Money, Power, Glory, Love?
Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift: Role Models or Cautionary Tales?
“Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life. I have put only my talent into my works.” Oscar Wilde knew a thing about being as famous for your love affairs as for your art.
Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey, the two most influential female pop stars of the era, have lived out their own intense romantic entanglements in their art.
The two are good friends. They collabed on Snow on the Beach. They share a producer, Jack Antonoff. They are in the same friend group.
They like bohunks.
Each has her own rabid, obsessive fan base. Their day-to-day, even hour-to-hour relationship status is not only worldwide breaking news but vital information you need in order to decode each each song, new album, and new look.
Pop music, of course, has always been the tale of teenage obsessions and pining for true love, but Lana and Taylor are both grown women well in their thirties. It’s one thing when an 18-year-old Britney sings about her toxic boyfriend; it’s another when it’s a billionaire thirty-four year-old superstar.
She’s Always Got a Blank Space, Baby
Football may be gay, but 2023 is the year it became fodder for a billion heteronormative YA romance fanfics. She’s the hottest pop star in the world but always unlucky in love. He’s the macho Kansas City Chiefs tight end and the media darling of the NFL. Sparks fly when she spots him in the front row of her sold out concert wearing his phone number on a friendship bracelet.…
It’s a blockbuster story. A real-life romcom. But don’t get too cocky, Travis Kelce. Your revenge album is coming.
2023 was the summer of Taylor Swift. A billion-dollar concert tour, breathless reports on which surprise songs she played each night (we got Champagne Problems at our show). A worldwide shortage of pony beads due to millions of girls making trillions of friendship bracelets. New albums. Reissued albums. And lots of relationship gossip.
Swift, over the course of just the U.S. leg of her worldwide tour, broke up with her six-year boyfriend, English twit Joe Alwyn, briefly “dated” Matt Healy of The 1989, and as of this writing is the arm candy of an NFL side of beefcake named Travis Kelce.
Full disclosure: I dig Taylor Swift. I went to her concert here in L.A. with my Swiftie daughter. There, I confess that I was psyoped into singing along (at least, to the songs I knew) with 70,000 other weeping white women. Powerful waves of estrogen-induced mass hysteria took hold. There was no escape. Grown men were reduced to tears, ripping off their boxer shorts and tossing them onto her bejeweled bodysuit.
Resistance was futile. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
During the interlude when Tay spoke to the fully hypnotized audience, she remarked that she spent the pandemic “as a single millennial, drinking too much wine, alone with my cats.”
But what she didn’t mention was that she’d spent the pandemic hunkering down with Joe.
Everyone was rooting for her and Joe. But as Year Six of their “perfect” relationship ticked down, I had a feeling things were not rosy in paradise. Six years is a long time to be someone’s GF.
And lo, it came to pass that this spring the sad news of their breakup exploded. Shocker, I know.
Despite unfathomable wealth and fame, Taylor is basically living the de facto lifestyle for millennial white women. Partying with friends, drinking a lot of wine, owning cats that have first and last names, and riding the dating carousel.
As with all women in their mid-thirties, dating Ms. Swift is sort of complicated (It’s Delicate), she’s ambivalent at best about “settling down,” and most of the fun is had in the chase.
In her extravagant video for “Me,” a widely derided ode to her narcissism, her co-singer Brandon Urie offers her a diamond engagement ring and she rolls her eyes. Then he hands her a kitten and she accepts with glee.
No one wanted to play with me as a little kid
So I've been scheming like a criminal ever since
To make them love me and make it seem effortless
Eternal love and devotion is the end goal Taylor and other young women claim to seek, but when they find it, they may risk losing the engine of their angst and some of the spark that fires their creativity.
Being in love may be personally fulfilling, but falling out of love, experiencing heartbreak, longing for the perfect man who is always tantalizingly out of reach, emotionally unable, afraid to commit—this, folks, has always been songwriting gold.
Baby love, I think I've been a little too kind
Didn't notice you walking all over my peace of mind
In the shoes I gave you as a present
Putting someone first only works
When you're in their top five
And by the way
I'm going out tonight
Taylor’s in on the joke, of course, but it’s not necessarily coming from a place of contentment. Why did she and Joe Alwyn break up after six years? He wouldn’t propose? Or, more likely, getting married is something normal people do. Taylor Swift is married to the sea (of screaming fans). And that’s okay. It works for her.
Happy Taylor doesn’t sell as well as Lovelorn Taylor. Her life is her art, and we’re just bystanders.
In a way, Taylor Swift, like Margot Robbie’s Barbie, is the perfect woman. She doesn’t need a man. She just needs a gynecologist.
“This is the Experience of Being an American Whore”
So goes the chorus on “A&W,” a song on Lana’s fantastic new album. She contemplates a string of lovers who don’t love her back, singing “Did you know a singer can still be looking like a sidepiece at thirty-three?”
I'm a different kind of woman
If you want some basic bitch go to the Beverly Center and find her.
Raw honesty—the unprettied up, unglamorous side of the millennial woman who has it all except true love—is Lana Del Rey’s essential lane.
If I was her friend, I would want nothing but happiness and eternal love for Lana, with her soul mate. But would a happy trad wife make the emotionally tortured music Lanastans crave? Maybe we want her on that heartbreak wall. Maybe we need her on that heartbreak wall.
But unlike Swift, the 38-year-old Del Rey seems much more interested in marriage as a real life goal.
Lately, we've been makin' out a lot
Not talkin' 'bout the stuff that's at the very heart of things
Do you want children? Do you wanna marry me?
Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?
I've got things to do, like nothing at all
I wanna do them with you
Do you wanna do them with me?
Del Rey, born Elizabeth Grant, has her own Swiftian string of ex-boyfriends.
She famously fell in love with a Tulsa, Oklahoma police officer named Sean Larkin, a tall silver fox, but they broke up when the pandemic started in 2020.
In response, she found a cute boy toy on Instagram and things moved fast.
Larkin got married to a Lana lookalike in 2022.
To promote her new album, “Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard,” Lana put up just one billboard in the entire country—in Larkin’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hell hath no fury like a scorned woman. After all, “It's not about havin' someone to love me anymore.”
It’s about revenge. It’s about revenge songs (cif. Blue Banisters).
Lana watchers started going wild this past March when word leaked out that she became engaged to music producer Evan Winiker, a close friend of her (and Taylor’s) music producer, Jack Antonoff.
Is this guy the end of the line for Lana? Or will she keep seeking her missing piece—and not want to spit it out when she finally gets a hold of it?
The missing piece in Shel Silverstein’s book, remember, also loved to sing. When he finally found his missing piece, he discovered that becoming whole meant he could never sing again.
In fact, the title song off “Did You Know There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard” contains the entire female universe of love, longing, and growing older.
Apparently there is a real tunnel in Long Beach, California, built in the 1920s and since abandoned. Lana describe it as “Handmade beauty, sealed up by two man-made walls.”
The chorus asks “When's it gonna be my turn? Open me up, tell me you like me. Love me until I love myself. Don't forget me—there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd.”
Then the final twist of the knife: “Don't forget me—like the tunnel under Ocean Blvd.”
It gets me every time.
Lana and Taylor Save the World?
For now, let Taylor enjoy the beefcake buffet in the VIP suites at every NFL stadium in the world. Let Lana wait tables at Waffle House in Alabama and flirt with cute gas station attendants in Appalachia.
I hope both these incredibly talented, charismatic women have long happy lives and continued success. Of course, if I was their mother, I would want them both to fall in love and live happily ever after.
But when you’re a pop star, they don’t let you do it. They know and I know that pain and suffering are the best fodder for the creative act.
Just ask Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone.
Fat, contented housewives are not at open mic nights belting their hearts out in the throes of an existential crisis. As a fan, therefore, I am agnostic on their marital status. Let them be. Let them cook. And let me look forward to many more years of poignant music written in the throes of despair and girl-boss rebirth.
So to all the angry boomers who hate these ladies, listen to me: marriage won’t “cure” Lana or Taylor, because their perennial relationship chaos is a feature, not a bug.
HOWEVER: When either Taylor Swift or Lana Del Rey does get married, we will witness the greatest spike in weddings in American history. Mimetic desire will grip the hearts and minds of millions of millennial women, who will awaken from their rosé hangovers and start issuing marital ultimatums to whoever they left on read that week.
A new baby boom will be triggered by a tsunami of heterosexual romantic happy endings—one so revolutionary that the coming collapse may just be averted.
Travis Kelce literally holds the fate of the country in his football jock strap. Stay hydrated, bro.
Thanks for reading,
—Peachy
Maybe Taylor and Lana need to be mentored by Dolly. Still writing heartbreak songs and churning out hits, even while married.
The old saying rings true: the common element in all your disappointing, failed and toxic relationships is you.