I Listened to the Lana Del Rey Album

I am taking the side that says this is a fatally flawed album, fascinating though it can be. Here are some more thoughts:

- While I hold to my previous impression of it, “Video Games” is indeed the best song on the album. It’s focused and evocative where much of Born to Die is a slapdash grab-bag of signifiers—one of the few that can be said to be about more than just, well, being Lana Del Rey. It’s also one of her most straightforward vocal turns, which is telling.

- On several tracks, she seems to be confusing jumbled wordiness for the kind of half-rap sass Beyoncé and Rihanna do so well. Is this supposed to be the ‘gangster’ part of her persona? Her vocal style is too slurred and manic to handle such rapid rhythms.

- ‘Trip-hop’ or ‘future cosmetics commercial?’

- She has a flair for stringing together some truly awkward lines. “Off to the Races” and “Lolita” are nearly unlistenable in this respect. Also, rhyming is more important than she thinks it is.

- Even more grating than her words are the way she modulates the timbre of her voice from verse to verse, line to line, and sometimes word to word. Everything from nasal-Stevie-Nicks drone to hiccuping-smurf giggle. She pouts behind the beat until she’s audibly out of breath half way through a phrase, which is not pleasant to hear.

- Not that it matters much, but these songs don’t hang together as an album very well. The sequencing is senseless and haphazard. It’s also about 20 minutes too long.

- The dubious ‘authenticity’ of her persona doesn’t bother me, and in fact I suspect it’s not what’s actually bothering a lot of people who grouse about it. Born to Die’s few clear-headed moments hint at a grand-scale tragedy of American dreaming, of messy, ignoble people wanting more than anything to be magically lifted out and given the kind of sparkly, beautiful new lives they’ve seen on TV, but knowing deep down they’ll never get it. On paper it could be the foundation for a Great American Novel. Here, though, I see it as a problem of execution. The bullet point images of smalltown bad girls, James Dean-ish hearthrob dudes, mid-century Americana, aspirational Hollywood glamor, etc. come so fast and smooshed together that it scans as subterfuge. Maybe we as consumers of music are just so used to incredibly well-executed pop personae that an alarm goes off the minute we encounter a not-so-well-done one. In other words: it’s not that she’s fake, it’s that she’s just not very good.

    • “Video Games”

    I know no one cares about this anymore, but I’m finally comfortable with my own thoughts on it, so…

    We don’t begrudge actual pop stars their good looks, artificially made-up or not, so I don’t see the lips thing as an issue. It seems to me a fallout of confusion based on a failed marketing experiment (trying to expose a new pop singer through the “indie” blog channels), as do the raised eyebrows at her odd trailer-trash Rapunzel shtick. Y’know, the ‘It’s not my fault, I let the publicists worry about all the icky stuff while I just sit in my room and make pretty songs’ thing. The trailer-trash bit is the most interesting part of her persona, since when taken in combination with this song it suggests a way of looking for regal beauty in a seemingly messy, ignoble life. That’s an artistically worthwhile idea to explore. The somber piano cadence and orchestral arrangements work great on their own, too.

    So, the problems. If she is a strong singer, she’s doing her best to hide it. She pouts too much and it turns into kind of a nasal drone. Her lyrics are about 50/50 fine imagery and uncomfortably servile attitude. “Heaven is a place on Earth where you tell me all the things you wanna do,” really? The one instance where some sense of play or ideological costumery might be present—her affected voice on “…is that true?“—is undone by all the moments of bleeding sincerity that come before and after it. She’s being honest, and the lack of self-awareness and self-possession she’s being honest about should give us pause. Her handful of other songs follow closely in this vein. Also, and this is maybe me just harping on another marketing foible that doesn’t actually matter, but I don’t see why Nancy Sinatra should be mentioned in connection to her. There’s a certain physical resemblance that’s played up in press photos, but Sinatra was a pop singer proper who knew how to take control of a song. Lana del Rey has potential, but the road is long and the way is hard that leads up from her current blog-troversial mire.