Glowing praise for Lana Del Rey’s music video “National Anthem” co-starring A$AP Rocky has filled the blogosphere and Twitterverse today.
The video’s ethereal 1960s Instagram-esque aesthetic features a marriage made in heaven – a linking of today’s first couple of the hipster-hype dynasty.
The branding strategy behind this video is genius, to say the least.
As we well know, both Del Rey and Rocky are recording artists who went from virtual YouTube obscurity to worldwide mainstream acclaim.
With innovative auras linked to their iconography and fashion sensibilities, these artists captivate audiences just as potently as their music does. And precisely because of this, you’ll probably find that both artists have overlapping fan bases.
Yet aside from the visuals being absolutely tantalizing to look at, this “love story of the new age,” as Del Rey croons, can speak volumes to the state of racial imagery in popular culture.
Is this video a ‘national anthem’ for how the future of race relations is going to be depicted in the 21st century?
The parallel being made between Del Rey and Rocky with Marilyn Monroe/Jacqueline Onassis and President John F. Kennedy is overt and finely styled.
But what can be read as richly symbolic is the invocation of 1960s iconography placed with the images of Del Rey and A$AP Rocky engaging in a sensual and loving relationship with one another.
The video features several scenes of them kissing, suggestively touching each other’s thighs, and an especially sexy one of Pretty Flacko grabbing Del Rey’s ass.
Given the presence of their caramel, curly-headed progeny, we can assume that their characters got it in more than once.
Rocky and Del Rey’s charming on-screen chemistry exudes the notion that even in this fictional music video world, their personas have a deep and loving relationship.
This fact is further emphasized by the video’s quite moving and tragic ending.
Yet what ultimately makes “National Anthem” compelling is the overlay of the video’s vintage aesthetic with images of 21st century race relations – realities that were utterly taboo in Civil-Rights era Americana and politics.
The controversial social implications undergirding black male and white female sexual relations go back as far as the United States’ founding.
In a nation premised on a racist, anti-black super structure, black and white sexual relations posed the ultimate threat to the institution of racism itself.
Racial intermixing literally blurred the stringent color line that was deemed imperative to maintain an orderly, race-based society. Heck, the loathing of this taboo was the premise of the first-ever film screened at the White House, Birth of a Nation.
This 1915 film depicted the rise of the Klu Klux Klan in Reconstruction America and was praised as much for its pioneering cinematography as it was for its demeaning stereotypical depictions of black men as innately sexually deviant and violently lustful of white women.
A 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. In 2000, Alabama was the last state to lift their legal ban against interracial marriage.
But perhaps we should read the reception of Del Rey and Rocky’s digital marriage as a sign of the evolving times.
Despite the U.S.’s harrowing hang-up with white/black romantic relationships, times have surely changed.
Data from the 2010 U.S. Census reveals that 1 in 10 heterosexual marriages are mixed race. Del Rey and Rocky’s romance in “National Anthem” is becoming more of the norm than the exception.
While the stigmatization of young black men and interracial relationships remain, the story is considerably less black and white than the time period from which Del Rey’s new video borrows its imagery.
There is no better example than the simultaneous fanatical embrace and racist backlash of our own President Obama (who is himself a product of an interracial relationship).
We are living in a more complex, not quite post-racial reality.
