Lana Del Rey might want to be a bit more careful as she promotes her upcoming album, Chemtrails Over the Country Club. The “Summertime Sadness” singer took to Instagram yesterday to awkwardly point out that the newly released album cover features people of color (including “My best friends are rappers my boyfriends have been rappers” and “I’m not the one storming the capital, I’m literally changing the world by putting my life and thoughts and love out there on the table 24 seven”).
Del Rey then went on BBC Radio 1 to further discuss the album, which quickly devolved into a rambling discussion about her post, politics, and the state of the nation in general.
“Before I even put the album cover up, I knew what people were going to say,” Del Rey said. “So when they actually started saying things, I responded and I just said ‘I got a lot of issues, but inclusivity ain’t one of them.’ It just isn’t. You can’t just make it my problem. My friends, my family, my whatever, they’re not all one way, and we’re not the ones storming the Capitol. We voted for Biden. My girlfriends come from all over the world. They have children from all different types of people.”
As the conversation ranged from COVID-19 to Trump, the singer’s strange takes continue. Of course, none of this should be surprising considering that she seemed equally tone-deaf when calling out people like Beyoncé last year and then stirring up more trouble in trying to defend herself. When her rant came to the disgraced president, Del Rey called Trump a “live-television psychopath crazy person” while blaming both television and Instagram for normalizing people like him. But in her eyes, the politics of the last four years haven’t been all terrible.
“As bad as it was, it really needed to happen,” Del Rey said. “We really needed a reflection of our world’s greatest problem, which is not climate change, but sociopathy and narcissism — especially in America. It’s going to kill the world. It’s not capitalism, it’s narcissism.”
According to Del Rey, the “big issue in the world” is what to do with the jerks, assholes, and “people who don’t know they’re hurting other people.” She did offer a solution though. “Do we put them all on an island together?”
Check out the whole thing at BBC Radio 1 to hear more of the wide-ranging interview.
