Born To Die Lana Album
Kathy Douds
What happens to a dream fulfilled? More specifically, an American dream fulfilled, rags turning to riches with the snap of a manicured finger, kissing James Dean in Gatsby's swimming pool, getting played on the radio. This is a central question animating Lana Del Rey's Born to Die. Our heroine has all the love, diamonds, and Diet Mountain Dew she could ask for, yet still sings, "I wish I was dead," sounding utterly incapable of joy. To paraphrase Liz Phair, if you get everything you wish for and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you.
Given the waves of hype and backlash over the last six months, it can be easy to forget that we're here, first and foremost, because of a song. "Video Games" struck a nerve not just because it was an introduction to Del Rey's captivating voice but because it seemed to suggest something as-yet-unarticulated about the way we live today. Whatever her intention, as a metaphor about disconnect and detachment from our own desires, "Video Games" felt frank, pointed, and true, and it had a chord progression and melody to match. The ultimate disappointment of Born to Die, then, is how out of touch it feels not just with the world around it, but with the simple business of human emotion.
The singer born Elizabeth "Lizzy" Grant may have made her mark with a grainy homemade video that brought to mind other grainy homemade videos in the indie sphere, but the slick sound and sentiment of "Radio", Born to Die's most straightforward statement of purpose ("Baby love me 'cause I'm playing on the radio/ How do you like me now?"), places it firmly within the realm of big-budget chart pop. Born to Die was produced by Emile Haynie, whose credits include Eminem, Lil Wayne, and Kid Cudi, and the album's impressively lush atmosphere might be the one thing that will unite its detractors and apologists.
The album's recurring themes ooze out of every note: sex, drugs, and glitter hover in the yawning atmosphere around Del Rey's breathy vocals. There are strings and trip-hop beats and bits of 1950s twang, and the melodies, assembled with assistance from hired-gun songwriters like Mike Daly (Plain White Ts, Whiskeytown) and Rick Nowels (Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth") are built to stick. But for an album that aims for fickle radio listeners, many of its pop signifiers feel stale and ill-fitting. On "Million Dollar Man", Del Rey drawls like a highly medicated Fiona Apple, and "Diet Mountain Dew" and "Off to the Races" aim for chatty, sparkling opulence, this singer doesn't have the personality to bring it off.
The album's point of view-- if you could call it that-- feels awkward and out of date. Whether you take a line like "Money is the reason we exist/ Everybody knows that it's a fact/ Kiss kiss" with a 10-carat grain of salt is up to you, but even as a jab at the chihuahua-in-Paris-Hilton's-handbag lifestyle, it feels limp and pointless (unlike, say, Lily Allen's mock-vapid but slyly observant 2008 single "The Fear"). Still, the dollar signs in its eyes aren't an inherent strike against Born to Die: Even in the wake of an international debt crisis and the Occupy movement, it was hard not to fall for Watch the Throne. But that's because Jay and Kanye made escapist fantasy sound so fun. Del Rey's gem-encrusted dreamworld, meanwhile, relies on clichs ("God you're so handsome/ Take me to the Hamptons") rather than specific evocations. It's a fantasy world that makes you long for reality.
And speaking of fantasy: The conversation surrounding Lana Del Rey has underscored some seriously depressing truths about sexism in music. She was subjected to the kind of intense scrutiny-- about her backstory and especially her appearance-- that's generally reserved for women only. But the sexual politics of Born to Die are troubling too: You'd be hard pressed to find any song on which Del Rey reveals an interiority or figures herself as anything more complex than an ice-cream-cone-licking object of male desire (a line in "Blue Jeans", "I will love you till the end of time/ I would wait a million years," sums up about 65% of the album's lyrical content). Even when Del Rey offers something that could be read as a critique ("This is what makes us girls/ We don't stick together 'cause we put our love first"), she asks that we make no effort to change, escape, or transcend the way things are ("Don't cry about it/ Don't cry about it.") In terms of its America-sized grandeur and its fixation with the emptiness of dreams, Born to Die attempts to serve as Del Rey's own beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy, but there's no spark and nothing at stake.
The critic Ellen Willis once wrote of Bette Midler: "Blatant artifice can, in the right circumstances, be poignantly honest, and she expresses the tension between image and inner self that all of us-- but especially women-- experience." But Born to Die never allows tension or complexity into the mix, and its take on female sexuality ends up feeling thoroughly tame. For all of its coos about love and devotion, it's the album equivalent of a faked orgasm-- a collection of torch songs with no fire.
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Whatever your personal opinion of her may be, there is one fact that is truly undeniable: Lana Del Rey is in a league of her own. If you don't believe me, read her fantastically revealing cover piece with Fader. If you don't feel like it, listen to her albums, watch her videos, read other interviews, watch the infamous SNL performance, and follow all of the ridiculous Internet hype surrounding the totality of it. After a sleeper debut album, Lana dropped "Video Games" in 2011 and was a superstar over night. And when I say superstar, I mean it in every sense of the phrase. She temporarily captivated the critics, made a TV appearance, and then instantaneously became the main choice of conversation for every cynical comment board on the Internet. Everyone has an opinion about Lana Del Rey, even before her actual music is the subject of conversation. She is polarizing in almost every plausible sense. While critical reception of her 2012 major label debut, Born To Die, and the companion EP, Paradise, weren't horrible, the reviews themselves were chock full of personal attacks, bent on burying the 25 year-old singer who already had full biographies floating around on the web about how her career was bought with old money and so forth. And through it all, Lana remained at the top of the headlines.Lana's second major label LP and third overall, Ultraviolence, truly gives us the first post-hype LDR record. After avoiding live dates in the states for almost two straight years and letting the lurching dogs at the tabloids busy themselves with the lives of others, Lana's name popped up near the top of several festival lineups around the beginning of the year. Reincorporating herself to all the venoms of the industry, Lana made her comeback slowly, announcing single after single, then a leading tour, and finally, the Dan Auerbach-helmed LP. The record's bonus tracks have been floating around on the Internet for a year or so as ambiguous rarities, impostors, or otherwise. The rest of it fits perfectly into place as a Born To Die follow up, complete with copious amounts of nostalgia, brokenhearted wandering, and American hustle.
And yet, if you can't help yourself and read the reviews anyways, only a small proportion of every one is dedicated to the music - Lana herself remains the target of criticism for reasons unbeknownst to her now massive fan-base. My theory is this: perhaps after three years of coffee table conversation, critical hubbub, and endless forum gossip, we still have no idea who Lana Del Rey really is. If you think there's any form of coincidence there, you aren't giving her music and her intricately assembled character a fair shake. Lana Del Rey is ahead of her time - she is truly among the first artists to completely transcend the wild west medium of the Internet in full form. Ultraviolence is the next chapter in her ongoing unique take on the American Dream. Many have told the tale in their own radically different way: John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Brett Easton Ellis, and Oliver Stone just to name a few. But Lana Del Rey's new vision of the dream's communication it what sets her apart from the competition. To borrow Factory Records mastermind Tony Wilson's description of himself, love her or hate her, you can't possibly ignore her.
Ultraviolence begins a bit farther on down the road than where Born To Die and Paradise left off. On Born To Die, Lana was a young girl caught in the throws of naive love and freedom by birth. Every track on the record reeks of romanticism. In Lana's world, we are "Born To Die", we worship James Dean for his mystery and misguided charm ("Blue Jeans") and sensualize drug use and crime ("Off To The Races"), we sing a "National Anthem" to feverish lust and the blinding lights of Hollywood (the video, featuring A$AP Rocky as the president of the United States in the 60s communicates this message perfectly), and we justify everything we do as the way it is if you want to live the dream to the fullest ("This Is What Makes Us Girls"). Paradise and its accompanying short film Tropico took the same nuances to biblical proportions, mixing Of Mice and Men with Paradise Lost all soaked in remorseless hero worship (the Holy Trinity are depicted as John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis). A "Blue Velvet" cover thrown in here doesn't hurt one bit - Lana's surrealist world and its backwards motifs take a hint from Lynch's film. The arrangements here are even more lush on those on Born To Die, seeing Lana plunging into an ocean of contrasting ideals trying to soak it all in with reckless disregard to the future. But as "Bel Air" closes the EP with a whisper, the shot fades out and an "INTERLUDE" seems to fade into focus. There is a conscious breath before Ultraviolence takes us under again for another brutal and brilliant round.