You all knew it would come to this, didn't you? The inevitable post about Lana Del Rey.
Lana Del Rey maybe the most brilliant enigma of 2012 so far and I will tell you why:
First off, if you catched her performance on Saturday Night Live (hosted by Daniel Radcliffe) you may have thought it was bearable or you may have thought it was terrible. Juliette Lewis did.
The rest of twitter did and so did every music blog ready to sink it's teeth into Lizzy Grant (AKA Lana Del Rey.
Lana Del Rey is a creation, yeah, I said it. She's a music mogul's wet dream, an embodiment of assisted self-creation in an overzealous hype machine. Google Lana Del Rey controversy and you will be met with so much material of why she is to be hated from her bad lip injections (her lips are immobile y'all) to the maybe true maybe not fact that her dad is like the inventor of toaster streudel (that last one was a stretch but no he's more like a domain investor or some crap). Lana's biggest crime with the indie community is that she's way pretty, aware that she's way pretty and a little too self-aware of herself. She calls herself a "gangster nancy sinatra," and "lolita lost in the hood." I don't know about THAT.
With all her hype and hate, let's get to the real deal: the music. Lana's music is not especially remarkable. She's got a husky voice like Fiona Apple but unlike Fiona Apple, Lana's a one note, two if she's feeling like a 'bad girl.' Her music is more like sweeping soundscapes with nods to everything retro and American from Elvis to hip hop. She's a hipster projection and that's what unfortunate.I can't imagine her following up after the release of her "Born to Die," album just because it's so much hype and that it seems nearly impossible. Implosion straight ahead.
Her music is not bad, but it's not great and it's definitely not going to be substantial for all the hype. "Born to Die," and "Blue Jeans," "National Anthem" are particularly good for their wearied sound but the rest of her singles seem to float in inoffensively. No blood, sweat and tears here. Her lyrics are decent but nothing pushing for incisive, at most she embodies the one liner cliches that come from...you guessed it...old classic movies that somehow ended up in a song.
Her pouty face and Americana fetish are interesting, she looks as if she walked out of a Mad Men episode. She looks like she belongs in a dusty Ford commercial. Honestly it's the best personification of a dying vision of the American Dream. Lana Del Rey, hmmm, she's good, terrible and likely to produce more analysis than warranted (like I just did here). I want to appreciate Lana Del Rey because a "pretty" (critiques of how good her music is focus primarily on how attractive she is---irk) girl singing about Death is really my kind of party, but, it's not a party because I think, poor Lana is just too sedated with dreams of fame to really get loose.
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