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LDR on German Rolling Stone

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Even if you don't speak German there's no translation necessary for that title. I'd like to have a beer with Lana. Or maybe I'd just like to have a beer period. What kind of beer do you think Lana used to like? I bet she was probably into the brewmasters of every genre. ;)

 

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Ha, the yearbook photo.

 

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1. "Sunflower" Beach Boys, 1970 :monicker:


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Stalking you has sorta become like my occupation.

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Even if you don't speak German there's no translation necessary for that title. I'd like to have a beer with Lana.

 

 

 

Not really! The title is 'A beer with Lana'. Ralf Niemczyk did that interview and after it they had a beer together ... but after only seeing people here complaining about a 3 year old cover photo I guess nobody is it worth to get a translation??? :pft:

I hope the German fans enjoyed the article. :P

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I could try to translate it if you really want me to (+ if no one else is already working on it). Though there are some sentences that even I am not really sure what they are supposed to mean.... It's pretty long too so it'll take some time

If you could that'd be great! :)

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You can't post the momentous, life-shattering article where she fell off the wagon and not give a translation

I know people like full translations, but synopses of the new info are also useful and appreciated too. So yeah, the title shows either she has fallen off the wagon (which would be big news) or the Germans just have a conventional view of her (and they have not researched her past).

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I know people like full translations, but synopses of the new info are also useful and appreciated too. So yeah, the title shows either she has fallen off the wagon (which would be big news) or the Germans just have a conventional view of her (and they have not researched her past).

The article said the interviewer actually drank a beer with Lana.. didn't she say she wanted to try alcohol again because she feels stable now? I don't know maybe it was nonalcoholic   :lel:

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Ok guys I'm working on that translation for hours already...it's so fucking long...But I'm doing this because you're my favorite little stans and I love you!  (the fact that I'm bored anyway also plays a little role) :hooker:

Though I don't know if I'll be able to finish the whole thing today, maybe you'll have to wait until tomorrow.


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The article said the interviewer actually drank a beer with Lana.. didn't she say she wanted to try alcohol again because she feels stable now? I don't know maybe it was nonalcoholic   :lel:

 

At first I thought the article said that - but after reading it twice the article says that the interviewer is drinking a beer with his colleague at the bar and Lana came by and made an ironic remark about their drinking. I don't think she drank a beer with him. But the title of the article is clearly misleading!

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At first I thought the article said that - but after reading it twice the article says that the interviewer is drinking a beer with his colleague at the bar and Lana came by and made an ironic remark about their drinking. I don't think she drank a beer with him. But the title of the article is clearly misleading!

Ohhh you're right! I thought it was her assistant coming in while they were drinking but it was Lana  :facepalm:  :derpna2:

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It's done!! But don't expect a perfect worded translation...it wasn't that easy to do this as the journalist often only wrote like half sentences, used some words even I as a german native speaker didn't know and just randomly used extremely complicate formulations. The fact that I'm not that good at english made it even more difficult to find the right words. There was also a lot of senseless blahblah and I didn't feel motivated enough to translate all of these things so I left out a few sentences (but not more than about 6 or 7). The last part is only a report about her concert in San Francisco and I didn't translate this one yet because there aren't any new information, I think...maybe I'll get on it later. Done!

Again this is just my translation of a translation so bear in mind that what I wrote might differ from the actual interview.

 

TRANSLATION

 

Girl No. 1

The West Coast is getting remeasured. On her trip through US pop music Lana Del Rey builds her own California – with a pretty sensational result.

 

You have to imagine Lake Placid like Garmisch-Partenkirchen but smaller. A traditional ski resort in the north of the state New York. About 2700 inhabitants, magnificent hiking possibilities. Two scenic lakes in the proximity. In 1932 and 1980 the Winter Olympic took place there. The gold medal winner in ice speed skating of 1976, Eric Heiden comes from there.

“Lake Placid is a bubble. It is incredible nice there but also awfully boring”, says a school colleague of Elizabeth Woolridge Grant. “At the Main Street there is the old Palace cinema. Down at the riverside the Lake Placid Pub & Brewery and the restaurant/bar The Cottage.” Genuine places which are like Mr. Mike’s Pizza miles away from any Rock’n’Roll aura. You can get cigarettes and alcohol at the Sunoco Gas Station just a few blocks/corners away. And about Art Devlin’s Olympic Motor Inn guests write on Google’s travelling portal: “It is clean and the prices are great!”

A shielded paradise in the mountains that must be depressing for young people who have the big dream of a future as an international star: Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Bruce Springsteen, Kurt Cobain – this league. Lizzy Grant, how she used to call herself in her beginnings as a musician almost broke because of it. “Back then she occupied herself with lyric”, says the school friend. That led to that many schoolmates thought she was strange and weird. At some point she was sent to boarding school by her parents. Allegedly there was an alcohol problem. “But she’s a genius, not really from this planet”, says the acquaintance. And in fact: The ambitioned teenage poet Elizabeth Grant meanwhile became the greatest white US pop musician under 35 years: Lana Del Rey.

The facts are impressive. Her stately tempo debut hit “Video Games” counted 57 Million clicks on YouTube (at the editorial deadline of this issue). The follow-up “Summertime Sadness” has been watched more than 155 million times. And even the more than 10 minutes long opus “Ride”, a monumental bad biker road movie in which Del Rey tells about her escape from the province (“I was a singer – not a very popular one”) just hit the 50 million mark. The drop-dead gorgeous “Young and Beautiful” from the soundtrack of “The Great Gatsby” in which she wears a flowing mane, a long evening gown and a prisoner tear in her face, has 82 million views. In February 2012 the American “Billboard” magazine wrote about Del Rey’s first album “Born To Die”: “Highest charts debut of a female artist for years.” Until today the record (including the following “Paradise Edition”) sold about 7 million copies worldwide. In Germany alone where she already got a contract with Universal very early, she sold stable 700.000. And that number is still rising. And all that in a time where even established luminaries reap profit from extensive tours. Only Adele is still a huger big-wig among the younger musicians with 50 million sold records. But Adele’s story is a different one, a saga of retro moral uprightness.

Del Rey’s lyrics and videos – optionally in Technicolor or Instagram pixels – are big American literature. And at that more Mark Twain or John Steinbeck than Bret Easton Ellis. Her stories deal with the “disrupted society”, the shattered (white) US society. The saga of a hillbilly-Lolita that appears out of nowhere. A Norma Jean Baker of today. The pictorial language in which Del Rey played a decisive part from the start, is one of the best what the mainstream music clip landscape offers right now. Compared to that the meat dresses and the Marina-Abramovic-art-fling of Lady Gaga seem literally artificial and soulless.

With her new album “Ultraviolence” she just wants to continue her story, says LDR. And solely the notion of this makes her fans go crazy. Del Rey’s first concert in San Francisco in the middle of April in front of a few thousand young tweens with flower wreaths in their hair became a religious service. It wouldn’t have surprised anybody if the songstress in her white Sharon-Tate-memorial-dress suddenly walked twenty centimetres above the heads of her completely euphoric (female) fans.

In the fugitive show business you have to be careful with statements like that: But as I haven’t been in the US for years the west coast week around Elizabeth Woolridge Grant (who just moved to Los Angeles) restored my belief in the US pop culture. Especially the by historian Kevin Starr so beautifully entitled “Coast of Dreams” is shining brighter again. Thank Lizzy!

 

Pools, Botox-lips and clueless managers

The media start to “Ultraviolence” happens not completely perfectly. At least there’s no scheduling according to the principle of “German efficiency”. By acclamation we eventually sat in this Boeing 747 to LAX. On the following day the interviews were supposed to take place at the legendary Chateau Marmont. “For me this hotel is the ultimate film noir set with its gloomy, pseudo European interior that pretends to originate from an old French winery. Also perfectly suitable for ghost or horror movies”, says Lana Del Rey. The lyrics of her song “Gods And Monsters” connects this sublime atmosphere with the uncountable showbiz anecdotes that took place there. Since her teenage years Elizabeth Grant wanted to belong to those chosen few despite all breaks and damages. “In the land of gods and monsters, I was an angel/Lookin’ to get fucked hard/ Like a groupie, incognito, posing as a real singer/ Life imitates art.”

In the real world in the fall of 2011 she held a photo session for the luxury fashion label Mulberry at the Chateau and told her opinion on the topic “style and stuff” at the turquoise shimmering hotel pool. “Bizarrely at the beginning fashion people trusted more in me than music industry. In the music industry I stayed for years the newcomer who couldn’t handle anything.” As she tells this LDR has to grin a bit about herself. “Whereby I openly admit that there are more and less suitable companies for me.” From the Chateau Marmont to Hennes & Mauritz and back. Some scenes for the video to her song “Video Games” were also shot there. Therefor the accommodation of her heart.

But due to a holiday week and the happening Coachella festival a special type of L.A. hotels are just booked out. It’s a funny idea that the Chateau receptionist had to turn down the booking request of the LDR management: “We are terribly sorry, Miss Del Rey but next week it’s really not possible. Even the Garden Cottages and Hillside Bungalows are fully booked.”

Eventually the whole interview circus was relocated at the as luxurious Sunset Marquis that is just around the corner. A quiet mini-landscape park beneath the Sunset Boulevard consisting of white houses, pools, scattered cocktail bars and fragrant hibiscus bushes. The whole thing has been rooted in L.A.–Rock’n’Roll for more than 50 years now: In the sun-drenched lobby you’re encountered with the wrinkled Slash in black and white and in the foyer a permanent photo exhibition of the usual Rock suspects is extending. In one of the patios the Swedish soul pop starlet Miriam Bryant is chilling with her flaxen-haired entourage. All of them equipped with the colourful wristbands of the notorious VIP sector of Coachella.

Out of one of those posh looking houses comes at about 3pm a petite hippie girl wearing a white see-through knitwear shirt and jeans shorts. Lana is ready, says Belinda Mercer, Del Rey’s personal assistant. So let the interview begin, the last one for today. We’re sitting down in the little patio of the California Chalet. Miss Del Rey who is celebrating her 28th birthday in these days lights a cigarette of the brand Parliament. She asks if it’s okay for me. Yeah, yeah, no problem. After all in Berlin people still smoke like everywhere – what of course pleases her.

Lana Del Rey appears natural, relaxed and courteous in a very pleasant way. No trace of the by blogs and social media heavily criticised, unverified plastic-, Botox-, and Barbie puppet-prejudices. Even the over and over invoked “rubber raft lips” are just…normal lips of a woman from Lake Placid. Lana herself coquetted with her hyaluronic injections. But is this relevant in any way?

On the edges of her hands she wears tattooed in an artistic font the words “trust no one” and “paradise”. Her fingernails are perfectly red lacquered. Therefor she doesn’t really differ from her peers. A crucial factor of her worldwide success.

LDR alias Elizabeth Grant takes a long pull from her cigarette and says: “After the inserted Paradise Edition I just had to catch a breath. Everybody was asking me how the new record would be like. And I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t even know if I should go on as a musician. Because if you take yourself seriously as an author you only release something if you have something to tell. So it took a while. Additionally I had no new proposition/thesis or a main theme, but maybe an aesthetic direction in my mind. I like it to have a single word as starting point. In this case it was “Fire”.” She tells that she likes to flirt with single sentences only because they sound good. And that she could imagine to work at a (European) tabloid because there you can use so simple but beautiful sentences. […]

“My stanzas grow according to this principle”, states Del Rey. “Piece for piece it becomes the lyrics. After the first album everybody said: ‘The next one needs to be bigger! You need to exceed yourself!’” But Del Rey kind of closed herself (?) and only a random meeting at a party with Dan Auerbach unravelled the knot. […] With “a pile of records and data” Del Rey drove to Nashville. She needed a “facilitator” she says. Someone who she can talk with about “abstract things”, “vibes, moods, inspirations, atmospheres” tells Del Rey. “I didn’t want to create ‘Born To Die part two and a half’ but continue telling my story. As we told Universal that the record would sound jazzier and have a smoother west-coast-rock-colour they just said: ‘Well…no idea what this is about.’ But we have a contract about acquisition of tapes (?) so they had no other choice than trusting us.”

Seven weeks later LDR had to report in Santa Monica to Polydor-CEO Lucian Grainge and Interscope boss Jimmy Iovine. Lana Del Rey imitates the grumpy credo of the noble gentlemen: “Quite okay” was all they said. That eventually meant that they didn’t really know what to do. Of course they have an opinion. But if you as a manager are talking to an author/originator who is directly connected to the producer there’s not much room for influence. Even though they surely would have liked to have it”, says Del Rey, grins coquettish and lights the third Parliament in 20 minutes.

 

A broken Dictaphone and the Anfield Road in Liverpool

While we’re talking something happens that would be a catastrophe for the audio-visual metier. The recording device, in this case a Sony Dictaphone with tiny microcassettes breaks down. Del Rey as a media professional had pulled the device at her side of the table – and noticed at some point that nothing is spinning in it anymore. […]

Having flown 11.000 kilometres – and then not more than random noise. The second half of the interview is lost, at least on tape. “Shall we redo the whole thing?”, asks LDR with a concerned mine. But most of the time the memory of an interviewer works good enough to paraphrase the main points. To counter-check this version she notes her private e-mail address. Like that it still goes on for a while the dunning press officer (?) is sent out twice. Eventually it’s quitting time for the pop star and the journalist.

Because of the broken recorder I get to know another side of Del Rey: Behind the video image there is an authentic person and this reaches the hearts and souls of her audience.

But LDR doesn’t have a consistent, Gwyneth-Paltrow-like image. She does lots of commercial nonsense too but she does it indeed very well. For example that “Women of the Year 2012” photo shooting for the british GQ magazine, as she lolls dressed-naked behind white curtains. Beside this Elizabeth Grant can tell you a thing or two about how it is if you set your mind on doing your own thing despite all oppositions. Then not making progress at all or getting labelled as a complete fake.

Such animosities can only be conquered with a stable personality. The simple way of just being a thoroughly honest indie girl never really appealed to her. “There was a time when I would have liked to belong to an indie community”, LDR once said in a blog interview. “But in reality I didn’t belong anywhere! But I was really looking for an affiliation. But in the end I didn’t even know real musicians and back then I never met those classical indie guys, if they even exist. And after all: Who is indie? I can’t imagine what it’s about. If you just listen to it it’s just some kind of pop music, isn’t it? Because it’s more or less popular. Or does indie mean that it’s not played on the radio? So I didn’t have an indie past that was blown up afterwards. For some time I slept on the sofa of my British agency. That’s normal if you’re a nothing. That’s where I come from.”

The Internet is full of various Lizzy Grant things. Among them the song “Kill Kill” (2008) with its self-made Instagram video. Or LDR as a blonde water corpse with Lo-Fi-backing in a black and white trashy movie. She in a trailer park being haltingly interviewed by a local reporter. A long background that is well-documented in the net but still is suspected to be just a giant fraud. And even then it would have been one of the most successful viral music campaigns of the last 4 or 5 years.

Lizzy Grant from Lake Placid only then got started when she edged away to the back then still completely unknown artist’s agency (?) TAP Management in London. In the world’s capital of pop refinement she ought to find the commercial confidence as well as the artistic involvement for her next substantial steps. What happened with Diet Mountain Dew in 2010 for example. In that period she also got to know her current boyfriend Barrie James O’Neill who boredly hang around at one of the Marquis bars during the whole interview marathon wearing a “Dark Side Of The Moon” t-shirt. With his then-band Kassidy LDR went on tour in spring 2013. Meanwhile O’Neill has become a solo artist and life companion who – as a Celtic Glasgow fan infected her with the European phenomenon soccer/football. On the website of the Liverpool F.C. are various photos of LDR: at a visit at the stadium at Anfield Road or at the match against Tottenham Hotspurs.

Sidenotes like this one – and there are lots of them – aren’t really pointing toward a manufactured industrial clone but towards surprisingly complex and cool interests. “The passion for the F.C. Liverpool comes from my Manager who is a die-hard Reds fan what fortunately doesn’t completely mismatch with Barrie’s Celtic following.” There aren’t many US superstars who reached that far and cool at the same time the psyche of the old continent.

Then time has come: The second single “Shades of Cool” a hymn that gets behind younger and older girls dealing with drug victims, suddenly appears in the net at the end of April. While the previously released “West Coast” seemed like a rough change of rhythm (strings and mega orchestral adaptations are gone!) Shades Of Cool kicks into high gear with this unashamed attitude with which she once created the opening lines of “Cola”: “My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola/ my eyes are wide like cherry pies”.

“Ultraviolence” doesn’t include any superficial hit material like it seems to be usual in Urban Music. One can imagine the unease of the Universal-Music managers concerning the seeming “non-commerciality”. The eleven songs, of course biographical like e.g. “Brooklyn Baby” or “Fucked My Way Up To The Top” seem like a complex trip from which you benefit for quite some time. German buyers of the record get 4 bonus tracks that are rather characterized by their slowness than by radio friendly good-mood beats. She reduced her established alliances with the great songwriters Justin Parker (Video Games, National Anthem) and Rick Nowels (Summertime Sadness) in favour of the musicians of her live band. “Rick Nowels is still in my team but supplemented with producer Dan Auerbach and film composer Daniel Heath who already was present at “Bel Air” and my cover of “Blue Velvet”. In the studio I gave the sound recordist the colour gold as a technical guideline. He knows me so he knew exactly what I wanted”, tells Del Rey who at the end of our meeting shows a certain competence for technical things of music. […]

As we are having a beer after the interview Lana Del Rey accompanied by the agency lady Belinda Mercer comes over, arms akimbo and says laconically: “So that’s what you call work!”

 

With flowers in the hair to San Francisco

The musical Easter weekend in southern California was dominated by the Coachella festival that took place on two weekends with almost identic line-ups. There a remarkable two-to-three-classes-society rules: on the one hand there are the normal fans who pay across the counter for their expensive tickets, buy expensive beverages and have to take care that they don’t get a heat stroke. On the other hand the supermodels and movie stars in hotpants and Swarovski-headbands who transform the music marathon into a catwalk happening with bling bling galore. In between all kinds of semi-celebrities and guest list sharks who are at least allowed to spend their time in a semi-celebrity sector. “Are VIP Packages Ruining Festivals?”, asks the US version of the Rolling Stone worriedly on the title page of its June issue. In 2014 the enormous squad with twice 90.000 spectators includes Lana Del Rey who performs in a fire red summer dress with a flowery pattern. Between the two Coachella gigs she continued her regular US-tour and played in a big way in San Francisco for the first time.

Even hours before the show there’s an unbelievable long queue in front of the massive Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Once the Golden State Warriors played there basketball, now Queens Of The Stone Age and British songwriter Ellie Goulding are performing shortly after each other. At Lana Del Rey’s show appear estimated 73% girls with extravagant floral arrangements in their hair and obligatory fluttery dresses or Lana-hot pants. The rest are beautiful boys of all kinds. At about seven o’clock the doors are finally opened. Pushing scenes like at a Justin Bieber concert. Inside prevails a huge ballroom atmosphere. In the boiling room the flower wreath made out of plastic or real orchids is THE merchandising product.

Before the actual show the DJ plays old Swing and HipHop, from “Cry Me A River” to “Like This, Like That”, plays Chris Isaak and “Killing Moon” by Echo & The Bunnymen. A, if you like, musical Del-Rey-world. With the first sounds it gets clear that the whole high-end-media-programme of the European tour in 2013 was stripped down to a simple screen. The new Lana now works according to the principle: override the distance, bring the message to the fans using as little technical effort as possible. Her white ghost-esque nightgown and the flat white shoes give her a Swan Lake-like aura. The old songs are played according to the “West Coast”-dogma: Strings out, mild feedback in what gives the whole thing a Mellow-Grunge-tone. During “Born To Die” she dances directly on the edge of the stage so that the teens in the audience could see under her skirt if they wanted to. At “Summertime Sadness” it gets clear that Del Rey’s US concerts are intensified ADHS-events with hyperactive fans. Reporters with a notepad and a ball pen seemingly are like aliens for those beings: “Are you writing down all people that smoke weed?”, asked a girl next to me. Meanwhile Lana walks around with the microphone stand. At some point she’s barefoot. A woodkid-like installation of the biblical “psalm 51” flickers on the screen. During “Blue Jeans” everybody is singing along. “Video Games” bring them back to Chateau Marmont. At “Edge Of Seventeen”, a greeting to the Valley icon Stevie Nicks: “Uh, Baby, uh!” Del Rey struts around like a Bolshoi-ballerina and moves on to “Ride” in her Hells-Angels-video, in which her sister can be seen too. As a final a mix of “Carmen” and “National Anthem” whereby every lyrics blooper gets celebrated by the word-perfect audience like elsewhere a guitar solo of Jeff Beck. “I feel the connection”, exclaims Del Rey. And: “I do not deserve it.”

When “National Anthem” gets played everybody stands up. LDR takes a bath in the crowd, surrounded by a forceful guitar sound. Then she leaves the stage light-footedly while the band still keeps on playing for a while. As she leaves Lana gets a rectangular something from the crowd. A lovingly made fan painting: Lana as a floating angel in a velvety white.

 

 

 

 

Edited by PinUpCartoonBaby

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I'm sorry, but as a journalism major I have to ask what kind of quack journalist this person was?

 

You always have another voice recorder on hand, you surely don't paraphrase what ANYONE has said if you're going to make claims and not have direct quotes to back them up and you absolutely never send your articles to management for correction before they're published (which is what it sounded like he did)

 

/end rant


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