I live in fear of this Substack accidentally becoming a “pop music blog” (as opposed to “a Taylor Swift blog,” which it obviously is). But I ended up watching some of live streaming sets at Coachella on Friday. Two of my up-and-coming pop girls (Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan) did a great job. Against my better judgement, I also stayed up to watch Lana’s Coachella set. It was… mostly… not so good. Not entirely. But mostly.
Two things were clear: one, that Lana was extremely uncomfortable on the stage, and two, that something was going wrong with her equipment. It felt like every time she started to relax and really sing, the microphone would start acting up, which would cause her to go back to whispering into the microphone, repeat repeat. By the end of the set I felt terrible for her but also very affectionate and loyal, like I knew she wasn’t doing a good job but also if anybody came along and said “wow she’s bad at this” I was going to knee them in the groin.1 It was like I was a mob boss and Lana was my superlatively talented but self-sabotaging wife.
Of all the singer-songwriter-pop-stars out there, Lana seems to suffer the most from the demand that a star do “everything”: have routines and costume changes and a lot going on on the stage and perform to huge crowds and be your fans’ best friend / distant queen all without breaking a sweat. Somebody like Taylor thrives under these conditions. And you could see in Sabrina’s set that she took a lot of lessons from the Eras tour.2 But Lana… does not. She’s too shy. I imagine that in a small, intimate setting, among people she knows and trusts, she’s really an amazing performer.3 But Coachella is not that.
I don’t think everybody picks up on this fact about her. They see she doesn’t exactly want to be up on the stage but they don’t get why. The Guardian ripped into her Coachella performance like so:
Del Rey has become an icon for the dour and terminally online, in no small part to her well-known shtick: being too cool and half there. Unfortunately, her signature laconic delivery just didn’t work for such a big stage, and came off as unprepared rather than unbothered.
This seems like a classic case of people reading social discomfort as rudeness, and reminds me that for many people Lana’s image is permanently frozen as whatever it was they thought of her when “Video Games” dropped and she gave those two terrible SNL performances. Even though those songs were not (really) too cool either, coolness was sort of the affect that let Lana hide her shyness for a while.
But it was a real bummer to see her bomb this set because she clearly viewed it as the moment she was going to erase that SNL episode from her record—even referencing SNL in her billboards. If she had been more confident, maybe the sound issues wouldn’t have mattered so much; if the sound issues weren’t there, maybe she would have eased into it. Taylor knows how to make a joke when stuff goes wrong. But Lana, to borrow a phrase from a favorite novel of mine, “has no oil on her feathers.”4
As is a recurring theme here, her lack of self-defense is part of her creative genius, but also her problem. It pushes her forward, it holds her back. Lana is somebody who has been pure-heartedly dedicated to music for most of her life. And she’s been rewarded for that dedication. She is a star with a big and devoted audience that accepts all of these things about her. They don’t care that she usually shows up late and performs unevenly. Her “bigger” friends—Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff, Billie Eilish, and so on—make a point of praising Lana in public repeatedly and often, so even if Lana struggles to do this for herself, she has people well-positioned to do it for her.
The person I suspect really cares about it is… Lana. Otherwise—why accept headlining at Coachella? Why deliberately bring up the performance so bad you almost wrecked your career?5 To prove you can do it now.
I like writing about Taylor because Taylor—larger than life, massively successful, thriving under attention and pressure—isn’t very much like me. The reason that line about not having any oil on your feathers has stuck in my mind all these years is because I recognized myself in it and the character it describes—somebody who is a little too withdrawn and a little too intense and a little too willing to accept failure. And I recognized that in Lana on the stage.6
When I write all of that I’m really not looking for reassurance (which is sometimes how I worry it comes across). Actually, I just like that Lana is so great at what she does while also being so bad at it. And anyway… she isn’t always bad at it. Sometimes, she’s sublime.
More exactly:
Something I like about Sabrina is that she clearly looked around at all the Taylor 2.0s who are out there crafting their heartfelt soulful breakup ballads and said: you know what nobody else is doing right now… stupid music.
As evidence I also present how much she relaxed when one of her friends came up on stage:
Miss Pym Disposes, Josephine Tey:
“When we were Juniors and Madame used to blister us with her sarcasm—Madame can be simply unspeakable, you know—the rest of us just came up in weals but Innes was actually flayed; just raw flesh. She never cried, as some of the others did when they’d had too much for one go. She just—just burned up inside. It’s bad for you to burn up inside. And once when—” She stopped, and seemed to decide that she had said enough. Either she had been on the verge of an indiscretion or she came to the conclusion that discussing her friend with a comparative stranger, however sympathetic, was not after all the thing to do.
“She has no oil on her feathers, Innes,” she finished. She stepped off the bridge and began to walk away up the path by the willows. “If I was rude,” she said, pausing just before she disappeared, “do forgive me. I didn’t mean to be.”
(Also recall how Lana didn’t want to be a prominent feature on Midnights and basically had to be forced to do it.…)
Or projected it.
Sabrina Carpenter has an actress's talent at performing the attitude and winking at the attitude at the same time. she seems both to be having a great time and to be able to pull off the leveled-up fame that opening this tour has afforded her. as a 45-year-old cishet guy i understand that her whole deal is not for or about me but i like to think i can spot The Goods when i see it.
I know this is technically an unrelated comment but I RAN to your newsletter because I am reading the 76 page Tavi Gevinson zine on Taylor Swift and so far I feel like it’s in conversation with a lot of your writings on Taylor and also I am 👀. Will report back.