? She wants to be memorialized as a junkie who left millions heartbroken in their wake? Is she so afraid that her music is so mediocre that she wants to die young to ensure she'll be remembered forever? And then, when she's called out by Kurt's own daughter, Frances (who I adore because she takes literally 0 shit from anyone and calls out poseurs from a mile away), Lana quickly backtracks and says it was misconstrued. At least stand by your mistake. People would have more respect for you, if you had just come out and said, "Yeah, what I said was really dumb, and I'm sorry for saying it, because it was really disrespectful." Where's her cool, vintage gang member look now? It just crumbles when someone calls her on it. Hilarious, you've just proved my point.
And the people who follow people like her are the exact same ones who come down to the punk club where I live and stand around with this clueless look on their face because they have no idea what they've gotten themselves into, or they're running through the crowd mindlessly punching people and screaming that they want to start a circle pit. There's a reason we have a sign that says, "POSEURS PAY DOUBLE," on the door. We don't want your kind. Go back to Coachella and ferment there where rich people get to slum and pretend they're real rock fans despite the fact they're at a few hundred dollar a ticket festival that plays dubstep and whatever the hell American pop is called nowadays to people dressed like folksy old people.
Why is it all so fake? The flowers on their heads, the "flannels" on their backs, the Indian headdresses on their heads, the auto-tuned vocals coming out of their idols' mouths, the metal bands they wear on their shirts that they wouldn't recognize in the street if they ran them over with their cars, their "combat boots" with zippers on the side and pvc "leather" all around. Is it just because it's easier to do all of this than really feel or really discover who you are? Or are they all fake as people? Is that all they truly are, amalgams of what the media tells them is cool? Has it always been this way? If I go back ten years, will I find other punks, Goths, and metal heads complaining about the mainstream appropriating our culture to shock and piss off people for ten seconds? And why can't they just find happiness on their own instead of faking everything? Is it their home lives? Is it their personal lives? Is it the public schools? Is it social media? Whose fault is it that our culture has become so saturated with quick fixes and short cuts that our kids have now become shallow empty holes of nothingness? And how can we change it?
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