Since its 2007 beginnings, Tumblr has been a popular hub for blogs about self-harm, as well as disordered eating and suicidal ideation. “I used them as (unhealthy) coping mechanisms for past trauma and the mental health issues I was dealing with at the time,” she told me.
She also was “guilty of browsing through tags to try to find tips to lose weight quickly.” Her blogs, adorned with Lana Del Rey lyrics, were largely a form of escapism. So too was Anna (a pseudonym), who says that while she ran a daddy-worshipping blog that she hid from her friends, self-harm was the only original content she ever posted on Tumblr in her young teens. She was part of Tumblr’s nymphet community a decade ago, while a sophomore in college. “I do vividly remember that after I started listening to Lana, the content I would reblog would be a more sensual, erotic BDSM, Lolita, soft blush pink sort of aesthetic,” Taylor (who, like most of sources in this story, goes by her forename to protect her identity) told me. Some grapple with the problematic context in which the Lana-Tumblr moment existed, where thinness was treated like divinity and self-harm brought in reblogs and engagement. For many of the young women who spent their after-school hours online, trying to fantasize their way out of the mundanity of their teenage bedrooms, lockdown inspired a revisitation and a reckoning. Now, a decade later, we seem to be living through peak Tumblr nostalgia, as the aesthetically symbiotic worlds between Lana and soft grunge Tumblr are being reimagined by Tiktokers and Girlbloggers. Her love for daddies and older men (“I got sweet taste for men who are older,” she sings on “Cola”), her resistance to self-improvement (“I don’t wanna know what’s good for me,” she sings on “Gods & Monsters”), her mostly buried but nonetheless risqué lyrics on eating disorder culture (“I’m a fan of pro-ana nation/I do them drugs to stop the f-food cravings,” she sings on an old track called “Boarding School”)-not to mention her perfectly tacky glamor and hip-hop-meets-Old Hollywood high femme look-represent a new kind of dissatisfied femininity that is spread throughout Tumblr. Lana plays a central role in each of these online communities, as they herald her as one of their own. She often reblogs kink, sugarbaby, and nymphet content, as well as some images of self-harm and pro-ana (pro-anorexia). With the album on repeat in the background, Rachael spends most of her days and nights on Tumblr, showing up to class wired on a dream-filled two-hour sleep. You can hear that tension in the music as she sings with a bored disaffection over soaring instrumentation. Lana lives out her alcoholism, addiction, and destructive tendencies through her art, populating the world of Born To Die with unsustainable fantasies: American maximalism, sadomasochism, too much liquor, older men, shitty men, unavailable men, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, money-as well as disappointment when those fantasies neither last nor materialize into real life. It is also an album made by a recovering addict, one who hasn’t had a drink for nine years and is clearly nostalgic for the giddiness of mania.
#Lana del rey tumblr pictures full#
It is an album full of self-destruction and willful submission, hellbent on a one-way death drive toward libidinal excess.
Born To Die, Lana’s second studio album, has just been released.
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