![]() ![]() ![]() The album embraces the countrified energy that runs through some of Del Rey’s all-time greatest ballads, like “Video Games” and “Ride,” both sonically and thematically. It feels like an apt progression that the sound and visuals of Chemtrails are less hip-hop and more country, a genre in which working-class life-and more specifically, working-class life as a white person-is routinely alluded to. ![]() Following the backlash, Del Rey defended herself by telling a Maxim interviewer that she lived in East Los Angeles ( which has a 96.7 percent Latin American population), and that she had "always spoken Spanish in all songs." Bizarrely, neither of these claims was true. In a 2021 article for Harper’s Bazaar, Iman Sultan wrote that “the persona that catapulted to success is built on the appropriation of music, aesthetics, and storylines conceived in low-income neighborhoods populated by people of color.” Following the 2013 release of her short film Tropico, the singer came under fire for appropriating Native and Latin cultures: she pole-dances with teardrop tattoos on her face, surrounded by Latinx extras, then brandishes a gun in the desert while wearing a Native American headdress for some reason. ![]() like a god.” In “Tulsa Jesus Freak,” she dreams of going back to Arkansas (even though Tulsa is, of course, a city in Oklahoma). “Don’t even want what’s mine/Much less the fame,” she sings in “Dark But Just a Game.” In "Dance Till We Die," she mentions being “burdened by the weight of fame." In “White Dress,” she describes wearing a white dress as a 19-year-old waitress, singing, “It kinda makes me feel like I was better off/’Cause it made me feel. Her earlier albums narrated the achievement of a certain American Dream, but according to her latest lyrics, she now regrets dreaming that dream in the first place. A running theme on Chemtrails is Del Rey’s disillusionment with fame. Despite growing up in the picturesque suburbs of Lake Placid, N.Y., and attending the $65K-a-year Kent School, Del Rey moved to the Manhattan Mobile Home trailer park in Bergen, New Jersey in her early twenties, and she has been making yachtloads of cash singing about the supposed romance of working-class life ever since. ![]()
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