A PORTRAIT OF THE GARBAGE AS A TRASHCAN

Someone Asked Me To Say Something About Lana Del Ray

LANA DEL RAY is the music industry’s SARAH PALIN. The more you try to
understand what is going on, the more you can’t. And only then do you
realize that THERE IS NOTHING TO UNDERSTAND.

The argument in her case is about authenticity, I guess, because some
of her behavior seems to be an act. A THING LIKE THAT, huh? A musician
is making something up about themselves? STOP THE E-PRESSES.

When I think about bands who have tried to cultivate myths about
themselves, the only band I can even think of is THE WHITE STRIPES.
They basically employed the same level of winking bullshit as LDR is
doing now. So what is different this time?

The fact of the matter is, ever article I read I can barely make heads
or tails of anyway, because nobody is writing about LDR, really, they
are WRITING ABOUT WRITING ABOUT her. They are reacting to each other,
and so part of me wonders how much of a hand she had in this
myth-building anyway. She was the spark but they were the pile of old
dead leaves.

Now like, with Sarah Palin, regardless of who lit the flame the moth
showed the fuck up. A whole family of irritating fucking moths. But
time will tell if like, Del Ray parlays this into a reality show on
IFC.

When I was regularly blogging about Twilight news and shit, I could
see real narratives about half the time. And in the end, those were
the stories I ran with. I could see a thru line from Ashley Greene
dating Joe Jonas to Disney Culture and back to Twilight again, I knew
that over the course of a few weeks I could work out what I had to say
about all that shit and do it in a way that would get traffic and
possibly attract the kind of people who UNTHINKINGLY consume that kind
of news and maybe get them to THINKINGLY consume it. But for every
story that I covered for two months there were three that I just
dropped, realizing that it wasn’t going to go anywhere where I could
make an interesting point.

I have a fairly low output. Not as like, one dude, but I mean, more
than a blog with more than one writer. More than a TV station. So I
have the luxury of waiting around for those stories I can run with. I
get a lot of NCITW questions and I hang on to some of them until I
have something to say. In a lot of ways, I run my operation in a very
old media way. But that is not the way most sites work. If they don’t
have an organic narrative, they force one.

Look at the way people hungrily pounced on MIA giving the finger. It
wasn’t: this is a story. It was: we can MAKE THIS a story. That will
give us something to do!

I read something the other day about M. Zuckerberg discussing THE
HACKER WAY, which is that Facebook churns out lots of code and puts it
up and deals with the issues as they happen. And that Google runs more
like an old institution, waiting for stuff to work fully before they
put it out there. I don’t even know if that is TRUE, it’s just a thing
I heard, but I feel like it is a similar push/pull.

I’m writing this as I am writing it. Where did I start? Sarah Palin?