Hiding, too, has been a long-running motif in Del Rey’s work-so long as she can do it with her Daddy-lover. The lyrics being something of a siren song for Del Rey as Rutherford sings, “Go ahead and cry, little girl/Nobody does it like you do/I know how much it matters to you/I know that you got Daddy issues/And if you were my little girl/I’d do whatever I could do/I’d run away and hide with you.” And yes, it’s no wonder Del Rey was all too eager to invite Jesse Rutherford of The Neighbourhood onstage in 2019 to perform the band’s song, “Daddy Issues,” together during The Norman Fucking Rockwell! Tour.
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Case in point, “Axl Rose Husband” (recorded in 2008), during which she croons, “I said, ‘Daddy, I need you’” and “You’re my one king, Daddy.” As usual, LDR falls prey to conflating a supposedly “paternal” boyfriend with a replacement father figure-not unlike another being of the twentieth century past she romanticizes, Marilyn Monroe. Long before “Ride” or Del Rey’s meteoric rise to being the millennial maven of post-MySpace pop culture, she was already exploring her Daddy obsession in unreleased demos that could easily be repurposed into an entire album called Electra Complex (though perhaps that would be too close to Marina and the Diamonds’ Electra Heart). But one supposes that overt similarity is for her shrink to sort out.
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So well-known and frequently-cited, in fact, that all the other times she’s mentioned “Daddy” in some capacity or other in her songs has tended to get buried beneath the legend of, “You can be my full-time Daddy, white and gold.”Īpart from the video for “Ride” itself being a kind of love letter to the type of girl who would be mockingly told she has “Daddy issues,” Del Rey’s real-life fascination with older men also most recently played out with Sean Larkin, a forty-something cop (the precursor to his “aesthetic” already explored in the video for “Shades of Cool”) who looks a lot like Del Rey’s own father, Robert England Grant Jr.
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Despite only one line in Lana Del Rey’s 2012 song, “ Ride,” mentioning anything about a “Daddy” (while also including “father” in the lyrics, “Dying young and playing hard/That’s the way my father made his life and art”), its brevity does not detract from its memorability and iconicness.