Lana Del Rey

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.

i actually don't hear any julee cruise or badalamenti in the album at all, i think that influence is grossly overstated.

It's more Twin Peaks itself than the soundtrack imo. There's a lyric about a girl tying a knot in a cherry stalk with her tongue like Audrey Horne. And she's talked about how much she's inspired by the scene in Fire Walk With Me where Laura Palmer's dancing at the roadhouse.

xp lol Tracer

yeah, i think it's that she's creating an image of the female that's very similar to those that david lynch created over the years, esp in twin peaks: self-negating, consumed by weirdly disempowering passions, offering herself for use by those who will treat her badly. and the look, the retro glam signifiers, passive torch songs, femininity not as fully integrated personhood, but as a collection of desirable attributes.

BREAKING NEWS:

Amoeba is truly sorry for photo restrictions at Lana's signing today, however this is what Lana's management has requested.

from the nose up and from the chin down only

autographed 8x10s of The Lips available at the register

All of this is so weird

On the plus side, though, who says there's no monoculture?

every other person on this board. seriously, don't get them started.

was just watching last weekend's SNL and this was pretty prescient btw:

the box cutter killer from the calcutta gutter (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ) wrote this on thread Saturday Night Live on board I Love Everything on Jan 15, 2012

Lana Del Rey is a Kristen Wiig character, right?

Don't give Wiig any ideas bro

Because I dont think any of us are ready for that to become a deathless SNL bit

no i'm saying, it already is, on last week's Weekend Update

Coming to Hackney this summer...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/hackneyweekend/2012/artists/lanadelrey/

Because she's a fashion icon or something.

we get the fashion icons we deserve

she does good interview

No instruments on video games? Hmm ok. I guess it makes sense in the alternate universe where a four and a half minute ballad is somehow shattering the rules of pop music.

she's gonna be on the cover of issue #4 of Lovecat (paz, lohan, & cindy crawford were the 1st three)

smoking Pall Mall Blues that share space — in a beat-up snakeskin bag — with an old Tennessee Williams paperback

You can't fault her commitment

Black and white The onetime philosophy major is philosophical about this Emporio Armani Underwear top, $44. Go to armani.com. Opening Ceremony skirt, $255. Go to openingceremony.us. Charlotte Olympia for Peter Som shoes, showpiece only. Go to petersom.com.

pretty sure i saw her eating a burrito today

That Pall Mall/snakeskin/Tennessee pile-up is the point where anybody who doesn't write for a style section might want to raise an eyebrow.

this is also good writing about LDR: http://theremixbaby.tumblr.com/post/17213964072/all-4-u

Of course, my current problem with Lana Del Rey is that I literally can no longer trust any [heterosexual??] man to give a reliable reading of the image she is portraying.

...The issue is not that they won’t like it. It’s that they won’t get it. Inevitably, they will miss the point.

....Being a girl in a patriarchal society means wanting things that are directly contrary to your own happiness and liberation, and that is something that I’m not sure privileged people can ever actually understand.

...We want these fucked up things that don’t even exist—the sublimation of pure devotion, beauty which can make us interesting, the very ideal of the “bad boy” itself. We want them because we have been told every day that they will make us happy and they are our natural desires.

...Let me reiterate how much I don’t expect male music writers to get it, especially as it manifests itself in Del Rey’s music.

great piece of analysis, except for the constant hammering of the "guys don't get it" slant. women will always, of course, be best able to parse the mechanics of female experience, selfhood and desire. that, however, doesn't make her arguments incomprehensible to me as a straight guy. i agree with everything she says about the way LDR embodies and describes the appeal of clearly toxic roles and desires. but the way that interacts with the actual experience of being female isn't really mine to articulate.

fwiw, i've thought a lot about exactly the argument she's making and have even addressed it ITT. i hinted at it when you, lex, accused me of viewing LDR exclusively through a het male lens simply because i spoke of the erotic "appeal" of her persona. i wasn't speaking only of her appeal to straight guys, but of the way that erotic personas appeal to people in general, both as objects of desire and as surrogate selves. this is v similar to what rmxbb is getting at.

The "Hey, is she your girlfriend? You a lucky guy" bit was cute.

My impression is that the whole "artist controlled completely by her management" is also part of the presentation.

This bit was what Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes couldn't pull off.

some of the armchair psychology in this thread might be otm but she is such a sweetheart to her obsessives that I was pretty won over tonight. missed her flight back to LA so she could xoxoxo fans for over 3 hours after the show. Also sang much better than on snl. and let me take photos w her where we pretended to box each other. thumbs up ldr.

Actually, the last act that was supposedly "controlled completely" as part of their, um, (schtic? There must be a better word. thing? anyway)..

was tATu

Tatu. tAtU. whatever...

she isn't completely controlled by her management

From stories I've heard her management is insanely, self-sabotagingly controlling of press access and so on, but that's not the same at all as her being controlled. Everything she says, every lyric she writes, reveals the same basket of influences and themes and when you consider current pop trends I just don't see any cynical manager or record exec thinking, "Yeah, Twin Peaks/retro diner trip hop - that's a banker."

It's her, it's her, it's all from her
She tells you all the time

I literally can no longer trust any [heterosexual??] man to give a reliable reading of the image she is portraying.

Why? Anyway good looking women are the rule in the music business not the exception, aren't they?

Not according to the bitch style rags, no.

Who writes those, heterosexual?? men?

Dunno, prob not.

maybe. Isn't it mainly heterosexual men that write pulp romance novels?

Have we talked about the SFJ article yet?

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/a-star-is-born-and-scorned/

cant believe ned linked to this hours ago and no one has mentioned that it is literally the most awful piece of writing to ever have existed and i would rather remove my brain through my nose with a clotheshanger than read it again

this thread can basically double as 'rolling worst music writing 2011/2012'

Rolling worst ILM thread 2011/2012

Wait, if you possess male genitals you should think twice about criticizing it because your opinion may be invalid.

Oh wait, it was written by a male, continue on.