Lana Del Rey just released a new single “Chemtrails Over The Country Club” – the title track for her next album, due out on 3/19 – and then she went to BBC Radio 1 for a live interview with host Annie Mac. “I just woke up. I have a popsicle, I have a broken arm … I hope I’m in my game,” she said at the beginning. During the conversation, she talked about Trump’s recent uprising in the Capitol building and addressed the controversy surrounding the cover of his new album.
Yesterday, when revealing the cover of his album, Del Rey posted a long statement defending him, which included phrases like “In 11 years of work I have always been extremely inclusive, without even trying. My best friends are rappers, my boyfriends were rappers. ”She expanded on this in the interview:
DEL REY: Before I even put on the album cover, I knew what people would say. So when they really started saying things, I replied and just said, ‘I have a lot of problems, but inclusion is not one of them.’ It just isn’t. You can’t just make this my problem. My friends, my family, my whatever … They are not all the same and we are not invading the Capitol. [Laughs] We vote in Biden. My girlfriends come from all over the world, they have children of all kinds. And I’m mentioning all this, like, to the people who are listening because people really wanted even more people of color on my album cover. What, you know, is, to some extent, a photo just what it is.
MAC: So are you saying that people pressured you to put more colored people on your album to look more representative, that kind of thing …?
DEL REY: That was the problem that was arising. But I said that actually half of the people in this photo are people of color … I thought about it for most of the day and I thought, well, I don’t want to get discouraged because that’s what often happens with this, like … Na I’m representing a certain thing, but people will say no. It’s like being in the opposite world.
MAC: These women are your friends. Am I right? Are these people dear to you?
DEL REY: They are my best and oldest friends. I also felt uncomfortable about bringing them into the controversy, but I talked to them too and they were like … ‘We don’t care. You shouldn’t worry about … everything you’re doing … Your friends it is everywhere and you’ve never represented yourself otherwise. ‘I thought about all my music and videos and started with a more hip-hop sound … I mean, I just don’t feel like that’s my problem. There were certain things that people touched and that made me think, ‘OK, maybe I have to look at this’, but this is not one of them. I was not being preventive, I was definitely responding, but … I just feel that if that is really what people are going to say, I have an answer for them, that if you look more closely, you will see people of color. It’s a black and white image, so zoom in, you know. It’s weird, you know?
A little later in the interview, Mac asked how LDR was dealing with 2020. “I mean, I always thought something like this would happen sooner,” she replied. “In terms of the pandemic, I have always asked myself about 8 billion people in the world, this has not happened before. When they got rid of the White House’s contagious disease sector, I thought, we will never make it. So that was one. Because I’m a little fatalistic, I’m scared. So I thought something was definitely going to happen there. “
She continued:
DEL REY: And then, in terms of a broader picture of the government that you see on TV or whatever, a reflection of what is happening in our homes. I was not surprised that the second epidemic that came out of the pandemic was domestic violence and general disorder … calls to 911 were 350% in all states. People need to look at themselves and live with themselves, probably with television to deal with it. I’m way ahead of the train in dealing with this because I have things going on. I am prepared for a pandemic because I am crazy. I have a shelter, I have my right medicines, I have my friends who fully understand. I am realistic.
Trump’s madness … As bad as it was, it really needed to happen. We really needed a reflection of the biggest problem in our world, which is not climate change, but sociopathy and narcissism. Especially in America. This will kill the world. It is not capitalism, it is narcissism.
I wrote a very small but beautiful book called Violet folded back over the grass and I have a little poem there called “My room is a sacred place now, there are children at the foot of my bed” and it is because I took a crazy person out of my room. I was surprised that we haven’t had a crazy psychopath on live television as president for a long time, because that’s what we see on TV and what we see on Instagram. A lot of really obsessed influencers … Not to mention that there aren’t some really cute, great and carefree influencers who taught me about crockpots and Target hauls and all the things that really excited my life.
But, you know, I just think there are actually, aside from our terrible number of deaths, I think it was a great wake-up call. Your life is not about what kind of shoes you buy, it is not about studying at Harvard or Oxford. It’s about the kind of person you are. If you are an idiot and everyone … if you are an idiot and everyone says you are and everyone says you are an idiot, then we finally need to solve this big problem in the world: what do we do with all these people who don’t know that they are hurting other people? Do we put everyone together on an island?
I once got a call for news from George K. Simon, who wrote a book called Wolf in lamb skin, and it was all about people who don’t know they are hurting other people. Like Trump. He doesn’t know he’s inciting a riot.
MAC: Don’t you think so? I thought it was very, very obvious that he knew what he was doing all the way.
DEL REY: Because he has delusions of grandeur. … I think he’s not doing well, but I think the people who are invading and getting in trouble and then Fox News flashes them and say ‘It’s a revolution.’ I know it’s a long answer, but I think it’s really the most important thing that I will say in this interview. I think that for the people who invaded the Capitol, it is disfellowshipped anger. They want to have fun somewhere. And it’s like, we don’t know how to find a way to be wild in our world. And at the same time, the world is so wild.
MAC: There is a phrase in your song about this …
DEL REY: Yes, that’s it, in my title track that you played – and thanks to someone for still playing singer and songwriter music, I appreciate that. I say, ‘I am not unbalanced, I am just strange and wild.’ If I arrived at the Brentwood Country Mart barefoot or something, it’s like, I’m not crazy, I’m connected to the land. Whatever it is.
Again, I think people are having to reevaluate what is weird and what is not weird. Watching people invade the Capitol, everyone will look at this and find out which Capitols they are attacking this year in their own lives. Because everyone is crazy. You know, half the people I know are just idiots. As if I could imagine them as, ‘Well, we need a change.’ You know, and then the other half of the people I know are looking at them with tears in their eyes, in disbelief. And it’s sad, it’s scary. But it can happen in any country.
“I want people to understand that I didn’t want to be that idiot in 2019 when they were like ‘2020, clearer version’, I wanted to be like, ‘Oh, you don’t understand yet, do you? This isn’t over, it’s starting, ”said Del Rey at the end of the interview. She continued:
I heard it well said by a CNN anchor at some point: Are these the cries of an old regime? Or it is the labor pains of an entirely new division in the country of chaos. I’m sure this is it. I think people will be very upset with the ultra-democratic wing.
But, ultimately, the important thing about any of these situations is that people know what’s going on. And now what I think some of the bosses and people who are thinking can really see is … OK, we have a problem now. We didn’t know that we had half the country wanting to shoot the Capitol. We didn’t really know that because we never got to see it. I think it gave us an opportunity to see where our mental health level is. And also to see where our dissociated anger level is.
I also think that the institution of a very firm schooling for those who do not want to go to school has been very difficult for those who are not part of this type of institution. As probably some of the people who were shooting people.
The full interview is available here.