Illustration by The Red Dress

Like all other worlds these days, the world of female singers has become riven and divisive. The divide is so large that it's not merely a matter of style anymore; rather, the female voice itself seems to have been split in half. On the radio, there are the booming divas singing of empowerment and revenge with their mechanistic melismata; in the drizzly samizdat of what used to be called indie rock, there are the wan wastrels, the massed legions breathily pleading for us not to hurt them. Once it seemed that every great girl singer was capable of generating her own style and fomenting her own revolution; now female singers seem bound to make a choice between sounding like precocious 12-year-olds keeping secrets or, well, like machines, complete with auto-tuning.

Which is where Florence comes in, with her Machine.

We all know Florence Welch, of course, though we'd be pressed to remember her last name. She has flaming red hair, a voice that's a force of nature, and she still practices in the vestigial category of "alternative rock." We can actually hear her on the radio across a variety of formats, and our wives can pick up her new CD, Ceremonials, at Starbucks while waiting for Adele to get out of the hospital. Her first album, Lungs, boasted one of the great radio workouts of last year, "Dog Days Are Over," and its very title served as an unsubtle advertisement for the two things that set its creator apart: first, the sheer power of her pipes, and second, her utter lack of irony.

Irony is the other dividing line in the world of female singers beside the amplitude of voice, and what's ironic is that the divas who survive the rough trade of commercial radio generally possess it, while the waif squadron doesn't, preferring a recessive authenticity over the assertion of self that turns out be the assertion of brand.

Beyoncé and Gaga, Rihanna and Ke$ha: They share little but an ability to impart an awareness that whatever their music pretends to be about, it's really about becoming Beyoncé, Gaga, Rihanna, and Ke$ha — about living up to their porn or (in Stephani Germanotta's case) their drag names. Florence Welch doesn't have a porn name; she's resolutely Florence, though she's got herself a Machine. Though no waif, she uses her power to promote authenticity rather than a role she's decided to play, and the becoming that she sings about is on a cosmic scale rather than a personal one. Her success proves that there will always be a market for a female singer whose force is nothing less than elemental — who, when singing of the thunder and the rain, tries to sound like the thunder and the rain. Listening to Ceremonials for an hour is like listening to Sarah McLachlan singing "Angel" after she's been subjected to a Jean-Grey-turns-to-Dark-Phoenix transformation; it just keeps coming at you with its own vastness and Valkyrielike volume, and though it's beautiful from beginning to end — with a few songs that stick like "Dog Days" — the effect is ultimately as impersonal as listening to the crashing of the Waves without Katrina.

A more interesting challenge to the challenge of being a female singer in the Year of Our Lord 2012 is being mustered by Lizzy Grant, whose debut CD as Lana Del Rey, Born to Die, comes out this month. Like Florence Welch, she has red hair, though she was once blond; unlike Florence Welch, she has no aversion to taking a porn name. Indeed, in her first single as Lana Del Rey, 2010's "Gramma," she confesses to her grandmother what sets her apart: first, that she's pretty, and second, that she wants to be "the whole world's girl." She's as ambitious as Gaga herself and about as authentic; though almost freakishly beautiful, she looks like the spawn of a postoperative Nicole Kidman; and her lips — not just plumped, Bratz-style, but flat, as if she's pressing them against a window — are already more famous on the Internet than her music.

And yet it's her music that makes her interesting, because almost alone of the women who've made a conscious choice to sing from the impersonal vantage of celebrity, she uses the impersonal vantage of celebrity to make music that's personal in the extreme. Her voice is not agile and overwhelming like Florence Welch's; nor is it as aerobic as Beyoncé's or Gaga's; nor is it desultory and small, with a dollop of cuteness, like Feist's or St. Vincent's. It's low and dark, with a threatened upper register that conveys rather than sheds its emotional burdens. It makes whatever she's singing sound a little like the songs David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti wrote for Julee Cruise back in the Twin Peaks days, but those songs were about the atmospherics, and Lizzy Grant's are about whatever led her to create the entity known as Lana Del Rey. It's a different kind of becoming, at once mysterious and transparent, and if you want to see it in motion, go to YouTube and compare an early performance of "Born to Die" with a recent one at, yes, the Chateau Marmont. In the first, she's wearing a white dress that's too tight and too short, and she starts the song the way she does on the record, with a breathy wink-and-titter "Who me?" In the second, she's representing a high-end fashion house, and she's singing to a crowd that supposedly includes the likes of Kate Bosworth and Juno Temple. Pretty girls all, they no doubt thought that this pretty girl was singing about them; but really she was singing about herself, for herself, with a name that no real human being has ever had, and a fat lip that, for one moment at least, she seemed to have come by honestly.

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