“The Other Woman” has always been Black: Lana Del Rey’s viral cover of Jessie Mae Robinson’s masterpiece

“2023 is the year of female rage,” says the caption on a TikTok showing a conventionally attractive white woman, eyeliner done like Priscilla Presley’s, dress straight out of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), the tags under the video reading #coquette #waifcore #lolita, and most importantly, soundtracked by Lana Del Rey quavering the words to “The Other Woman.” Now, this exact TikTok is completely hypothetical, but if you checked under one of the many versions of Del Rey’s “The Other Woman” circulating around the app, you’d find several in this exact genre of video. Even worse, you’d find ones solemnly proclaiming that Del Rey truly ‘did something with this song,’ accrediting all of the song’s incredibly poignant lyrics to her singular genius.

Jessie Mae Robinson via WBSS Media

Despite her fans’ support across TikTok, “The Other Woman” was not written by Del Rey at all, nor was she even the first to bring it to popularity. The song was written by Black songwriter Jessie Mae Robinson, first performed by Black jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, and, during the 1950s, most famously rendered by legendary Black pianist Nina Simone. All three of these women hold key places in music history; Robinson was the hidden writer of many pop hits in the 1940s and 50s, including “I Went to Your Wedding” and “Let’s Have A Party,” Vaughan was a powerhouse jazz vocalist often listed amongst the greatest voices of the 20th century, and Simone’s legacy is so vast, it is hard to sum up the impact her unique vocal style and signature piano sound still have on songwriting today.

Nina Simone at Town Hall, 1959 by Herb Snitzer

 Immortalized on the album At Town Hall (1959), Simone’s live version of “The Other Woman” carries a weight that Del Rey’s version fails to imitate; Simone’s voice, rich and low, carries resigned melancholy, needing nothing more than the gentle trills of her own piano and a light smattering of percussive brushes. Simone sings as the titular “Other Woman” from a detached perspective, embodying the truly lonesome nature of this character, forever doomed to be the mistress of men who do not truly care for her. She’s “never seen with pin curls in her hair,” Simone sings morosely, and the listener understands the trap of feminine beauty this “Other Woman” finds herself in. She is beautiful, but lonesome; she lives her life aesthetically, but cries herself to sleep because no amount of external beauty can fill the gaping hole that a lack of love throughout her whole life has left. We, as listeners, do not envy the “Other Woman’s” lifestyle, nor do we find it particularly empowering—we understand, first and foremost, that this song is about the tragedy of a failed life. Simone’s “The Other Woman” is a masterful piece of work, conveying every emotion that Robinson wrote into the song’s lyrics in a longing, sorrowful manner. Yet, to much of today’s music audience, the cautionary message has been completely forgotten, its 7 million streams paling in comparison to the 122 million streams that Del Rey’s version has racked up on Spotify.

Lana Del Rey’s “Ultraviolence” album cover, courtesy of Polydor Records

Del Rey has many strengths when it comes to melancholic songwriting and performance, but her cover of “The Other Woman” does not even come close to rivaling Simone’s version. Del Rey sings with little expression in her voice, her flat mezzo-soprano shaking in an attempt at emotional vibrato that feels forced. Her vocals have been put through a gated effect that makes the heavily-produced song sound colder and more isolated than Simone’s live version with no studio effects whatsoever, and her inclusion of it on Ultraviolence (2014), already controversial for its title track’s glamorization of domestic abuse, inextricably links Del Rey’s version to the romanticized ideal of a woman scorned. To be more specific, the romanticized ideal of a white woman scorned; the videos on TikTok that use Del Rey’s cover are dominated by pretty white girls with mascara tracks running down their faces, lamenting about how they have let man after man walk all over them. Sad fan edits also use Del Rey’s cover, showcasing the most controversial white female characters in media; Pearl from Pearl (2022), Cassie from Euphoria (2019-present), Elaine from The Love Witch (2016), Jennifer Check from Jennifer’s Body (2009), the list goes on. Del Rey’s version of “The Other Woman” has come to stand almost entirely for a glamorous aesthetic centered around white female rage and tears—depressingly ironic, considering every woman who first pushed the song into the mainstream was Black, and all emphasized the deep loneliness this “Other Woman” felt by living solely for aesthetic purposes.

“The Other Woman” is yet another example of a long-time phenomenon in the music industry where white artists become markedly more successful than Black artists when covering their songs—Jessie Mae Robinson experienced this numerous times over in her songwriting career, and the accreditation of her work to Lana Del Rey proves that even 57 years after Robinson’s death, she still has not received the credit she is due for the masterpiece that is “The Other Woman.” The music industry treats Black women and their experiences as if they were nearly-obsolete, and this trend on TikTok of glorifying abusive, emotionally-messy white female characters to Del Rey’s cover only furthers the burial of the song’s actual meaning. It is not a crime to enjoy a cover, but it becomes distasteful when the cover by a white artist overshadows the original, and even worse when it becomes accredited to that artist and not the Black musicians who brought it to life. Jessie Mae Robinson deserves every bit of songwriting credit for the brilliantly sad lyrics, and Nina Simone’s rendition of the song deserves to be pushed into the mainstream once again, if only to correct the narrative that this “Other Woman” has to be beautifully waif-like and white, willingly letting men abuse her, because she always comes back for more. The “Other Woman” has been Black since her very conception, and she deserves to reclaim her story—it has never been glamorous to be the “Other Woman,” and the deep tragedy of her character ought to be fully recognized once and for all.

Article by Gianna Caudillo