LANALYSIS: Relating Songs To Known/Assumed Relationships

[longtimeman 8,069]

OH MY GOD WHY WILL NO ONE ANSWER ME?

Your guess is as good as ours.

[PinUpCartoonBaby 1,017]

I don't really follow this thread. One question, that whole thing about Lana's 7 year relationship with some record exec... Is that just a load of bullshit?

 

I mean, she dated both Reeve Carney and Mike Mizrahi at different points in her young life, and she moved to new york when she was 18... Does that give her enough time to do begin and end a 7 year relationship before being discovered. If so... Lana's one busy girl

 

Idk, I'm so confused someone please explain.

 

Well I asked myself the same question and some time ago I wrote down some speculations in this thread. Don't know if it helps you, though. Actually we can only make guesses about this period of her life (and about pretty everything else concerning her past).

[LiamViljoen 908]

Your guess is as good as ours.

[mermaid motel 533]

I don't really follow this thread. One question, that whole thing about Lana's 7 year relationship with some record exec... Is that just a load of bullshit?

 

I mean, she dated both Reeve Carney and Mike Mizrahi at different points in her young life, and she moved to new york when she was 18... Does that give her enough time to do begin and end a 7 year relationship before being discovered. If so... Lana's one busy girl

 

Idk, I'm so confused someone please explain.

 

I think it was probably a 7 year on/off non-official relationship. I'm guessing she still kept in contact with him and had feelings even when in relationships with other people.

[BabyTonight 77]

Well I asked myself the same question and some time ago I wrote down some speculations in this thread. Don't know if it helps you, though. Actually we can only make guesses about this period of her life (and about pretty everything else concerning her past).

Nice theory. But is cheating on Lana's mind? The whole thing with Jimmy and Revee may assume us to think she cheated on one with the other. But if she was in a 7 year relationship with someone why cheat? Unless she was cheating from the start. That's the ONLY thing that would make this plausible. Given the evidence of most of her prominent relationships and the time stamps with them, how would she find time to have such intense relationships with other men while in a 7 year relationship with a record executive? She's either over exaggerating it or lying in my opinion. 

 

The only thing I wish we knew more about was K. That's the worst and the biggest chunk of her life that remains a mystery. If we knew who he was, when they dated, when he was sent to prison or put to death all the rest of her life would kind of make more sense to me. K is the one I'm most fascinated by, honestly. And Mike as well.

 

Also, who do you think Florida Kilos is about? She said that the song was based off of the Cowboys documentary or whatever, but obviously it has some relation to her life as well. Do we know for sure that K did coke/crack? Could be either about him or Jimmy. Or maybe its about herself? "Florida Keys are calling, come back to me" - She wants to resort back to drugs 

[BabyTonight 77]

I think it was probably a 7 year on/off non-official relationship. I'm guessing she still kept in contact with him and had feelings even when in relationships with other people.

Keeping in contact doesn't exactly mean someone is in a relationship though. I'm guessing either she was exaggerating, lying or her words were taken out of context yet again, assuming she said that 7 year bit in a written magazine interview or something? 7 year relationship - Someone I dated and have been knowing for 7 years now? Possibility that's what she meant. We don't know who long her and Mike dated right?

[longtimeman 8,069]

I think it's a fair comment to make that any time Lana gives a specific detail, like a number of songs on her hard drive or a number of years of a relationship, we shouldn't take it as gospel, or even as an approximation. She repeatedly uses specific numbers in a metaphorical sense.

[Greenwich 1,050]

K isn't real honestly   

[Valentino 884]

Ok so I looked at her FB again and I noticed that on the list of artists she's liked, she liked "Lana Del Rey."   She also lists Jimmy Gnecco, Kassidy and Carney. Any other ex-boyfriend bands we should be aware of?

 

She still has the pic of her and Barrie as her profile, which is listed as being from Feb 2013, so it might be safe to say she doesn't use this account anymore.

[Sophia 301]

do we know who exactly k is? cause i have a feeling that k might be just a reference to special k

[Valentino 884]

do we know who exactly k is? cause i have a feeling that k might be just a reference to special k

Nobody knows who K is or if he is real.

 

"Double homicide, sent him on to death row, not to hang around though"

 

That's one hell of a metaphor. K refers to a person, although his existence is disputed. I don't think he's Kurt Cobain or any other thing.

 

The only other reference to him by name is For K pt 2, and that was originally titled Rehab. Everything else we have goes back to the info in Drive-By (death row criminal in jail) and is an inference.

[Sophia 301]

Nobody knows who K is or if he is real.

 

"Double homicide, sent him on to death row, not to hang around though"

 

That's one hell of a metaphor. K refers to a person, although his existence is disputed. I don't think he's Kurt Cobain or any other thing.

 

The only other reference to him by name is For K pt 2, and that was originally titled Rehab. Everything else we have goes back to the info in Drive-By (death row criminal in jail) and is an inference.

 

that would kinda make sense since special k is a drug to call a song rehab. i don't really know, just guessing

[Valentino 884]

that would kinda make sense since special k is a drug to call a song rehab. i don't really know, just guessing

 

wow, i thought you were talking about the cereal, omg sorry

 

Still, I think my point stands that the way she talks about K in Drive-By sounds like it's about a person, not a concept or thing. "Is this what you wished, to leave me behind?" One speculation about "Rehab" was that it was actually about Jimmy Gnecco, who might've been the "local rockstar" she says she met in rehab. Why is the song called For K Part 2 now? That's anybody's guess.

[Jazzmin 297]

I've looked just a few pages back and:

effr, on 26 Jul 2014 - 6:50 PM, said:

 

Responding to the discussion about Gene Campbell a few pages back, I don’t know how many of you have read this since then, but she said that he was 22 when she met him, and even though she was 15, it’s not at all Lolita-esque. Most of my friends in high school had boyfriends in their twenties when they were 15/16/17 and it wasn’t a big deal. "When I was 15, I had this teacher called Gene Campbell, who is still my good friend,” begins Lana. “In boarding school, to become a teacher you don’t have to have a Masters. I was 15 and he was 22, out of Georgetown. He was young, and at school you were allowed to take trips out at the weekends. On our driving trips around the Connecticut counties, he introduced me to Nabokov, (Allen) Ginsberg, (Walt) Whitman, and even Tupac and Biggie. He was my gateway to inspirational culture. Those inspirations I got when I was 15 are still my only inspirations. I draw from that same well. It’s one world I dip into to create other worlds. Like this philosopher Josiah Royce once said: ‘Without the roots, you can’t have any fruits.’”

 

It's so obvious... but I confess I've actually never bothered to check out Campbell's (at least approximate) age.  I somehow took it for granted that he was at his forties, at the very least.

 

So the whole lolita thing is just a Nabokov reference and doesn't have anything to do with Lana's actual life?

[evilentity 13,303]

Responding to the discussion about Gene Campbell a few pages back, I don’t know how many of you have read this since then, but she said that he was 22 when she met him, and even though she was 15, it’s not at all Lolita-esque. Most of my friends in high school had boyfriends in their twenties when they were 15/16/17 and it wasn’t a big deal.

So the whole lolita thing is just a Nabokov reference and doesn't have anything to do with Lana's actual life?

@@effr But were any of them their teachers? (And I disagree that it's appropriate for 20-somethings to date 15-year-olds.)

 

Yeah, I had originally assumed he was older too, but what information I've been able to find certainly fits with her accounts in interviews that he'd only recently finished his undergrad when he was her teacher:

Gene was just a few years older than her, fresh from Georgetown University.

"When I was 15, I had this teacher called Gene Campbell, who is still my good friend," begins Lana. "In boarding school, to become a teacher you don’t have to have a Masters. I was 15 and he was 22, out of Georgetown."

It looks like he taught at her boarding school through the end of the 2004-2005 academic year and was listed as having only a B.A. from Georgetown on their faculty listing pages. It appears he has been working at a D.C.-based all boys Christian school since the 2005-2006 academic year and is now listed as having a M.A. from a Vermont college (interestingly much closer to Lake Placid than Kent) that he presumably completed while teaching in Connecticut.

 

But I disagree completely disagree that just because the age difference between Lana and her teacher isn't as far apart as Lolita and Humbert's or because there's no evidence that their relationship was ever physical that it wasn't Lolita-esque and inappropriate. I think it's hard to read her lyrics and comments about this in interviews and not come to the conclusion that she viewed it through that lens, at least not without being in extreme denial. It may just be her spin on things, but the activities she describes sound extremely inappropriate for a teacher to be doing alone with a teenage student of the opposite sex, unsupervised:

"He would sign me out and we would listen to Tupac and stuff in his car," she remembers, "and he would teach me about old movies like Citizen Kane. He taught me everything."

He was young, and at school you were allowed to take trips out at the weekends. On our driving trips around the Connecticut counties, he introduced me to Nabokov, (Allen) Ginsberg, (Walt) Whitman, and even Tupac and Biggie.

The first Biggie Smalls track that I really loved I would say, just like everyone else, was "Juicy". I realised what cool was. I wasn't that young - I was 15 and my best friend at school, who is still my best friend today, was actually my teacher. He was a white English teacher who played basketball and listened to hip-hop. I didn't know what everyone thought was cool. He played Biggie Smalls for me in his car.

(Also, note how defensive she is about this, taking pains to say she wasn't that young and that he wasn't that old. Another time she lied about it being a male teacher. What's that about?)

 

And I mean, fuck, he was the very teacher that introduced her to Nabokov and Lolita specifically:

"I was lonely," she says, but "I had this teacher who was my only friend in school. His name was Gene. He read us Leaves of Grass and we read Lolita in class, and it changed my world, which was a really solitary world. I didn't have a connection to anyone in class and when I found these writers, I knew they were my people."

I'm usually an advocate of teaching challenging material and opposed to classroom censorship, but a male teacher has absolutely no business teaching Lolita to high school aged girls or younger. The likelihood of a lovesick female student projecting it onto her relationship with her teacher is just too great, to say nothing of the teacher's propensity. Ignore former teacher Sting's warning in "Don't Stand So Close to Me" and you'll be answering to more than just the musical Police. (And let's not forget the case of Lana stan Megan Stammers and her teacher who found a little too much inspiration in Lana's lyrics.)

 

 

 

On another subject:

The theory that the “cult leader” is Jim Boch and the cult was Atlantic Group (or The Pacific Group) makes sense, but she thanked AG in the liner notes for Born to Die. If it was a cult she was uncomfortable in and got out of, why would she thank them? She also made several posts on Facebook in recent years about AG meetings, so I don’t think that’s it. On the other hand, “filled with poison” would just make so much sense in an AA context.

I'm not necessarily endorsing the "cult=AG" theory, but this doesn't undercut it at all. The theory still makes sense if you assume she became disillusioned with AG at some point post-BTD. I haven't seen any AG shoutouts recently.

[Greenwich 1,050]

do we know who exactly k is? cause i have a feeling that k might be just a reference to special k

i don't think she has ever done K tbh, doesn't seem like her.

she was too busy snorting coke off of men in motels.. 

[Greenwich 1,050]

(Also, note how defensive she is about this, taking pains to say she wasn't that young and that he wasn't that old. Another time she lied about it being a male teacher. What's that about?)

tbh i really think the interviewer misheard and thought Campbell was a female, that's my only guess

[BabyTonight 77]

Someone should just flat out ask and confront Lana about K, let's be real.  She'd probably get pissed as hell, would love to see her reaction.

[vodkatonic 32]

Someone should just flat out ask and confront Lana about K, let's be real.  She'd probably get pissed as hell, would love to see her reaction.

 

I'm curious to see who K is, but lol i doubt she'd share honestly

[dietmtndylan 73]

Wow this thread is sooo cool. I've been interested (you could say) in Lana's love life recently, i mean how can you not? She sings about her ex-boyfriends in almost all her songs. The one that interests/haunts me the most is K... now this is my theory

 

K is a guy she met during or before her Sirens era, long story short... He ran an illegal company or some stuff (maybe drugs) and also killed someone (as sung in Drive By/For K). He basically got sent to jail and assumably on death row (also sung in Drive By/For K). He's also the guy of the whole Born To Die trilogy. She sings in Blue Jeans that he was chasing paper, making money which makes sense for the guy she sings about to be K. Now i always get this confused, is K the young guy, with lots of tattoos or is it the old guy? We can see both of those in the West Coast video. In an interview she said that the parts with the young guy are reality and the parts with the old guy are fantasy. Here's what i think: K is the young dude with tattoos that likes alot of drugs, he gets in jail and assumably also gets killed. The old guy is basically her fantasy of how it could've been, if he was still alive and with her. Also at the end of the West Coast video you can see K laying there, dead, and if i can see clearly with blood (4:14). But what about the whole SOC video? It looks like Lana's the one that's dead... I think it's just Lana reversing the roles and saying how she feel dead even tho she's not, and how she haunts K and how he thinks about her all the time when in reality it's actually Lana that constantly thinks about K and sees him etc. (K's also the guy with the blue hair, she sing about him in Birds Of A Feather.)