Lana Del Rey, the Grammy nominated neo-torch singer, will share the bill at this year’s Coachella festival with another currently de rigueur female vocalist, the New Zealand teenager Lorde, The San Jose Mercury News reports — even though Lana Del Rey was the target of a stinging critique from Lorde late last year.
The New York-based Lana Del Rey was also “long listed” for an Oscar nomination this year , with her song “Young and Beautiful” from last year’s Leonardo DiCaprio -topped film version of The Great Gatsby making it onto the Motion Picture Academy’s list of 75 songs eligible for nomination.
Meanwhile, Lorde’s debut album Pure Heroine will go head-to-head with Lana Del Rey’s Paradise in Grammy competition for Best Pop Vocal Album, as the Fashion and Style web site reports.
There is a huge list of performers for the three-day, two-weekend festival to be held at, The Los Angeles Times reports, the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California on April 11, 12 and 13. The whole festival then repeats the following weekend, April 18, 19 and 20.
In other words, it is very possible that Lorde and Lana Del Rey will never cross paths backstage at the festival. In fact, who would be shocked if they deliberately avoided each other?
Last year, in at least two interviews, Lorde dismissed Lana Del Rey as “irrelevant” and blasted her for singing “shirt-tugging, desperate, don’t leave me stuff.” That type of message, Lorde said, is “not a good thing for young girls, even young people, to hear.”
“I’ve read interviews where certain big female stars are like, ‘I’m not a feminist.’ I’m like, That’s not what it’s about,” Lorde said “I listened to that Lana Del Rey record and the whole time I was just thinking it’s so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know: ‘I’m nothing without you.’”
Of course, the upstart Kiwi songstress’s unavoidable hit single from Pure Heroine , “Royals,” is itself a blunt condemnation of exactly the type of pop star phoniness that Lana Del Rey embodies.
Lana Del Rey began her career under her real name, Lizzie Grant, as an earnest, “indie” singer songwriter grinding it out on the stages of various New York bars and small clubs. Her career went nowhere.
Then Lana Del Rey appeared, as if out of nowhere, and Lizzie Grant seemed to simply vanish, even online.
The truth is, Grant aka Del Rey has a millionaire father who has backed her career and her managers chose the new stage name Lana Del Rey, as The Guardian reported in a profile of the singer.
Of course “Lorde” is also a pseudonym, but with the real name Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O’Connor, who can blame her?
The point is, while Lana Del Rey is marketed as an indie outsider who bucked the system to hit it big, the reality is, she is just as much the creation of a marketing machine as any of today’s biggest pop stars.
“There are a lot of things that don’t seem organic about it,” said rock journalist Steven Horowitz. “She’s putting on a show. She’s here to entertain us.”
Ultimately, of course, all pop stars are here to entertain us. But if Lorde and Lana Del Rey bump into each other backstage at Coachella, that’s where the real entertainment could happen.