Lana Del Rey

Liz Phair brings...something:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/02/04/liz-phair-on-why-lana-del-rey-scares-rocks-boys-club/

Let me break it down for you: she’s writing herself into existence. She’s giving herself a part to play because, God knows, no one else will and she wants to matter in this life. As far as I can tell, it’s working. I went straight to iTunes and bought her new release “Born To Die” in toto (how often do I do that??) because it was more than a collection of songs or a performance, it was a phenomenon. Maybe all the more so because she’s not overwhelmingly talented.

hats off Ms Phair. she's Number 1 in the UK album chart as of this evening and the album's outstripping the rest of the Top Five put together with 117,000 sales in a week. a phenomenon indeed as the good lady points out.

Maybe all the more so because she’s not overwhelmingly talented.

good backhanded compliment

She bought the album though.

'I don't think I'll write another record. What would I say? I feel like everything I wanted to say, I've said already.'

^feel like this was something liz phair should have said at one point.

i fucking love liz phair

(which i didn't really do before)

Maybe all the more so because she’s not overwhelmingly talented.

takes one to know one huh

A comment from Facebook: "Liz's quote reads so much better when using your best Troy McClure voice."

on the bus, homeless-seeming guy talking to his buddy across the aisle:

"i'm watching this kid play video gaaaames. never was into video games myself. kind of bores me."

haha xp

hats off Ms Phair. she's Number 1 in the UK album chart as of this evening and the album's outstripping the rest of the Top Five put together with 117,000 sales in a week. a phenomenon indeed as the good lady points out.

spoken like a true PR

idk why anyone is bothered by how much anyone sells

does it make it better for you? worse?

remember when albums could sell a million copies on the week of their release? sigh.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Saturday, February 4, 2012 2:15 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it happened last year! twice (almost)!

feeling pretty prescient about my liz phair parallel way upthread now

remember when albums could sell a million copies on the week of their release? sigh.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Saturday, February 4, 2012 2:15 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it happened last year! twice (almost)!

― some dude, Sunday, February 5, 2012 7:37 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who?

when a critic is reduced to using feminism to defend an artist, you can know they're really bad

can someone esplain this "flag post" thing to me?

who?

Lady Gaga and (almost) Lil Wayne.

can someone esplain this "flag post" thing to me?

Flag Post

the kid

She kinda reminds me of Emmylou Harris. Or Christine McVie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFujVHeQJ0Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIKkveUcBPc

There's obviously a lot more going on in the LDR image, but its got that same kind of slightly vague glassy eyed affect. Sort of coked out cocktail pop with an immaculately maintained surface sheen. Gives me that same feeling as a lot of late 70s pop of this deeply loathsome and twisted emotional life buffed and perfected into consumable form.

Like Christine McVie's songs on Tusk, there's just an emptiness that I find really interesting. Its pretty difficult to smuggle that kind of desolation into people's lives via pop. A completely different sound but very similar vibe. Laurel Canyon pushed through distant memories of the Sneaker Pimps or Shirley Manson.

Think Emmylou far outshines her as a vocalist though. And Christine too.

The character she plays seems like it would be at home at the same parties that they went to.

I feel really badly for the woman whose art is getting shredded on this thread and elsewhere BTW.

Liz Phair is used to it by now...

Probably why she feels some empathy for her.

I've got no love for the tumblr PR machine though, get sick watching both it and the backlash. Churnalism and snark, you can have it all back thanks. I'm going to keep listening to this and the Weeknd though.

Gives me that same feeling as a lot of late 70s pop of this deeply loathsome and twisted emotional life buffed and perfected into consumable form.

Like Christine McVie's songs on Tusk, there's just an emptiness that I find really interesting. Its pretty difficult to smuggle that kind of desolation into people's lives via pop. A completely different sound but very similar vibe. Laurel Canyon pushed through distant memories of the Sneaker Pimps or Shirley Manson.

Raymond Carver pop?

It could be, its music that seems to be intensely aware of the consequences of excess.

I like the Weeknd's Thursday mix tape for the same reason, its not about how great the party is, its about the downside of the pills and the liquor. About the numbness, the desperate search for real emotional connections.

It seems like everyone I've known who partied like that was trying to slap a patch on genuine problems.

99% of people i've known who party like that do so because they are genuine hedonists

i agree with you about the numbness of LDR though. i think it's less to do with partying in her case and more to do with neediness, with the desire to please - that's the drug in her case. those people whose permanent need to be in a relationship or to be loved by someone seems to mask a discomfort about only having themselves for company

Cleverest thing she could do now: kill off LDR at the end of the year and came back with a completely different name and style. A new identity every two years.

i was totally thinking that the other day! it makes sense, if the whole LDR thing is a character or a project, how much mileage can there be in it anyway? can you sustain a character experiment over a whole career?

i was also wondering how the whole project would have been received if LDR was a girl group (following up some thoughts in some other thread about how many girl groups seem to be vehicles for woman to say certain things, play certain roles and dabble in certain archetypes that they might not feel able to as solo artists)

I think you're probably right about the Lana character, Lex.

Lots of lyrics about loving "you" forever, until the day I die, etc.

Which seem a little bit more chilling than they would in a normal pop context, and I come at Video Games as being a narrative of a woman who has that need for a relationship being trapped with a man who's emotionally immature. Seems pretty true to life to me.

And every homeless drunk is a hedonist, just without the glamour.

wasn't her music pretty much the same as lizzy grant? seems like this is pretty much her one big idea/aesthetic and just because people play up the 'character' aspect of it doesn't mean she's got a david bowie bag of personas.

idk why anyone is bothered by how much anyone sells

well it's a rough guide as to how many people are listening to her, which in this case seems to be quite a lot! on this little island, at least.

idk why lex is bothered by how much anyone talks about how much anyone sells

wasn't her music pretty much the same as lizzy grant?

the david kahne album was more straightforward, with generally less bland lyrics and way less produced. it almost sounds like a more mature album on the whole.

ok i mean i haven't heard the earlier stuff i was just going off that blockhead piece where he talked about working with her before and how that whole aesthetic was fully formed before the name change

was just doing a search on amazon for books about "grant making," this was the first result:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51LVXN2nnfL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_AA278_PIkin4,BottomRight,-34,22_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

ebook seo spam, what a world

lightening

are they saying she's passing?

LDR is sooooooo january.

i was totally thinking that the other day! it makes sense, if the whole LDR thing is a character or a project, how much mileage can there be in it anyway? can you sustain a character experiment over a whole career?

Now I'm trying to think of an Andrew WK parallel.

this might me break my moratorium on linking to LDR pieces on twitter

http://tigerbeatdown.com/2012/02/07/i-sing-video-games-for-the-fourteen-year-old-girl-i-once-was/

More than anything, I am perplexed at the sheer volume of words LDR has thus far begat.

Another dude says she kind of wants to sound like the music Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch wrote for Twin Peaks. While I amuse myself with dudes who disapprove, I am alarmed by this one comparison. Because our culture is already rife with instances of young girls abused, raped and murdered, like Laura Palmer was in Lynch’s series. Is that the kind of fantasy Lana Del Rey evokes in these dudes? Is this the scenery she inspires?

Maybe because it's the scenery she explicitly references in her music, lyrics, photo shoots and interviews?

hey guys i have this cool idea i'd like to base my art on. something in suburbia is..... ROTTEN and TWISTED. like you think everything's all perfect, but under the surface it's not! in reality the "perfect" families lead numbing, rote lives - imagine a long shot of a lawn sprinkler, just spricketing away, untended. and there's a dead body on the lawn! how long has it been there?? who knows! maybe the guy's just sleeping, like eventually he wakes up and walks away, drenched. because in suburbia there's no difference between life and death! that would be the messages of that shot. plus, no one in suburbia communicates! even if the guy WAS dead, no one would even notice. cause they're hollow inside. i'm gonna go to the big city. get the first bus out of town. i can't stand this place! you have to come with me or you'll break my heart. come with me. come with me and we can make a movie together about this place.

or, as you put it more succintly earlier:

Raymond Carver pop? though maybe Cheever has a place therein as well.