Them's Fightin' Words

Anyone who follows the music press and music blogs is probably sick to death of the three words “Lana Del Ray” at the moment and I have to apologise before I even start writing this for adding to the hype surrounding this “artist”.

But the thing is, at the moment Lana Del Ray is like that girl at high-school who magically got gorgeous overnight and in doing so, managed to get the entire school talking about her.

Murmurs about her started last year when her track “Video Games” hit the internet, but now that her debut album Born To Die has been released, those murmurs have evolved into people shouting indignantly from the rooftops that Lana Del Ray is full of shit.

I gave her album a spin yesterday so I could hear for myself what the fuss was all about and I emerged from that experience simultaneously entranced and disappointed.

The tracks that made her famous (“Video Games” and “Blue Jeans”) appear on the album in all their languid glory, brimming over with promise, tension and that unmistakeable melancholy that so articulates the theme of the broken American Dream, which is at the heart of this album.

“Diet Mountain Dew” and “Radio” also stand out as noteworthy tracks – I mean how could you not admire an artist who rhymes the cringe-worthy line “Now my life is sweet like cinnamon” with the undeniably bitter, “Like a fucking dream I’m living in” as Del Ray does in “Radio”?

I think what the furore about her all boils down to can be summed up on one simple statement: no one wants to believe she’s real.

Everything about her, from her looks to her style to her music, has been accused of being manufactured like she’s just another plastic robot being churned out of the Fame Factory with no real substance to her whatsoever.

And, sad to say, if you listen to the final few tracks on Born To Die (ie. tracks like “This Is What Makes Us Girls” and “Lolita”), which sound like outtakes from a Britney Spears album, you’d agree in an instant that she’s a pop shop mannequin and nothing more.

But somehow that just doesn’t sit right with me. Call me naive, but I think there’s more to Miss Lizzie Grant (her real name) than the haters out there are willing to acknowledge or accept.

Sure, her Saturday Night Live performance was a little ropey, but in one of the most telling interviews I’ve read about her over the last few months, she replied to Rolling Stone’s comment to her that the backlash from the SNL performance was pretty harsh saying:

There’s backlash about everything I do. It’s nothing new. When I walk outside, people have something to say about it. It wouldn’t have mattered if I was absolutely excellent. People don’t have anything nice to say about this project. I’m sure that’s why you’re writing about it.

Suffice to say, I haven’t made up my mind about Lana Del Ray just yet. Her debut album, for all it’s intrigue, is admittedly a bit of an incoherent mess stylistically (she swings from Amy Winehouse to Mickey Mouse Club so effortlessly it’s scary), but if she’s still around, I think album no. 2 is going to melt faces.

In the meantime, don’t write her off completely. Give Born To Die a listen and, if nothing else, you’ll at least, you’ll at least be able to formulate your own opinion and wield it with authority the next time a hipster starts hating on Lana like he’s some nerd she refused to go to the prom with.

-ST