If you're not familiar with Lana Del Rey yet, rest assured you'll be hearing about her fairly shortly. Del Rey is a Brooklyn singer who makes "Hollywood pop/sadcore" (we're not making this up, we swear), and her debut single "Video Games" has caused something of a blogosphere shitstorm on the other side of the Pacific. Del Rey seemed to arrive out of nowhere as a fully-formed entity, accompanied by lots of Pitchfork hype and people using the word "buzz" — she made her live debut at New York's Glasslands venue earlier this month, accompanied by several highly-paid session musicians and a truck full of expensive gear that wouldn't fit onto the stage, and the video for "Video Games" already has 1.5 million views on YouTube.
A bit of judicious digging, however, revealed that she wasn't exactly a wide-eyed young newcomer. In fact, as Carles of Hipster Runoff
reported gleefully, before she was Lana Del Rey she was Lizzy Grant, a middle-ranking pop starlet whose career flamed out unceremoniously a couple of years back. Del Rey's fairly contrived reinvention as sultry indie songstress, facilitated by fashionably DIY videos and collagen injections, has rubbed plenty of people up the wrong way, particularly as it looks like someone is putting a heap of money behind her. People either think she's the next big thing, or a painfully contrived poseur (or, indeed, both).
Anyway, this is all a fairly convoluted lead-up to the gist of this post, which is that someone has made a rather hilarious literal interpretation of the video to "Video Games". This makes Del Rey the latest singer to get a literal video makeover — and while the "Video Games" effort isn't quite on the level of the 24-carat classic that is Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", it's still amusing viewing. Here's the literal version:
And here's the original:
Hilarious, right? Right??