Music Dump - All Lana Del Rey All The Time Edition

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This was the week that music writing became consumed by Lana Del Rey. Nobody talked about anything music-related apart from Lana Del Rey. Nobody wrote a single music think piece that was not about Lana Del Rey. Before this week, there was already several internet servers' worth of very good writing about her (see this one by Amelia Schmidt, this one by Nitsuh Abebe, and this one by Carles). But her album's out now, and music writers could not get enough. The people have written. It's gotten so ridiculous that the Taiwanese animators Next Media Animation even made an animation about all the Lana Del Rey uproar, featuring an indelible image of a man in a Pitchfork t-shirt hitting the Lana Del Rey record with a pan.
 
 

So here's the best music writing of the last week: All Lana Del Rey, All The Time. Anyway, I might complain snarkily, but I like 'Video Games' well enough, and there's some wise and perceptive people writing about her. And Del Rey is now a genuine cultural phenomenon, as the fact of the Taiwanese animators bothering suggests: her album is #1 in the UK, she was the highest voted female artist in last week's Triple J Hottest 100 (not counting 'feat Kimbra'), and her album is sitting at #2 in the Australian iTunes store charts right now (and may well debut at #1). Your normal programming will resume next week. We hope.

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Deconstructing Lana Del Rey by Jessica Hopper (Spin): Hopper here gives you the facts as we know them, explaining expertly just how the Lana Del Rey phenomenon came to be. There's a lot here I'd never seen before, from how Lana Del Rey went to a fancy prep school to how she ended up in a trailer park in Springsteen's New Jersey, to how the A&R guy at Interscope signed her on the basis of seeing 'Video Games' on YouTube. It also functions as a pretty good defense of what Del Rey is trying to do in her music, and what her appeal is.

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Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Lana Del Rey by Jonathan Bogart (Exist Yesterday): Here Jonathan Bogart explores thirteen various things which help explain what he sees in Del Rey's music. Each of the thirteen cultural landmarks are women who are better known by other names, from Dolores Haze to Onika Maraj to Betty Jean Proeske. And, basically, he's making the point that artifice, reinvention, and fantasy is nothing new in the way women approach pop culture, and the way women are seen in pop culture. (Also see his glossary, where he explains who these names are better known as.)

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Screen Shot: Lana Del Rey's Fixed Image by Sasha Frere-Jones (The New Yorker): Frere-Jones likes Born To Die well enough - in it, he says, "there is little wisdom...but more than enough pleasure." But he is puzzled by the frenzied reaction to her, most of which centres around questioning her authenticity, asking 'why is pop music the only artform that inspires such arrantly stupid discussion'? While I've seen more than my share of stupid discussion about characters in science fiction television shows, I know what Frere-Jones means -- a lot of people dearly want the music they listen to to seem "authentic", and because Del Rey sounds curiously detached singing about her slightly inconsistent fantasy hipster world, there is a lot of suspicion about whether she is a product of a record company.

An issue neatly skewered by SNL, by the way:



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Lana Del Rey Just Wants To Be Loved by Maura Johnston (The Village Voice): Johnston is one of the sharpest American cultural critics, and she nails something important about the album: "Born To Die is an album with the timeless pop question "Is that all there is?" lurking, obviously and ominously, behind its every moan and underneath each reheated Sneaker Pimps beat." You can't help noticing that Lana Del Rey doesn't sound like she's having any fun being one of the 1%, and having no fun being a hot girl either. In a sense, this may make her music - whether this is intentional or not - work as an indictment of the modern woman's American dream.

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By Mistake Or Design? by Katherine St Asaph (katherinestasaph.tumblr.com): St Asaph is convinced that Lana Del Rey is actively trying to troll her. Her, specifically. After all, Del Rey is trying to pander to depressed, passive, teenage girls who just want boys to like them and who post glamorous images on their tumblrs. And St Asaph used to be one of those teenaged girls, the kind who'd like Twilight, but she's old enough now to know exactly which buttons are being pushed and resist it; but at the same time, she's still enough of the same person to feel those buttons being pushed anyway.

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The Last Thing I'll Ever Write About Lana Del Rey by Amy Rebecca Klein (amyrebeccaklein.tumblr.com): Klein argues that Lana Del Rey has made so many waves because Del Rey makes us think about the idea of femininity. For Klein, femininity is an empty word, meaning nothing; to be feminine is to reflect society's beliefs about women, rather than to reflect what women actually are. And because Del Rey defines herself by her femininity, because a lot of Del Rey's music is about trying to figure out what kind of feminine she wants to be - a good girl, a bad girl? - we can't help but notice that the emptiness inside Del Rey. In other words, part of why people find her to be inauthentic is because the idea of femininity comes across as inauthentic.

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Lana Del Rey: Lurching Towards Vegas by Nitsuh Abebe (New York Magazine): Abebe, as per usual, has a humane take on Del Rey (with further, interesting, commentary at his Tumblr). For him, Del Rey is camp, which he defines as "seeing some overblown proposition of what beauty is, and knowing that the fundamentals behind it, the belief system it grew out of, is defunct or rotten or collapsed". As such, he points out how Del Rey sounds a bit like stuff which is now kind of camp by that definition: the currently-not-very-cool b-grade late-90s trip-hop sounds of the likes of the Sneaker Pimps and Hooverphonic, and the movie Showgirls.

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Interview: Lana Del Rey Talks Backlash, Plastic Surgery, And New Album by Ernest Baker (Complex): Just in case you actually wanted to hear what Del Rey had to say for herself, as opposed to what everyone else is theorising about her, here she is talking to Complex magazine. Within she claims she lived in a trailer park for years, but talks casually about living in London, that the backlash against her makes her feeling 'fucking miserable', and that she just wants to have fun with her music (which isn't quite fun sounding). Reading this interview actually does make me think that the svengali behind Del Rey is actually Del Rey herself.

Tim Byron