Lipstick to Void.

Lana Del Rey has replaced Anna Nicole Smith as the reigning “faux queen,” a former blue jean baby whose rejection of upwardly mobile feminism and/or high-class femininity in favour of fatalistic glamour and female-to-female drag makes her a gender deserter to some, but a godsend to most, because at least she never makes it look easy. And what a relief. When straight girls and women are meant to choose between chic, studied effortlessness (creative upper class/Manhattan) and tweely aestheticized failure (creative under class/Brooklyn), Lana’s truth is way, way in between: being a man-loving woman is not an identity, it’s a job. It’s a glamorous job, but the hours are long and there’s often no future and it sucks, it scars and it hardens, and it’s hard. (Here I admit that it’s tempting to read “man” unliterally, as something big and impossible to get out from—drugs, fame, money, a whole damn country. In melodramatic pop songs, almost any relation is easier read as a relationship.)