Lana Del Rey Claims “Narcissism” Is Killing The World And Trump Presidency “Needed To Happen”

Following yesterday’s pre-emptive defence of the cover of her seventh album Chemtrails Over The Country Club, Lana Del Rey has elaborated in an interview in which she suggests the Trump presidency “needed to happen” to reveal the true crisis of our times: wide-spread narcissism.

On Monday, Del Rey dropped the cover art and tracklist for Chemtrails…, ahead of the release of its title track today. In a comment on Instagram, she pointed out that the black-and-white cover featured women of colour, and that followers needn’t make “this a WOC/POC issue”.

It comes after Del Rey last year made comments about the music industry’s ‘double standards’ against her which almost exclusively disparaged women of colour artists, which then prompted the singer to release a six-minute video where she said critics were trying to create a “race war”.

Talking to Annie Mac on BBC Radio 1, Del Rey has clarified her comments about the album artwork were a response to the comments she knew were going to come in.

“Before I even put the album cover up, I knew what people were going to say,” she said (via Consequence of Sound). “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…”

“We voted for Biden,” she continued. “My girlfriends come from all over the world, they have children from all different types of people. And I’m mentioning all this, like, to people who are listening because people really wanted even more people of color on my album cover. Which you know is, to a point, a photo just is what it is.

“I wasn’t being preemptive, I was definitely responding. But I just feel like if that’s really what people are gonna say, I have an answer for them, which is that if you look closer, you will see people of colour. It’s a black-and-white image, so zoom in, you know. It’s just weird, you know?”

Del Rey then reflected on the state of the US, saying that Trump’s presidency has bought to the surface issues that were long ignored.

“The madness of Trump… As bad as it was, it really needed to happen,” she 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…”.

For Del Rey, the country’s abysmal response to COVID-19 is a “huge wake-up call”.

“Your life is not about what kind of shoes you buy, it’s not about going to Harvard or Oxford,” she says. “It’s about what kind of person you are. If you’re an asshole and everyone … if you’re a jerk and everyone tells you that you are and everyone tells you that you’re a jerk, then we finally need to address this big issue in the world of what do we do with all these people who don’t know they’re hurting other people? Do we put them all on an island together?”

Later in the interview, Del Rey suggests that “disassociated rage” is the true source of last week’s insurrection by Trump supporters.

“I think, for the people who stormed the Capitol, it’s disassociated rage,” she says. “They want to wile out somewhere. And it’s like, we don’t know how to find a way to be wild in our world. And at the same time, the world is so wild…”

“Again, I think people are having to re-evaluate what is strange and not strange. Watching the people storm the Capitol, everyone gets to go look at that and figure out what Capitols they’ve been storming this year in their own freakin’ lives. ‘Cause everyone’s running amok.”

Del Rey has today released single ‘Chemtrails Over The Country Club’ and an accompanying music video. Find it below, and listen to the full BBC Radio 1 interview here.