Me On Lana Del Rey
I wrote this for the Village Voice Pazz & Jop issue - very cool to be asked to do an essay, and doubly fun because after a couple of years writing more and more trend pieces it was great to do something digging into a particular song and what’s happening in it.I don’t necessarily want to keep talking / thinking too much about Lana Del Rey because it’s exhausting and her album’s about to come out anyway so I have to steel my brains for Round 6,742 of LDR Debating, but the very end of this essay caught my eye. “It’s uncanny valley pop about an uncanny valley love affair—almost convincing, but just wrong enough to chill and fascinate.” Cool! Is this maybe something we’ll see happening a lot more as digital culture continues to further shape and contextualize art?
I think/hope so since this is kind of my “beat” now a bit - and it’s been a little bit of a theme in 2011 pop criticism, now we’ve moved on from “songs about internet stuff” (which never really got going) to songs and artists and self-presentations which capture some kind of digital culture ‘vibe’. Lana Del Rey as a kind of human Tumblr - this idea lifted from Mark Richardson - doesn’t just feel right, the projective metaphor helps us think out ideas about Tumblr as well as about LDR.
While we’re on the piece, I had a pub conversation about her last week too - I should go to the pub more often - and I was talking about the “distrust of performance” angle, and someone said “what about Gaga?”, which is a fair point, but Gaga usually is selling the idea of performing - dramatic entrances, costume changes, etc - more than any specific performance. I haven’t heard the LDR album yet but the guy I was talking to had reviewed it for a big UK mag, and he was saying how consistent it was in terms of the theme/persona/character of her - so I think what the dislikers react against or don’t seem to “get” is that consistency in performance somehow. (And as ever behind attacks on fakery is a frustrated wish to believe - the LDR construct, romantic submissiveness & all, is very tempting for some) (Sometime blog darling SALLY SHAPIRO was kind of a dry run for LDR in many ways!)
Anyway yes enough LDR talk probably. She is interesting though!
