In America it is thought that one can be whatever one wants to be, dream big and often. Life is a perpetual motion machine moving forward – discarding truth in favor of fiction, replacing facts with fabrications. Names and faces can be changed, rearranged, deranged, and estranged from just about anything with the right Youtube clip or Twitter burp. Lana Del Rey is front and center in a raging Pop debate about persona fakery and authenticity in an increasingly superficial online age. The self-proclaimed “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” (Can she really be a “gangsta” version of someone whose father had actual mob ties?) has garnered the ire of both the mainstream press and the blogosphere before releasing a full length record.
Born to Die is Lana Del Rey‘s debut, if one overlooks her first failed Lizzy Grant album, and a lot of attention is being paid to it despite Del Rey‘s almost total lack of skill or presentation. The music world was yearning for a song like “Video Games” when it hit the viral veins, both aurally and visually. A piece of uncomfortably moody, confused and somewhat disconnected, lovelorn, and bittersweet pop hit the right notes when first posted. The song is easily the best track on a record that gives plenty of ammunition to people ready to fire bomb this flavor of the month. After a truly disappointing national TV debut on SNL, Born to Die needed to be great. It is anything but.
Del Rey‘s death-obsessed sex object character is empty by even pop music standards. Her disconnected anti-emotion music might be perfect for who we are as a society, but as a listening experience it is boring. Throughout she sings a laundry list of products taken from hip-hop and hipsters – “Diet Mountain Dew” being one obvious example. “Blue Jeans,” “National Anthem,” and the title song barely make it past her big puffy lips before one begs for the amateur David Lynch nightmare to stop. How many put-on poses does Del Rey have time for in one album? Too many. Who cares about her material possessions? No one. She is a product of hype and money marinating, fornicating, and infecting music today. Though Del Rey probably doesn’t have a thought on the matter seeing as how she is dead already.
[...] Subscribe to the comments on this post [...]