Leave Lana Del Rey Alone — The Girl is Good

The late comedian Drake Sather once said that he wished he’d waited to perform on Letterman, because he wasn’t ready for the success that happened immediately thereafter. He didn’t have enough material, and the attention he gained as a result of his performance waned far too quickly. When I read that interview with Sather, I thought, “That can’t be true. If you waited, you might have forgone an opportunity that would never come your way again. You might have never had the experience of performing on that coveted stage, and you could have spent the rest of your life kicking yourself and living the regret of “the guy who turned down David Letterman.” But Lana Del Rey’s recent performance on Saturday Night Live might have confirmed Sather’s theory — there’s just no room for error. She performed on SNL because Lorne Michaels took a liking to her, and she was a media flop. The public didn’t get it, and they tore her apart. She then performed on Letterman, but she failed to redeem herself in the public’s eyes. And rumors are now circulating that she’s working on her stage presence.

But there’s something very important that the public is missing amidst this debacle. She’s fucking good. The SNL performance was terrible — that is for certain. And it’s unfortunate that she got really bad clothing and hair advice in addition to what was presumably a stage-fright-meltdown. That being said — I have absolutely no idea why every blogger and news outlet wants to take an artist with talent and throw rocks at her. If the public feels the need to attack her, then don’t complain that the radio is filled with musical garbage, because the only people meant to succeed in our unforgiving country are over-produced robots that spend more time on their image than their music. Watch her performance on Saturday Night Live and Letterman below, along with SNL’s very funny Kristen Wiig sketch, which comes to Lana Del Rey’s defense.