Ladies deified and despised
Instead of the CBS sitcoms that usually bury my Mondays, tonight, I watched Betty White’s 90th Birthday: A Tribute to America’s Golden Girl on NBC. The 90-minute special was more consistently amusing than last night’s drowsy and predictable Golden Globes, and more importantly, it was the kind of backward-looking history lesson that network television too seldom offers. In addition to the obvious Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls clips, there were commercials and game show clips dating back to the 1950′s. The closing “Thank You for Being a Friend” singalong filled the stage with TV comedy’s aging royalty: White, Carl Reiner, Mary Tyler Moore, Ed Asner, Carol Burnett, and umm, Chevy Chase, senior citizens all. As he did with last Friday’s Today show 60th anniversary, Barack Obama provided a semi-funny pre-taped piece that further legitimized a cultural institution. And indeed, White is a cultural institution. To my knowledge, the last entertainer whose 90th birthday was cause for a network special was Bob Hope. And while her medium and methods may differ greatly, Betty White is her generation’s Bob Hope, the widely beloved veteran who became our last active connection to a bygone era of entertainment.
As for the much younger woman whose NBC appearance over the weekend caused so much consternation among the Internet, and even some NBC personalities, let’s all chill the fuck out about Lana Del Rey. Her Saturday Night Live performance was far from perfect, and it could not have been perfect enough to silence her bloodthirsty detractors. But it was no worse than numerous other weak SNL performances: Florence and the Machine a couple months ago comes immediately to mind. Besides, was anybody who heard “Video Games” or “Born to Die” expecting powerhouse, Adele-level vocals? She has a breathy, affected coo that works for her torchy, affected songs. This was not a great American Idol performance. But insofar as Lana Del Rey has been defined, it was a solid, fitting Lana Del Rey performance: oscillating between sultry and childlike, tentative but compelling, calculated for maximum attention.
Nobody would even shrug if Adam Levine or Michael Buble delivered an off-key vocal on live TV. But, as with the Taylor Swift Grammy controversy a couple years ago, we seem to expect that all pretty girls will sing as flawlessly as they look. We hold them to a vocal standard that we would never hold, say, Ezra Koenig or Britt Daniel: men whose idiosyncratic vocals fit their idiosyncratic artistry. The assumption in so many attacks on Swift or Del Rey is that these women are incapable of such artistry, which does not require, and often exceeds, pristine vocal talent. Lana Del Rey is no Taylor Swift, and her artistry is yet to be determined. But to write her off or eviscerate her because she did not go all Aguilera on her first television appearance is foolish, ill-informed, unreasonable, and yes, cruel.
