So Legit(tt), a Lady Gaga diss track
Picture this: it’s June 23rd of 2013. If you’re American, it’s summer. If you’re me, it’s a crisp winter. You’re scrolling Twitter, a different kind of cesspool than it currently is, when you come across a Soundcloud link.
“So Legittt” it says.
“Lana Del Rey appears to criticise Lady Gaga in leaked song” reads a blog.
And in the world of 2013 pop music, this is unheard of. Lana Del Rey is alternative, but with the success of the ‘Summertime Sadness’ remix, she’s at least a name. Lady Gaga, by comparison, is already an established pop icon, 5 years into her career. They’re label mates at this point, Lana having been signed to Interscope in 2011, Gaga at the time about to hit her commercial peak.
And as we find out…there’s a past here.
This track, likely recorded in the Lizzy Grant era of Lana Del Rey’s strange and oft-mythologised early career, is a sparse ukulele led ballad detailing the sell-out nature of Gaga’s career. On one hand, it’s incredibly biting. Unlike her more theatrical later work, this adolescent crooning evokes a childish taunt, somewhat unintentionally. Every consonant is hard, almost like she’s choking out the Ts, Cs and Ks.
What happened to punK rockK /
RoohohohohohckK
But on the other…it’s a reverb drowned ballad by a hipster princess from New York in the late 2000s. Mean girl Zoey Deschanel vibes are not that uncommon when you reach this far back, and it’s extremely derivative of mid to late 2000s alt-pop from England at the time. You know, that weird crossover period where the world became obsessed with bitchy British woman with black hair. There’s nothing here that wasn’t handled more eloquently by Lily Allen or Amy Winehouse in 2007. It’s mean, but in a way that reads as a little pathetic past a certain point.
But that’s the thing. This isn’t an elegant takedown of a world-renowned popstar. It’s a wannabe celebrity bitching about a former friend who already made it big.
‘So Legit’ is lyrically one of the most bitter pieces of pop culture in existence. It’s ephemera that somehow reached us in a solid state, capturing the nastiest instincts of a 20-something in Brooklyn as she rages out behind a ukulele and a moustache tattoo on her pointer finger (I assume Lana Del Rey has one) over a former member of the scene. We were never meant to know this existed, let alone hear it.
And maybe we shouldn’t have.
Some lines hit worse than others. There’s the mild transphobia and the tabloid-tastic, like “You’re looking like a man, you’re talking like a baby”, playing on the rumours that Gaga was some sort of drag queen and/or a transgendered woman. It sits weirdly within the stanza itself, between a genuinely great few lines where Lana Del Rey suggests her subject can’t sing, and the final two that calls out Gaga’s music in commercials, in comparison to her lofty dreams prior to fame.
But the best of it comes later.
Stefani, you such. I know you’re selling 20 million /
Wish they could have seen you when we booed you off in Williamsburg /
You’re hurt – I know my words don’t hurt ya
This is transcendently nasty work.
Later music by Lana Del Rey often seeks to dull this type of edge or, by working with talented producers, it offers her a chance to play around with her anger with increased maturity. But there’s a fire to this that is rarely mirrored in her music from this point forward. The languid strumming throughout is indicative of the sonic choices to come, but this unpolished and unabashed trill into calling out the biggest star in the world (at the time) by name is almost worth the song as a whole.
Almost.
Because to be clear, this is a garbage song and I can’t imagine listening to it sincerely. Like many of her unreleased early work, you can hear the foundation of what would later come with ‘Born To Die’ (2012) and ‘Ultraviolence’ (2014), but it’s aesthetically rough. If the edge of stanzas was later smoothed out, so are such clunkers. The last third of the song is just…nothing. She complains that the scene is dying, or at least her scope is taking her beyond it. Another jab at Gaga, double confirming that this is about her.
The bitterness turns out to the world, and it’s here that the romanticism of something dingy and dark that will make Lana Del Rey a star in her own right rears its ugly head. Lana Del Rey’s poetry is at its best when she’s writing from a place of vulnerability, but so much of what didn’t make it to her mainstream debut is weirdly defensive. And often, these demos lyrically feel incomplete. In 2023, it’s an ancient relic of a persona that’s pretty much dead and gone.
But again, we return to 2013.
On one hand, Gaga is already freefalling from the peak that ‘Born This Way’ (2011) provided her. ‘Artpop’ (2013) is rapidly approaching, but until that taints her pop career for almost a decade, Gaga is still the undeniable successor to popstars like Madonna, Cher, and Britney. While she was the subject of ridicule, the family friendly nature of many of her latest hits, along with the visual influence of her last few eras, has essentially made the weird theatre-girl of pop a palatable figure for general audiences. She was on top of the world. Her song, after all, was in the coke commercial – crazy! Lana Del Rey, meanwhile, was one amongst the many early-2010s alt pop girls. Not quite a star, not quite an oddity. Her ascendency came much later.
But here’s the funny thing – when you’re not a “pop star”, you’re not expected to be commercial or friendly. And in 2013, it was clear that this often awkward performer with a penchant for Americana didn’t NEED to exist alongside Gaga. As her work got less and less commercial, she and her label clearly saw her more in the lineage of artists like Fiona Apple. A dedicated audience for every album, rather than a fascinated general public. Nobody expected her to be the leading influencer for pop music by the end of the decade.
The song was of mild interest to the already dying music blogs, but it was one amongst many leaks at the time. It exists as a forgotten relic, and maybe I’m an asshole for bringing it up. But I’m often fascinated by these sonic moments that should be private. Lana Del Rey clearly doesn’t mind its existence. It’s a forgotten relic.
I wonder if Gaga ever heard it.
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