After Lana: Ethel Cain and the anxiety of influence

Lana Del Rey has inspired the next generation of artists, including Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift, and, yes, Ethel Cain — they’re starting to rebel.

There is a concept in Jungian psychology called individuation, which concerns the lifelong process all of us must go through to become unique individuals, separate from the influences of our own parents. I thought of this concept as I watching the beef between musical artists Lana Del Rey and Ethel Cain unfold last week: it wasn’t so much that the girls were fighting, as is often said about pop divas, but that an upstart was in conflict with the woman who, in many ways, at least creatively, raised her.

In case you missed it, here’s the general gist of the fight: Ethel Cain — a young artist often called the next big thing, who makes sprawling Appalachian ballads about isolation and family trauma — had grown sick of being compared to Lana Del Rey, and so started slagging her off a bit in interviews when reporters would ask about the Del Rey influence. There was some gossipy back and forth about Instagram posts and fat-shaming and boyfriends stolen (Jack Donoghue, that hipster zelig). Then, last week, Lana posted a video of herself on IG driving and singing along with a forthcoming new song, a diss track aimed at Ethel. “Ethel Cain hated my Instagram post, think it's cute re-enacting my Chicago pose,” she sings dismissively in the opening bars.

In our age of polarized online fandom, the internet went crazy, with some fans even clocking that Ethel has been, in the past, caught editing her own Wikipedia page to remove allusions to Lana. Much of the discourse, though, centered around one important idea: how dare Ethel talk shit on the artist, who, in many ways, paved the path for Ethel to even exist.

And those fans wouldn’t be wrong. Lana is often (rightfully) credited with a massive sea change in the industry, the overwhelming success of her music helping to make space in pop for introspective female singer-songwriters. Think back to 2012 when Lana first emerged on the scene with her breakout song, “Video Games”: LMFAO, Katy Perry, and Flo Rida were topping the singles charts with EDM-influenced over-the-top-pop, and even Taylor Swift was in her maximalist era, hitting big that year with the baroque boisterous “We Are Never Getting Back Together.”

Into this noisy, hectic morass came Lana, what with her slow languid songs about quiet desperation and loneliness. In the decade since, she’s never really wavered in her commitment to disruptive, sometimes difficult music; in fact, though it seems counterintuitive, the weirder she gets, the more popular she seems to become. Her latest album, Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, is a mournful meditation on death and regret, featuring sad, structurally-odd songs that could never be called “hits” in a traditional sense, but she’s selling out stadium tours all the same, and garnering hundreds of millions of streams.

You can hear it straight from the younger female artists how much of an influence Lana has been on the business: “Lana has raised an entire generation of music lovers and songwriters like me,” Olivia Rodrigo once said, “and taught them that there’s beauty in their vulnerability and power in their melancholy.” “I feel that that album changed music,” Billie shared with Dua Lipa about Lana’s Born To Die album. “And especially changed music for girls and the potential of what is possible.” Taylor Swift, whose songwriting has grown more complex and Lana-esque over the years, admits the inspiration helped her evolve: she once called Lana “the most influential artist in pop.” “Her vocal stylings, her lyrics, her aesthetics,” Taylor said, “they’ve been echoed in every corner of music.”

When I interviewed Lana back in 2017, she was sharp enough to be able to notice her own influence on the music around her. “There’s been a major sonic shift culturally. I think I had a lot to do with that. I do. I hear a lot of music that sounds like those early records. It would be weird to say that it didn’t,” she told me. “I remember seven years ago I was trying to get a record deal, and people were like, ‘Are you kidding? These tunes? There’s zero market for this.’ There was just such a long time where people had to fit into that pop box.”

And so, you can’t completely blame people for making the comparisons between Ethel and Lana. Ethel’s breakout song, “American Teenager,” feels almost like a direct homage, containing all the elements that we now think of as Lana-coded: an exploration of youthful American archetypes; a nostalgic, homemade-style music video; echoing, reverb-y vocals; hazy melodies over simple drum patterns.

But Ethel’s not entirely wrong to be annoyed, either. The comparisons between Lana and her younger counterparts are starting to feel cloying. Yes, Lana set the temperature of the water we all swim in now, but these younger women are also taking her influence into fascinating directions all on their own. Ethel, for her part, is a young trans woman exploring the ins and outs of that identity at this point in American history. Her latest album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You — an incredibly Lana sounding title, to be fair — sounds as much like a ’90s alt rock dirge as it does a post-Del Rey artifact, and much of it is quite good.

“One cannot individuate as long as one is playing a role to oneself," Jung wrote. Which is to say: even if Ethel is acting up, the generous reading is that she has to — to symbolically kill your idol is to say, “I want to forge my own path.” Artists, after all, need to chart their own courses — we want creativity to move in its own direction. In other words, even if Lana handed her the baton, perhaps we should be more forgiving if Ethel is expending the energy trying to leave her behind, one foot in front of another, on the next leg of the relay race.