Lana Del Rey – White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter

Homemaking can’t quite match up to homewrecking for the widest score range of the week…

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[6.33]Leah Isobel: Lana loves a juxtaposition, or more accurately the liminal space between juxtaposed poles: the implied distance between fantasy and reality when she sings “like an American” (her best song btw), her description of heaven as “a tunnel lined with yellow lights” (her best song btw) (not the Paradise version though), the memories and emotions connecting two spiraling lovers who write and tour separately (her best song btw). From that perspective, the absurd layering of Disney-lush orchestral instrumentation, muffled and poorly-comped vocals (check that sudden jolt on “Yoo-hoo, dinner’s almost done”), and classically awkward hip-hop affectation is just another way to achieve the skin-crawling uncanny valley effect that’s so central to her work. But that undersells the utter bafflement I felt on first hearing this song, and the fact that, even though I know to expect all of its tricks, it still makes me feel a little nauseous. Listening to it does make me react. So… she got me, I guess?
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Andrew Karpan: “Lana’s new song…..” she reported back to me, about three or four years after we had stopped seeing each other, and maybe just one since she had been the subject of another very long and pointless argument in one of those many barren stretches of the ice-cold midwest highway; “Dude the song is so good.  Makes me sick,” she says. “The intro is giving Burial and it’s all giving sexy hauntology, I’ll say that much.”
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Alfred Soto: The faint tweeness of the string arrangement and the cutesy-poo “Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, ‘I love you'” hook call to mind the Lana of the Hundred Coos that annoyed me in 2011. As her evocations of desire get denser her tempos get torpid.
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Claire Davidson: Lana Del Rey’s love of Americana, country music, and even her swamp tour guide husband are not inherently suspect on their own. For one thing, there are plenty of country musicians — or even just artists who dabble in the genre — with left-wing politics, who use the genre’s rural aesthetics to speak to the disenfranchisement experienced by working-class people from these areas. When taken all together in this political climate, though, Del Rey’s specific confluence of interests becomes particularly fraught, given how her pivot to a style of music that’s more insular by nature just so happens to have intersected with her marriage to a man whose job points to a specific, very gendered strain of back-to-the-land isolationism. Even an embrace of a more rural lifestyle isn’t inherently problematic, but as “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” proves, Lana Del Rey is committed to embodying these conservative tropes without irony — indeed, the entire track is centered around dirty talk that culminates in Del Rey’s feigned inability to cook over a stove. That the song sounds borderline unfinished seems to be its foremost provocation: the track begins with Del Rey muttering over sparse acoustic plucking before pivoting to a very affected portrayal of whimsy, where she inhabits a gratingly self-infantilized delivery amidst a backdrop of strings and spry flute touches, complete with tongue-in-cheek interjections of the phrase “whoopsie-daisy!” on the chorus. I’d call this erratic structure bad Tori Amos cosplay, but even at her most inscrutable, Amos always intended her wild tonal swerves to represent a kind of abstract, primeval femininity being released in her work. Lana Del Rey, on the other hand, is very calculated in what she chooses to divulge here. The song’s first verse is fashioned as braggadocious ragebait, implying that all the external symbols of her partner’s rugged masculinity are exactly what make her peers jealous of her — and, indeed, are what makes him so attractive in her eyes, as evinced by the swooning delivery of onomatopoeia like snap, crackle, pop. It’s then that her evocation of her newfound domestic persona — which, crucially, involves quite a lot of cooking for her man — becomes truly insidious, illuminating just how tantalizing this adoption of rigidly enforced gender roles is for her. That she chooses to deliver the song’s chorus in a giddy, baby-voiced whisper only makes it more obnoxious: she knows exactly how deeply this will alarm keen-eared listeners, and in turn, she exaggerates every iota of poor taste on display, rubbing her audience’s noses in just how good she feels rebelling against a presumption of liberal values.
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Nortey Dowuona: Bitterly through my teeth, rightfully looking very ashamed to be saying this to an admitted black women hater Well, I never!
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Julian Axelrod: If nothing else, Lana’s current era proves she’s better at coming up with titles than almost anyone. Unfortunately, “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” breaks one of the cardinal rules of naming stuff: The title can’t be more memorable than the song itself.
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