Voices That Matter: Authenticity, Identity, and Voice in the Musical Career of Lana Del Rey

Abstract

Discursive authentications of singing voices in pop music reception are often rooted in gendered expectations. Moving away from essentialist understandings of the ‘authentic voice,’ this article proffers that voices are formatively entangled in processes of subjectification. Lana Del Rey is a singer whose (vocal) career has been considered inauthentic in the discourse of journalists, particularly when she first rose to stardom in 2011 via YouTube. Del Rey is a prime example of the contemporary values of artistic personae in pop culture, as her career has been so bound to notions of authenticity and sounding authentic. Through an analysis of the vocal aesthetics of Del Rey and the discourse that surrounds her, the notion of ‘vocal ontogenesis’ is developed. This concept moves from subjectification as an ontologically complete instance to subjectification as a never-ending process. The notion of vocal ontogenesis becomes useful for comprehending the complex aggregations of which the voice is a component, and more broadly implies the need for further study of vocal materialism, setting an agenda for decentered examinations of voice, gender, and authenticity.