Watching Lana Del Rey’s ‘Tropico’ in 2021 - A Reflection on Western Society 🥀

Doin’ time, except since I’m a white girl the only time I’m doing is rewatching Clueless, obsessing over the new Lana single ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’ and finding deep meaning in color psychology I learnt in Legally Blonde style analysis’s on YouTube. Well, hopefully I’m not that basic; but at the end of the day, all my alternative hipster phases and attempts to come across as multi-faceted are in vain. I am here in 2021 reclaiming my whiteness, as much as I hate it. And my heroine Lana Del Rey only reflects back to me my own privileges and prejudices.

Let’s be real. I’m from an Italian WWII refugee family, wedded to second-generation British immigrants who settled in the ‘colony’ of New Zealand: a land whose rightful name is Aotearoa, not that anyone outside of the Pacific Ocean would know that. The Monarchy did a pretty good job in making people from over the seas believe it’s just another peaceful island nation of the British Empire, hiding the fact that it was manipulatively stolen from the rightful landowners in a feat of calculated scumduggery that ‘laws’ and ‘treaties’ can only attempt to mask.

Do many of you from outside of Aotearoa even know of Māori culture (Te Ao Māori), Māori language (Te Reo Māori) or the fact that they are the rightful owners (tāngata whenua: people whom the land belongs to/who are from this land) of ‘New Zealand’? Probably not. But I bet you’ve heard of the Monarchy, I bet you’ve heard of Lorde, I bet you’ve heard of newcomer BENEE, and our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. This is truly a land where the English woman reigns. I know this first hand as my mother, an English woman through and through who watches the Crown to comfort herself, has been very high up in the Waitangi Tribunal, a legal body set up to help with land grievances (a.k.a. Indigenous peoples rightfully wanting some of their stolen land).

How does this relate to Lana Del Rey’s Tropico, you ask?

Here’s how.

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I was one of the original Lana Del Rey fans. Circa 2010. I remember when Video Games and Blue Jeans were released on Spotify, a then small streaming platform in comparison to iTunes, the music Queen of the day. We heard about Lana Del Rey (which literally translates to Lana of the King in Spanish - I studied Spanish in my Anglican Christian All Girls School so obviously I’m an expert) through a good friend of ours who has long been a frequent of the Australasian DJ scene. Apparently a remix of Video Games was blowing up in Aussie clubs, so we eagerly got into her, never thinking anyone else would ever know her name.

She has been the soundtrack to my adolescence and the beginning of my adulthood. Calming me and my friends through our first (and second and third and fourth) heartbreaks, she has seen it all. She was there for me when I was 11 years old and felt out of place in the small West Coast surfing town I grew up in, she was there for me through my private school years and my atheist rebellion, there for me when I went on high school exchange to Tennessee and truly experienced the Southern States of the USA. She was there for me in my backpacking days in Southeast Asia after I graduated, she was there for me in my drugged up late teens, she was what I was playing at my first Retail Manager job at 20, she is there for me now as I await my 22nd birthday and the ‘real twenties’. It’s like she’s been the soundtrack to my whole life - the parts I was lucid for, at least. 🥀

But today I sat down to finally watch Tropico, her 27-minute long film from 2013, and it must say, it hit different.

Like many of us white women, who didn’t have to fear for our lives every day of 2020, it has given us lots of time to ‘reflect’. To ‘progress on our spiritual journey’, ‘look back on our past blindspots’, even to become ‘aware of our privilege’, FINALLY. Some of us have taken to the streets in BLM protests, some have taken to our favourite social media platform, the real dedicated ones even reading books on Anti-Racism, systemic injustice, unfair incarceration, prejudice, discrimination, colonisation, slavery and the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as a whole.

But it is not enough.

I recall in May 2020, sitting around the table with a white family I am close to, consoling my friends younger sister by saying ‘White women can help save the world because we have the privilege without the patriarchy’. My friends’ Mother then brought up the ‘Starlight Rides’, a phenomenon of police brutality against Native Americans and Indigenous peoples in North America, involving kidnapping Native American teens and adults and leaving them to freeze to death in the cold wilderness.

Being a white saviour will never be enough. We have to actively acknowledge and condemn the white supremacy in every way we can until the day we die, and it will still never be enough. We will never know of all the horrors committed against BIPOC in human history, and because of our privilege we get to sit here being ignorant and trying to decide ‘how to help’. I’m not meaning to belittle or bemoan the efforts of white activists; I merely mean to say none of it is enough. We are so far from a fair society that it is literally sickening.

Let’s come back to Tropico. Like Lana’s music, much of the iconography and symbolism romanticizes aspects of Western and Christian culture: Elvis Presley “is the King don’t you think”; the Mother Mary, immaculate conception archetype; Marilyn Monroe, the way an ideal woman should be - a sex symbol, fully made up and usually in small dresses, just like Lana; and the classic tale of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace as Eve cannot resist the fleshy worldly pleasures found in the Garden of Eden - in Tropico’s case, an apple and albino male model Shaun Ross.

The elephant in the room for me is the whiteness of it all.

Similar to Elvis, Christianity has long been a fan of appropriating things from Black culture and Indigenous cultures, while all the while making BIPOC feel lesser and forcing them to conform with the ‘right way’ of doing things - or should I say, the white way.

Elvis, hailed the king of ‘Rock and Roll’ by many for decades, in fact made palatable to white audiences what was already popular music in Black culture. Have you heard of Muddy Waters? Of Ray Charles, Ike Turner, Ruth Brown, Little Richard, Fats Domino’s and Big Bill Broonzy? Probably not as much as you’ve heard of Elvis. Broonzy, who ended up working as a janitor, is recorded as saying, “He’s singing the same thing I’m singing now. And he knows it. Rock and roll is a steal from the old, original blues”.

Just like all of North America is stolen land, as is Australia, New Zealand and many other ‘Western’ countries. Meanwhile, John Lennon is credited for saying, “There wasn’t much before Elvis”. Sounds like bullshit to me. Black bodies were stolen from African countries for centuries and to this day 2021 no reparations have been paid for slavery, yet all White America seems to do is steal from Black culture while incarcerating and marginalising Black people? White people need to wake the hell up and take some responsibility for the disgusting state of affairs the whole world over. And women especially have a lot of work to do carrying this load - to stop acting like white saviour angels while appropriating every culture under the sun would be a good start.

But how are we supposed to do that as white women when most of us can’t even seem to see our own hypocrisy?

Now I come back to Lana Del Rey. I do not mean to chastise her. She is and always will be my favourite artist. But all of us fans need to take a good hard look at ourselves and take her down from this pedestal of holiness. Yes, her music is some of the best I’ve ever had the privilege to hear, but all she sings about is romanticising the whiteness, the wealth, the stolen land, the Christianity, the American Dream, the sexism and materialism America is built on, that will also be its demise if white people continue to live in a dreamworld instead of reality. Waking up to the horrors of mass Indigenous genocide, the fact that so much wealth was built on slavery, and that colonisation is just a fancy way of saying “rape and pillage”. This is the kind of spiritual self-reflection I want to see from white people in 2021. No more sugar-coating the truth, because I bet that sugar is refined and wholly fake, poison disguised in sweetness.

I am guilty of all of these charges myself. Of romanticising capitalism, of being an endless, blind believer in the American dream, of worshipping white idols, turning a blind eye to colonisation, slavery and genocide, and going about my privileged existence. But I’m tired of painting myself as an angel while being deathly ashamed to be English. Who you are born as is not a reflection of your moral code. What you will do with the shoes you were given, the privilege and wealth you were born into? That says a lot more.

White feminism is a term that has been floating around the internet lots recently; I think Lana is the embodiment of this. Us white women are too quick to put our suffering top of the list, while not realising that Native, Black and Indigenous women probably have it way harder. Yes, us poor white women are just like Marilyn: deeply troubled, overtly sexualised, commodified and discarded by white men, only valuable for aesthetic and domestic duties, we may as well carry a ‘Use-By’ date. But we know nothing about being commodified compared to our BIPOC friends. It’s all relative.

White domination is a problem to all. Democracy is literally falling apart after falling prey again and again to venture capitalists whose only agenda is to exploit everything around them, including legal and political systems, for their own gain. It wouldn’t even be a stretch to say colonisation and white supremacy are largely responsible for the climate crisis and the impending human extinction. This is a call to action to all white activists. Stand down from your pedestal. Stop wearing dreads and let your BIPOC peers lead the mainstream environmental movement. Amplify Black voicies wherever you go. Use your platforms to amplify the cries, calls and truths of your BIPOC friends and peers. We white ones do not really have any idea what is going on in the world, as much as we like to present the image that we are in control. As a culture and society (if you can call it that), Westerners are deeply troubled, extremely behind and altogether blind to the calls of the earth and the wisdom of all Indigenous cultures. So no more “stand back and stand by”. I’m asking white people to look deep into those capitalist hearts and declare now an emergency. Western culture has absolutely no moral code and it is time we stand down and finally listen to those around us. Oh, and putting them in positions of power would be a really important step.