MUSIC REVIEW: LANA DEL REY - 'BORN TO DIE'
An Album that Divides the Audience with Sultry Games & Pure Pop Persona
(Interscope Records) Born to Die is just about the most fatalistic album title you could imagine. The phenomenal ground swell and aftershock beneath Lana Del Rey, formerly Lizzy Grant, also has more than a twang of fatalism about it. This is album number two from the artist, but strictly speaking, it is also a debut – signed, remodeled, and re-imagined on a major label. In short, Lana del Rey is happening again for the first time.
Initially, we were supposed to love her. And we did. “Video Games” rippled across the blogs like some kind of messianic arrival of the new alt-pop hope. The video was a moving cut-and-paste affair of iconic imagery. The lyrics were deeply smokey -- a sultry lament of emotionally absent lovers, distracted affairs, and hipster referencing. It was, and still stands as, one of the finest pop singles of 2011. But then, within a matter of only months, we were supposed to dim the lights on Lana Del Rey. There has been a disturbance in the collective blog-consciousness.
All the furniture started to move, the walls came in, and the carpets shifted out from beneath Lana Del Rey. Those who proclaimed genius suddenly began to decry the emperor’s new clothes. There has been almost unequalled bitchiness and snark, side-swipes, and full-on confrontations for a debut pop artist. Ironic that, in the world of pop-art, so many media outlets and so many hipsters are forming a line to complain of the popular, artificial, and easily influenced aspects of a performer who is arguably the personification of genre.
A recent performance on Saturday Night Live – broadcast nationally and echoed around the globe – found the artist struggling to find register. An admittedly weak performance drew a disturbingly strong reaction from the mob, almost as if their will for an artist to fail had manifested. There isn't an artist alive who hasn't had a bad night on stage. However, in the case of Lana Del Rey, the timing of such an inopportune moment landed just as the sharks were circling...and here was a drop of blood in the water.
Few people are talking about the music anymore. Further irony: that drama and image are being discussed by the folk who claim to be only interested in art and substance. Lana Del Rey really is as much an artifact as she is a performer; that should be accepted. There is no difference between beloved performers of pop's yesteryear and Lana Del Rey; it's just that this year's pouting liquor-spiked bubble-gum-blower isn't on the other side of an ocean of musical charts. Bridget Bardot, Jane Birkin, Francoise Hardy, Nancy Sinatra, Vanessa Paradis -- all of them were expressions of the desires of certain audiences, all of them sung the intentions of other souls...all of them were of their time, or permissibly kitsch because of marrying the right movie star du jour.
Just as Johnny Cash was considered authentic, despite grandiose claims of imprisonment which inflated petty misdemeanors into blood-curdling crimes, it was understood that Cash was storytelling when he “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” So it should be understood that Lana Del Rey is both story-teller and story. Not everything is true about Lana Del Rey, nor should it be. This is psychosomatically spiked bubble-gum and never claimed to be anything more.
Lyrically, Born to Die scans like a chain of pouted moods, flirty with hands on hips -- a young lady at a party where unsuitably dark things are happening. The lyrics aren't always the most mature or truly reflective, and they certainly represent notions of things like emotions, if not quite the true perspective. The persona of Lana Del Rey is the story of the dangerous girl standing at the gas station at 3:00 a.m. promising more than she has delivered. She's pushing buttons, not quite expertly, but that's what makes this more provocative to certain audiences – an appeal of which she is aware, which means she's expertly toying with the audience. She is paradoxically naïve and sophisticated. Is it post-modern? Is it post-post-modern? Regardless of which pole you find yourself standing on, you will be compelled to debate the artificially laced content. If the job of art is to compel opinion or provoke reaction for reaction's sake, then the words here are truly successful. Bottom line: forget what you heard on SNL – listen to this record. Here, the voice tries on all topics and conjures a full dress-up box of voices incredibly well, and always marrying meter to content.
Instrumentally, things are tempered for dance floors, hairbrush microphones, the mattresses of a million studio apartment floors. The full spectrum is invited for interpretation. There is an air of expectation about the production, as if it was a given that all content was being surrendered to the re-mixers and DJs who would take the fruit and reserve it as they saw fitting to reach the largest demographic.
In short, the best analogy for the work and persona of Lana Del Rey is the totem of the fixed-gear bicycle: kind of impractical, retro yet modern, finesse of style giving license to any substantial oversight. Championed by hipsters and certain audiences as 'essential lifestyle accessories' readily bought into, until it's realized that chain stores are selling the style they once loved and considered rarified. We're told we can't love something if it's on sale in such mass-produced, commercially minded outlets. And, oh look – you can see the label! This kind of inverted snobbery presents the deepest, self-defeating irony within pop music.
The question: if you heard and enjoyed the works and style of Lana Del Rey in October of 2011 – other than rumor and whispers – what has really changed in the Lana Del Rey of January 2012 and the release of Born to Die? If you heard and loved “Video Games” and the super-sultry “Blue Jeans” back then, this album is more of the same and you will be pleased that the much-anticipated release is now here. The music of Lana Del Rey is not just to be taken as serious fun -- you will enjoy it more if you accept that she is also to be taken as fun fun, and that sometimes persona in pop goes a long way. And so it should.
Standout Tracks: "Video Games," "Blue Jeans," "This Is What Makes Us Girls"
For Fans Of: Vanessa Paradis, Bridget Bardot, Nancy Sinatra
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