“I Just Ride"

White Femininity, Melancholia, and the Settler Colonial Aesthetic in Lana Del Rey's America

Abstract

With over 54.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone, Lana Del Rey has taken the world by storm with her dreamy, melancholic music, and vintage American aesthetic (Spotify, 2024). This article thus seeks to identify and analyze the perpetuation of settler colonial privilege and power structures within the music and aesthetic of Lana Del Rey. I argue that despite having the potential to critique a heteronormative, capitalist ideal of the American dream, Del Rey’s aesthetic ultimately perpetuates settler-colonial power structures and imaginaries through a nostalgic idealization of America and of white femininity, founded on colonial violence. I interrogate the aesthetic of Del Rey using a settler colonial framework, specifically Kevin Bruyneel’s concept of “settler memory” which describes how structures of settler politics, history and media selectively remember and frame the past to erase Indigenous existence and sovereignty (Bruyneel, 2021). I first argue that Del Rey’s aesthetic romanticizes open landscapes and erases the past and ongoing reality of settler colonial violence within the United States. I then highlight how Lana’s depiction of Kennedy-era politics reaffirms settler colonial power structures and bolsters her white femininity. I then analyze the implications of Del Rey’s “sad girl” aesthetic in bolstering white fragility and framing the sexuality of Indigenous and racialized women as inferior and degrading. I finally analyze the decolonial potential of Del Rey’s music in spite of her perpetuation of settler colonialism.