Lana Del Rey

I make most of my physical music purchases at Target, and given how much effort the label I used to work for put into getting their records on Target shelves, I know I'm not the only one.

Target edition has an extra exclusive track.

wow, this scores very high on the "did she just sing what I think she sang?" factor

"I want MONEY, I want POWER, I want GLORY / I want to take you for all that you've got" etc.

also, yikes at the lyrics to "Brooklyn Baby", whoah

this is some shameless shit right here, yet somehow also insanely charming

I love watching her troll the world (or at least troll people who have to write about pop music for a living and have to assess whether she is Good or Bad)

those distant wolf howl noises in "Fucked My Way Up to the Top", nice

she is literally singing torch songs to Money

it doesn't need to be unpacked, analyzed or interpreted, it's about being blatant as fuck, on purpose- and yet there's a cardboard scenery vibe that makes all that seem really rickety and stagey

the lyrics are like charm bracelets of bad girl clichés, wishful/aspirational thinking, and "doomed femme fatale / Sphinx" posturing

not since Tiny Tim has an artist with as narrow a voice as this has made this big a splash

Lana, I salute you

er, rather "not since Tiny Tim has an artist with as narrow a voice as this made this big a splash"

if it wasn't obvious that brooklyn baby was winkingly naive, the line about hyrodponic weed made it explicit.

this album isn't nearly as fun as the first album which sounded like four different people at the mercy of four different insane producers and also had some stronger songs. but this one at least shows she does one thing really well. but she should do something else with the next one.

this is some shameless shit right here, yet somehow also insanely charming

I love watching her troll the world (or at least troll people who have to write about pop music for a living and have to assess whether she is Good or Bad)

Pretty much how I feel. I'm won over by her Method commitment to one strange idea and by how bizarrely successful it's proven to be. But I also like her voice fwiw so it appeals on the level of basic pleasure, not just as a trolly art project. I'm sure she'd claim there was no trolling involved but seriously, how else can you take a reference to He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss?

The moments when she lifts her soft palette and makes her midrange/lower head voice sound almost like Liz Frasier make the rest of the time when she's doing the pouty lisp with the stiff jaw that much more unforgivable

Oh fuck her Method commitment or whatever else. She and Dylan should tour together so I could doubly ignore it and watch everyone ELSE deal.

Pretty much how I feel. I'm won over by her Method commitment to one strange idea and by how bizarrely successful it's proven to be

Sums it up nicely - even though a song or two from her are enough for me.

Oh fuck her Method commitment or whatever else

Yeah well it's not that she should win an Oscar or anything but it's a much better way of seeing her than going on about authenticity and the like.

loving this album, honestly

it's weird when I think about how much of the guitar n voice palette taps into a seam of LA slowcore-psyche-rock (Acetone guitar parts, Mazzy Star vocals) that I would have thought would be Least Likely To Succeed as pop materials in 2014 - but they work (for me)

i really heard the mazzy star on the new stuff i've heard.

i don't remember thinking of them when the last album came out.

good heroin album. which is timely. since everyone is on heroin now.

like compare this guitar tone and the vibe of sunny California despair (Richie Lee killed himself after this album came out) in this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWtMEP6Iiwg

with the guitar solo at the peak of Lana's "Shades of Cool" (and for that matter, the aura of sunny California despair oozing out of the whole record)

maybe I'm projecting but it seems apt

and def a Mazzy Star spacey-childwoman thing vocally

yeah they should get joan didion to review it. the doomed and medicated and sexy cali thing.

"the lyrics are like charm bracelets of bad girl clichés, wishful/aspirational thinking, and "doomed femme fatale / Sphinx" posturing"

dug this by the way...

wondering if it might work even better if the bracelets were STRUNG with bad girl cliches, etc, etc...

charms are strung, right?

in any case, i'll be stealing that to use in something else at a later date. ty, dd.

listening to this again, take it back, this is great

too long though! really long

ayeeee florida keys is terrible! is this a bonus track! starts with that yucky dave matthews band guitar shit, barfff

Really wish this was an EP or just a video album - annoyed by how constantly risk-averse it is.

sad to see people i like waste words on this stupid bullshit tbh

i don't like lana del rey, w/e. *steps out*

yeah a few songs could have been scrapped. and i still wish it had a song as strong as Ride. but otherwise I think it's great.

I hate comparing, but Ultraviolence is feeling like a new interstate highway version of an old-school Meat Loaf/Jim Steinman creation. Everything ridiculous and epic all the time. I dunno, I guess if I had the cash and opportunity Grant and Auerbach have to make their own version of Bat Out Of Hell, then why the hell not.

It's so weird seeing how far Dan and Patrick have gone from that weird paranoid time in 2002 when we were all in my car on Rowena in front of Thai-American Burger and Dan said they had never heard of the Pretty Things. Had to listen to "L.S.D." immediately. I think they got it.

And congrats to LDR for mining a new vein whatever this kind of pop creation is. I welcome the oncoming Gap commercials.

get excited everybody there's a new thinkpiece

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/full-time-daughter/

they did a whole ldr thinkpiece supplement, which nah

this one is cool though

Lazy writing

<3 the piece

wtf that article. like, ldr is a white girl who evokes white america by exuding all-consuming whiteness

Plus musicians invoke sex and death shocker.

Wow this is some horseshit. I started to c&p the worst unsupported generalisations and then realised I'd have to do the whole thing. So I'll just c&p this dreadful pun instead: an eternal hard-on of the spotless mind

The extended talk about her lips seemed just a bit unnecessary.

It reads like the kind of shit that only makes sense when you're gorging on theory for the first time as an undergraduate and you think words like phallogocentrism are fun.

It reads like the kind of shit that only makes sense when you're gorging on theory for the first time as an undergraduate and you think words like phallogocentrism are fun.

i mean, capsule description of the new inquiry

Is it all that bad? Pretentious I can handle but this is intellectually rotten from the ground up.

this is hilarious because i don't hate this piece but generally dislike their thing

How can you not hate that piece? smh

idk! it seems a reasonable anatomization of ldr's performance of whiteness as it relates to blackness? a lot of its descriptions of her performance read as right to me, especially the paragraph about awkwardness. the lips paragraph is a reach, and the framing is off (this promotional cycle white dude critics are completely transfixed by ldr, not unconvinced; most of the nuanced critiques of her i've encountered lately are by women)

but also i don't know anything about anything so maybe for once generalized faux-intellecualism raptured me away ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I know no men "transfixed" by her, only style-blog gals I know.

We recoil from race-based generalisations because they're racist but they're also false. They might become less racist if the people you're generalising about are white but they don't become any less false.

Just one example…

In the context of American whiteness’s paranoid relation to what it perceives as the blood taint of blackness (which is also the taint of white guilt), false full lips might be deeply preferable to a real full mouth, even if they are superficially derided.

Unless you're ScarJo, Angelina, Brigitte Bardot, etc etc

http://38.media.tumblr.com/22a7424ff5176432c760a811b9f189c5/tumblr_n8rvziHQKA1rq171wo1_500.png

she was also mentioned on the cover of the last issue. WOMEN IN ROCK!!!

I know no men "transfixed" by her, only style-blog gals I know.

― everybody chives this is nowhere (Eazy), Tuesday, July 15, 2014 12:12 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you might say lots of men find her very "annoying"

ha

Doesn't look like anyone's mentioned her version of "Once Upon A Dream" from Maleficent? I like that one a lot, ymmv.

Couldn't read past this:

"Del Rey’s whiteness is unstable because it seems somehow faintly disturbed by the knowledge of its formation. Why else the death wish? Why else do her lips circulate independently of her face?"

Which, no matter how many times I read it, is entirely devoid of any meaning.