In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher emphasizes that capitalism is indifferent to whether you believe in the system or not. You can know capitalism sucks and you can disavow your participation in the capitalist economy, but today the culture of capitalism has internalized that very disavowal. Put differently, we have all become the customer service rep who won’t provide a full refund on the sweater you’re returning after Christmas. “Look,” he or she says while the line extends behind you. “You’re right that this is b.s., but there’s really nothing I can do.”

In the ‘90s, the staff of The Baffler developed a parallel line of thinking, writing article after article about the ways in which business and advertising sell people, particularly young people, a commodified version of their own unrest. (The best of these appear in the anthology Commodify Your Dissent.) Nike and alt-rock were were frequent targets. It was very ‘90s.

There’s a difference in methodology here, but more than that, there’s a difference in politics. The Baffler was filled with sharp analysis. But unlike Fisher, it lacked any sort of communist politics, even ‘communism’ as a regulating idea, and thus it never found the emancipatory horizon that Capitalist Realism was intended to orient us toward. This meant that despite the quality of its criticism, Baffler essays often presumed a certain impotence — the misfit grad students shooting paintballs at the windows of the Ogilvy office. In place of framework for radical action, or even a weak form of socialist teleology, they substituted a trickster’s irony. In one of their better known stunts, they broke the story that the New York Times had been tricked into publishing a fictional guide to Gen X slang (“Wack Slacks: Old Ripped Jeans”). This was fake news at its finest.

Back then, in popular music, indifference was typically alt-rock’s domain, hunched slacker Doug from The State drawling “I’m outta heeere” as he and his friends left the room. Today, indifference, particularly the kind that Fisher elaborates, is best articulated by one person: Lana Del Rey. Which isn’t to say that her music lacks values or emotion. If anything the opposite is true: Lana is constantly telling you how she’s feeling and what she’s into, and much of her persona is based on a gauzy version of old Los Angeles glamour (and James Dean-style anti-glamour) that she has both inherited and remade.

Her music explores, quite dramatically, stardom and love and rebellion, but in doing so it also enacts the disavowal that Fisher describes. Does Lana actually believe in this stuff? Certainly not in the way that, say, Lady Gaga does. In fact, as far as I can tell, Lana never gives a clear answer either way. This isn’t because she doesn’t have an answer, exactly, but because she’s come to understand the very question is beside the point in the first place. Reflexivity isn’t the answer. The singer drifts forward, both in her music and on the stage. Watching her great SNL performance — so good that the show itself had to disavow it the following week — I’m reminded of less of traditional choreography than the lagging movements of the ‘Xanax Tapes’ that my roommates once shot after taking large doses of anxiolytic medication.

Lana’s new song, “Love”: I will admit to rolling my eyes the first time I heard it. Specifically the first time I heard the first line, “Look at you kids with your vintage music.” Damn Lana, back at it again with the etc. etc. This first verse observes the way “kids” today are pulled in two different directions, listening to old records via futuristic technology. The hook, still in second person, describes a more literal stasis — “You get all dressed up/ to go nowhere in particular” — only this is fine because you’re “young and in love.” It was about here where I flipped opinion: Whoa, Lana is back at it again.

One thing that strikes me about this song is that it’s almost impossible to tell whose perspective we’re hearing, whether it’s Lana talking to the kids or an old person talking to Lana. Then the pre-chorus — “It’s enough just to make you feel crazy, crazy, crazy” — seems to imply a shift, but the continued second person suggests otherwise. And though the chorus registers to me as Lana singing in the second person about herself, this too is hard to verify, even when she switches the pronouns to first person (a country trick) for the final iteration. It’s a song that asks the listener where to put the quotation marks.

My best guess is that they go everywhere and nowhere. Rather than telling a linear story (like a country song) Lana seems to be pulling different sentiments out of the fog, attaching herself to them ambiguously and incompletely. She leaves the issue of who is speaking — of who believes in these words — unresolved, allowing it to shift from listen to listen. The floating Beach Boys references — citations or no? — don’t make things any clearer.

It’s enough just to make you feel crazy, you might say, she might say, someone might say. The idea of craziness recurs fairly often in Lana’s music, most memorably in the bridge on “Ride,” the best song off 2012’s Paradise EP. Even more frequent is reference to “Daddy”; there’s so much of this that someone made a YouTube compilation of “Every Lana Del Rey song that says ‘daddy’.” The pair is revealing. “Crazy,” I think, names the affective state of the disavowal I’ve been describing, the mental condition engendered by a life of doing without believing, the way it feels to live in system that privatizes anguish and insists that it belongs to the subject alone.

But what makes Lana unique is that she doesn’t only perform this alienation, she schizophrenically oscillates between alienation and its opposite, a total identification with capital itself. With daddy. On “Cola”: “My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola.” On “National Anthem: “Money is the reason/ We exist/ Everybody knows it, it’s a fact/ Kiss, kiss.”

She’s not being ironic. This lyric is the concept of capitalist realism reduced to 14 words: an ontology based totally on commodity exchange, justified by an appeal to common sense (“everybody knows it”), repeated with defensive insistence (“it’s a fact!”) and culminating with a doubled demand for hedonistic enjoyment. This is just the way it is, you can’t change it, so come on, kiss kiss, have fun!

For a type of liberal, still clinging to what remains of the folk tradition, lyrics like these are unacceptable. These people — you often hear them crowing about protest music or the lack thereof — reduce a song’s politics to a literal reading of its lyrics. Then they judge the song based on the agreeability of the politics, giving little thought to the commodification of dissent or the disavowal internal to capital itself — even the way that songs themselves are often unstable, containing many voices inside the one.

But Lana is doing something different. Rather than holding up a sign at a demonstration, she’s lying on the beach in a stolen swimsuit, lost under her own umbrella. Or maybe she’s sitting next to you in the back seat of a cabriolet, holding in her fingers the strings of a thaumatrope. It’s a trick I first encountered when I was a kid, in a magic set my grandma gave me for my birthday. On one side is Lana’s own image, beautiful in its surgical pout; on the other, a cage. You are spellbound by the way she spins it, and when she spins it fast enough, too fast for your eyes to process, the two images become one, the face imprisoned not by steel but the power of illusion alone.