What can I say about Lana Del Rey that hasn’t already been said? After six remarkable months of assorted rises and falls, the 25 year-old New Yorker has become the most talked about woman on the planet, inciting a full-blown pop culture upheaval along the way.
People respond to Lana Del Rey like no other artist in history. As well as being queen of trashy chic, she’s queen of the knee-jerk reaction, arousing hatred and adulation in equal measures, often based on as little as a photograph.
Whether she’s hailed as a divine pop starlet or dismissed as a kissy-faced phony, at least, one can argue, she provokes.
Del Rey likes to tell the story of her first gig in a rock bar in Williamsburg.
“Everybody stopped,” she recalls, “…the whole room stopped fighting and just went silent. They didn’t even clap at the end. It stayed quiet.”
It almost suggests a musical superpower; the ability to stop people in their tracks. At least, that’s what Del Rey will have you believe. The other explanation calls for a far more cynical mind. It’s 2012; attention spans are short and information is infinite, yet there are all these pesky Twitter and Facebook accounts demanding to be updated with hilarious and outrageous hypotheses. It was only a matter of time before having an opinion became more important than opinion itself, and Lana Del Rey, a singer with a loose grasp of her own voice, who looks more like a movie star than any actress currently appearing on the big screen, was just the artist to justify it.
But if Del Rey’s success is merely a case of right place, right time, how do you explain the 100,000 people who bought her debut album Born To Die on its first week of release?
It’s as simple as this; Born To Die contains some truly brilliant songs. There’s ‘Diet Mountain Dew’, a candy-coated, Dolly Parton-level ditty set over an addictive hip hop beat; the adorable and foolhardy ‘Summertime Sadness’, which makes clever use of a distorted refrain; ‘Radio’, a truly catchy alloy of stark synth beats and gentle, cooing melody and the genuinely heartbreaking ‘Video Games’.
And then there’s the one where she repeats “I’m your national anthem, God, you’re so handsome…” over and over, and nobody has the slightest idea what she’s on about.
The Lana Del Rey on Born To Die may be desperate, lonely, love stricken and co-dependent, but the real tragedy here is that on some of the record, she really has done a terrific job. On these tracks, her hypnotic voice, which flips from roughed-up Peggy Lee to breathy Disney princess at the flick of an eyelash, sounds confident and controlled, the lavish string arrangements compliment the melodies rather than strangle them, and clichés are kept to one or two per song. Elsewhere, overwhelming production and laughable lyrics (it’s hard to believe that the same woman who wrote a line as charming as, “You fit me better than my favourite sweater” could be responsible for something as appalling as, “Light of your life, fire of your loins”) make it hard to sympathise with her plight, no matter how grotesque her boyfriend sounds (for the most part, very).
Born To Die expresses, better than any other album I can think of, the overblown melodrama of being a stunningly beautiful twentysomething with an intense streak and a tendency to product-worship. It’s just that, well… not all of us can relate to it. I’d wager that about 99% of us have no idea what it’s like to be a cross between Serge Gainsbourg-era Brigitte Bardot and a red setter, to worship Bacardi chasers, beauty queens and dive bars and to harbour a desire for a twisted version of the American Dream starring Pabst Blue Ribbon, Pontiac, Diet Mountain Dew, James Dean and countless other Stateside icons.
There is an advantage to all this branded woe, of course; through sassy slang (“I say you the besest”), dropped gs (“It’s alarmin’, truly, how disarmin’ we can be, eatin’ soft ice cream”) and honeyed metaphors (“Now my life is sweet like cinnamon/Pick me up and take me like a vitamin”), Del Rey has defined the quintessentially first-world feeling of being sad, but not being quite sure why.
But even with this chart-friendly hook on her side, Del Rey’s musical legacy is about as secure as her inch-long press-on talons. Born To Die is not a great album, but it’s an important one, simply because it introduces a voice with real potential.