Hype Check: Alt-Indie Princess Lana Del Rey Bombs on SNL
How a viral "sensation" confirmed an industry's deceitful desperation – with one terrible performance.
We now have the official 2012 litmus test in hype vs. value on the warty, slippery slope of entertainment in America, and its name is Lana Del Rey. The music industry has endlessly regurgitated its own formula to aid their unfettered & continued pillaging of the modern market, but as of last night its latest attempt to hijack our attention and convince us of wildly inflated zirconium value has blown up in their faces, like a billion-dollar Barbie doll melting on the jumbotron at a Toddlers & Tiaras castoff convention.
Undeserving, meticulously crafted viral internet phenomenon Lana Del Rey made her U.S. television debut on SNL this past Saturday night, and the outcome was a painfully embarrassing mess, a collapse of inflated promise. Technically, Lana's performance was an absolute disaster, and actress/musician Juliette Lewis was on point when she tweeted "Wow watching this 'singer' on SNL is like watching a 12 year old in their bedroom when they're pretending to sing and perform. #signofourtimes." (She's since deleted the tweet.)
Yes, it was that bad. Watch it for yourself. Her performance was an implosion of hype, a girl with no place whatsoever on a nationally televised stage laying out her painfully amateurish wares in half-babytalk, singlehandedly dismantling months of genius build-up by Interscope (who will be putting out her Born To Die album on Jan. 31). And while legions of atrocious non-talents pass through the halls of celebridom daily, there's something particularly repugnant about an industry prop so smug and expecting of the shimmering hype pedestal on which she sits – not to mention the full-throttle insistence by the kingmakers that this is the real deal, the next superstar.
She's thus far been limited to internet sensation status, a collagen pout in a sunny corner of the new American Apparel catalogue that she – and Interscope – have taken great pains to distance from Lizzy Grant, the 2010 pop hopeful who, a year later, would become Lana Del Rey with careful grooming, renaming and character design. The would-be alt-indie princess released her breakout single "Video Games" and its accompanying video last Summer, pulling upwards of 13 million YouTube views and selling 20,000 copies of her single, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It debuted and spent three weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Singles Sales chart.
We can deal with Katy Perry. We can accept Bieber's place as a reincarnated, estrogen-infused Leif Garrett and every saccharine teen heartthrob that came before him. Hell, we'll even find a way to welcome back Britney Spears, who made such a cheetos-stained hillbilly tweaker mess of herself a few years ago that most were betting serious Death Pool money on her. We'll chuckle knowingly when the suits adorn her with awards and accolades for music she neither wrote or performed herself. It's pop, after all.
But Lana doesn't have a seasoned army of producers and a Mickey Mouse Club factory upbringing under her belt, equipping her with the bells and whistles to hide her painfully amateurish voice, nonexistence stage presence and not-ready-for-primetime delivery. All she has is hype, blank doe eyes, pouty lips and tired Stevie Nicks affectations.
Oh, and her Twitter profile reads: "EVERYTHING I WANT I HAVE. MONEY, NOTORIETY AND RIVIERAS – I EVEN THINK I FOUND GOD- IN THE FLASH BULBS OF YOUR PRETTY CAMERAS." All caps. Kanye, meet your soul mate.
It's not simply that Del Rey had a bad performance – in fact, her Jools Holland appearance was considerably better than what we saw Saturday night. Her undeserved industry positioning and exposure (she's the first act to perform on SNL before releasing a debut album since Natalie Imbruglia) are the central problem, the continuously ringing bell of inauthenticity that the 2012 internet masses simply cannot stomach – or ignore. She's been shoved hard to the frontburner by an industry that's not only sticking to its 1990s formula of shilling overpriced and undervalued product, but declaring war on its own patrons by propping up insane bills like SOPA and PIPA.
MTV.com, quick to defend a fellow cellophane hologram after the SNL airing, pointed out that the the 25-year-old was nervous. To her credit, she didn't lip-synch to a backing track, but what is it they say about gold medals at the Special Olympics?
The. Girl. Can. Not. Sing.
If we don't
The choir of voices calling bullshit is rising, beautifully.
It then became apparent that she didn't actually live in a trailer park and her dad is a multi - millionaire. She had tried to release herself as an artist before under her real name Lizzie Grant but was unsuccessful. She then manages to get herself signed to a different recording contract who came up with the name Lana Del Rey and made the story of her living a trailer park to manufacture her as being an indie artist. However the truth may have been meant to come out, has the whole thing been a manufactured play to get the audience to talk about her?
People became to not like her and many negative comments and press were released about her for example comments about her album:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/gavon/26-meanest-quotes-from-reviews-of-lana-del-reys-n
And negative articles:
http://sabotagetimes.com/music/dont-believe-the-hype-from-lana-del-rey-to-tyler/
But this negative publicity was also a good thing as it made her more well known as people were talking about her and her true fans will have felt sympathy towards her.
'There’s always the
chance that she’s playing a character, although that seems doubtful' …
Alexis Petridis on Lana Del Rey. Photograph: Photographer: Shivy K
It's hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for Lana Del Rey.
She's hardly the first pop star in history to indulge in a spot of
pragmatic reinvention that muddies her comfortable background, but you'd
certainly think she was. You can barely hear the music over the
carping, which appears to be getting louder as her debut album
approaches: a cynic might say that's just as well, given the recent Saturday Night Live appearance in which she demonstrated her uncanny mastery of the vocal style deployed by Ian Brown during the Stone Roses' later years
– she honked like the foghorn on Portland Bill lighthouse. But one
off-key TV spot is surely not a career-ending disaster. Perhaps the
arrival of Born to Die will silence the controversy and shift attention
to the songs.
Or perhaps not. There's something impressive about her desire
to brazen it out, but you do wonder at the wisdom of including Radio,
one of those how-do-you-like-me-now? songs in which the singer revisits
their terrible struggle to achieve fame. "No one even knows how hard
life was," she sings, "no one even knows what life was like," which does
rather invite the response: indeed not, but given that your father was
not only extremely wealthy
but so supportive that he took to the pages of the Adirondack Daily
Enterprise to promote your debut album I'll hazard a guess at (a)
probably not that hard and (b) basically quite nice.
There's always the chance that she's playing a character, although that seems doubtful, because when Lana Del Rey is in character, she really lets you know about it. The one truly disappointing thing about Born to Die isn't the sound, which understandably sticks fast to the appealing blueprint from Video Games and Blue Jeans: sumptuous orchestration, twangs of Twin Peaks-theme guitar and bum-bum-TISH drums. Nor is it her voice, which is fine: a bit reedy on the high notes, but nothing to get you reaching for the earplugs. It's the lyrics, which in contrast to Video Games's beguiling description of a mundane love affair, are incredibly heavy-handed in their attempts to convince you that Lana Del Rey is the doomed but devoted partner of a kind of Athena poster bad boy, all white vest, cheekbones and dangling ciggie. The reckless criminality of their lifestyle is expressed via hip-hop slang – "yo", "imma ride or die", and, a little Ali Gishly, "booyah" – and the depth of their love through romance-novel cliches ("you are my one true love"). It's Mills and Booyah.
The problem is that Del Rey doesn't have the lyrical equipment to develop a persona throughout the album. After the umpteenth song in which she either puts her red dress on or takes her red dress off, informs you of her imminent death and kisses her partner hard while telling him she'll love him 'til the end of time, you start longing for a song in which Del Rey settles down with Keith from HR, moves to Great Yarmouth and takes advantage of the DFS half-price winter sale.
The best thing to do is ignore the lyrics; easy enough given how magnificently most of the melodies have been constructed. Video Games sounded like a unique single, but as it turns out, it was anything but a one-off: the album is packed with similarly beautiful stuff. National Anthem soars gloriously away from a string motif that sounds not unlike that sampled on the Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony. There's something effortless about the melodies of Diet Mountain Dew and Dark Paradise: they just sweep the listener along with them. The quality is high throughout, which is presumably what you get if you assemble a crack team of co-writers, including Heart FM king Rick Nowels, author of Ronan Keating's Life Is a Rollercoaster, Dido's White Flag and Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is a Place on Earth.
You could argue that his presence recontextualises Born to Die, drawing it away from the world of the indie singer-songwriter she was initially thought to inhabit and firmly into the mainstream. It fits better there, where no one bores on about authenticity and lyrics matter less than whether your songs' hooks sink deep into the listener's skin. What Born to Die isn't is the thing Lana Del Rey seems to think it is, which is a coruscating journey into the dark heart of a troubled soul. If you concentrate too hard on her attempts to conjure that up, it just sounds a bit daft. What it is, is beautifully turned pop music, which is more than enough.
Reviews about her SNL performance were everywhere and very little people hadn't heard of her.
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/the-real-reason-why-you-cant-stop-talking-about-lana-del-rey/
http://www.spin.com/articles/deconstructing-lana-del-rey/?page=2
There's always the chance that she's playing a character, although that seems doubtful, because when Lana Del Rey is in character, she really lets you know about it. The one truly disappointing thing about Born to Die isn't the sound, which understandably sticks fast to the appealing blueprint from Video Games and Blue Jeans: sumptuous orchestration, twangs of Twin Peaks-theme guitar and bum-bum-TISH drums. Nor is it her voice, which is fine: a bit reedy on the high notes, but nothing to get you reaching for the earplugs. It's the lyrics, which in contrast to Video Games's beguiling description of a mundane love affair, are incredibly heavy-handed in their attempts to convince you that Lana Del Rey is the doomed but devoted partner of a kind of Athena poster bad boy, all white vest, cheekbones and dangling ciggie. The reckless criminality of their lifestyle is expressed via hip-hop slang – "yo", "imma ride or die", and, a little Ali Gishly, "booyah" – and the depth of their love through romance-novel cliches ("you are my one true love"). It's Mills and Booyah.
The problem is that Del Rey doesn't have the lyrical equipment to develop a persona throughout the album. After the umpteenth song in which she either puts her red dress on or takes her red dress off, informs you of her imminent death and kisses her partner hard while telling him she'll love him 'til the end of time, you start longing for a song in which Del Rey settles down with Keith from HR, moves to Great Yarmouth and takes advantage of the DFS half-price winter sale.
The best thing to do is ignore the lyrics; easy enough given how magnificently most of the melodies have been constructed. Video Games sounded like a unique single, but as it turns out, it was anything but a one-off: the album is packed with similarly beautiful stuff. National Anthem soars gloriously away from a string motif that sounds not unlike that sampled on the Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony. There's something effortless about the melodies of Diet Mountain Dew and Dark Paradise: they just sweep the listener along with them. The quality is high throughout, which is presumably what you get if you assemble a crack team of co-writers, including Heart FM king Rick Nowels, author of Ronan Keating's Life Is a Rollercoaster, Dido's White Flag and Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is a Place on Earth.
You could argue that his presence recontextualises Born to Die, drawing it away from the world of the indie singer-songwriter she was initially thought to inhabit and firmly into the mainstream. It fits better there, where no one bores on about authenticity and lyrics matter less than whether your songs' hooks sink deep into the listener's skin. What Born to Die isn't is the thing Lana Del Rey seems to think it is, which is a coruscating journey into the dark heart of a troubled soul. If you concentrate too hard on her attempts to conjure that up, it just sounds a bit daft. What it is, is beautifully turned pop music, which is more than enough.
Reviews about her SNL performance were everywhere and very little people hadn't heard of her.
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/the-real-reason-why-you-cant-stop-talking-about-lana-del-rey/
http://www.spin.com/articles/deconstructing-lana-del-rey/?page=2
The ongoing debate about whether Lana Del Rey is indie or not will always continue and there probably will never be a conclusion. However, personally I think as an artist she is amazing and her background shouldn't matter to her music. Who cares how much money her dad has or whether she lived in a trailer park or not? Things like that shouldn't matter to her music. I like how her past troubles and experiences are reflected in her music which let the audience get to know her as a person more. I also think she has a very distintive and uniqie voice however this can get a bit too much sometimes and as all her songs are quite slow listening to her music can also get depressing. I wouldn't say I'm a massive fan of Lana del Rey as my opinion of her is constantly changing but I do appreciate her music and what she has been through as a person.
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