Lana Del Rey Defends Her Cobain Comment

The "Summertime Sadness" singer wants the world to know that she doesn't glorify dying young. Lana Del Rey came under fire recently for a statement she made in an interview with The Guardian, in which Lana disclosed that two of her music idols are Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain. When the interviewer, Tim Jonze, noted that the two musicians were connected by an early death, Lana said that she wished she were "dead already," sparking backlash from readers and one rockstar daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. Now, Lana is defending her "death wish" via Twitter — by saying it was all a huge misunderstanding.

Lana's comment about death rubbed the late Kurt Cobain's daughter Frances Bean the wrong way, and for good reason — Frances Bean lost her father to suicide when she was only two years old. While Kurt Cobain's death may hold a certain fascination with Nirvana fans, Frances Bean knows the reality of losing someone to suicide, and it's hardly "romantic." She criticized Lana on Twitter, stating that "the death of young musicians isn't something to romanticize," and that "it becomes a desirable feat because people like you think it's cool."

But according to Lana, that's not what she meant to do at all. Lana took to Twitter to clear the air... by blaming the Guardian. Lana has since deleted the tweets, which allegedly stated:

I don't find that part of music glam either.

i regret trusting the guardian- i didn't want to do an interview but the journalist was persistent.

Alexis [Petridis, the newspaper's music critic] was masked as a fan but was hiding sinister ambitions and angles Maybe he's actually the boring one looking for something interesting to write about.

His leading questions about death and persona were calculated.

The journalist who did the interview — Tim Jonze and not Alexis Petridis, as Lana tweeted — responded back to Lana's tweets on The Guardian's music blog, stating:

It's not pleasant asking a pop star if she thinks the idea of dying young herself is attractive – it's a dark question, but it's not a leading one. She has every opportunity to say no. And she can hardly complain about the subject matter: she'd been talking about her icons all dying young, she named her debut album Born to Die and had spent much of the 50 minutes previous to this point telling me how miserable she was.

Here is a clip from the interview where Lana discusses the death of young icons:

Lana did say what the interviewer wrote, so it's surprising that she's now telling the world that she didn't mean to make the comments. As Tim Jonze noted in his blog, this isn't the first time that Lana has discussed death. The title track on "Born to Die" has this verse:

Come on take a walk on the wild sideLet me kiss you hard in the pouring rainYou like your girls insaneChoose your last words, this is the last timeCause you and I, we were born to die

While I wouldn't say that these lyrics are necessarily suggesting that Lana finds death glamorous, it does suggest that she finds a certain mystique in the act of dying. While she would hardly be the first artist to discuss death in her work, it doesn't excuse the fact that she should offer up a true explanation of her quote from The Guardian.

She's talked about death in her work, but I'd like to hear what she really thinks.