slang

This is like an "instagram" only it's on youtube. Wondering if this little piece of WTFery is legit (i.e., it's LDR's doing). "Die for you" (full quote "Has anyone else died for you?") is a bit of an LDRism, but the cross displayed here -- with the SNL date -- is actually very, very heretical(?), blasphemous (?), and sardonic (bingo!). I'm pretty sure Judah wouldn't approve, but if he did, he's way "cooler" than we give him credit for. Or maybe she's just trying to promo Christianity a bit, idk. However, my favorite/preferred theory is that somebody's is just spoofing her.

Not a huge fan of the Denver cover either, which seemed like a reverential payback for name-dropping his (other?) song on the Grants (why didn't she cover that one?). What's weird about the whole thing, is that I don't recall LDR releasing stuff later than the cover, so what CL says can't be about LDR's art, can it? A larger comment about covering John Denver may be that's she's pissed off she didn't cover a female classic. I mean, later in the article: "However, Love does shower praise on artists such as Patti Smith, Nina Simone, PJ Harvey, Julie London, Joni Mitchell, and Debbie Harry. Without a hint of self-awareness, she also said her show was meant to “redeem some of the women who have been treated so badly by the record industry,” adding, “Women are still marginalized in this industry, even though they’re more successful.” Anyway, the interviewer should have asked for elaboration. CL's view of Taylor just seems to be CL in Kim Gordon "provocateur" mode. Also maybe she's a little jealous of the fact Taylor stans Lana?

It was a mixed bag, and I'm still processing/rationalizing it. I couldn't see the live cause it's way, WAY past my bedtime, but I was grateful to see it on youtube, in a priveleged seat relative to the average audience viewer. Her singing's nice (when she's not fading) and she's killing the Jessica Rabbit look, imo. The sound guy obviously had problems keeping up with her vocal dynamics and couldn't handle when she's soft and then increases volume. LDR's singing style is definitely of a past generation, but even that generation didn't sing that way (e.g., Ella and Billy -- the other Billy -- had much more power). Her energy levels also seemed intentionally markedly depressed at times, as if it were way, WAY past her bedtime too. However, I can spin/rationalize that as a new kind of somno-style (to go with narco-swing and others), so that she and her songs, are meant to be perceived in a hypnogogic dream state, with the subdued lighting (and images) helping that. That Baptiste showed up was understandable for this concert, and I liked their interluding better than the album's. However, when Billy Eilish came on, it was like "holy shit, I really must be dreaming this stuff", and I liked that part very much ("get out of my fucking face", lol). I'm just guessing (any opinions?)... Antonoff did essentially a "live solo" with a hologram of LDR, singing what I imagine to be the original vocal stems (?); at any rate her singing seemed different from the rest of the concert. The hologram technique is usually done with dead artists (e.g., Tupac), so LDR's appearance, as such, was unsettling. Her morbidity game is certainly on point with that, even if it's the ghost of a past performance. Liked the Young and Beautiful outro and its horns. In sum, maybe her ambition exceeded her execution a bit, but ambition is still the most important thing for me. It will be interesting to see what her second performance will be (as in identical or with switch ups, or maybe she might do the same stuff a bit more amphetiminically, without the drugs, of course), though I doubt they'll stream that too.

From Wikipedia on Dirty Mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Mind#:~:text=Dirty Mind has,1980s.[8] So the track Sister didn't hurt him too much, or maybe DM would have placed much higher on all those epic album lists, if he hadn't included it, idk. He actually does have a sister, who is two years younger than him, if he were living. So "Sister" can be thought of as fiction, much like Nabokov's Lolita is. Or possibly it reflects personal knowledge of somebody elses situation. I love how Prince just HAD to use the word "incest" in the lyrics, so the listener knows, he's not using the slang-metaphor "sister" colloquialism of the times. Also, depending on how one interprets the lyrics following what you posted, it could reflect even worse on the sister (lol, was she her brother's pimp too?!). Music lost a (courageous and outrageous) hero, when it lost Prince; I really miss him.

I mean she's sex positive and so is her art. So if you're a certain persuasion of conservative reductionist you might see her as a "coquette". I see her more as a brainy intellectual with a Phd in Marilyn Monroe.

I'm guessing you like classical (as do I). Which sort of brings up the question, why no "classical" or "jazz" threads at LBs? Or maybe "What are you listening to?" could be broken down by genre. While it's true I could start a thread like this, centuries of being trampled underfoot has made me more of a follower than a leader. BTW, 50th anniversary is relative to 2009, and google reports 4 different people worked on the film score. Not sure, but I would say the score is influenced by Tchaikovsky's ballet score for The Sleeping Beauty. The question that comes to mind: are we talking college or commercial radio? College radio was an amazing source of music exploration back in the day before the Internet.

trying to discover prog after the 70s

Hopefully, LDR is just philosophical about the grammys and enjoys them for what they are, an awards show that lags behind trends. BTW, you can go to grammys.com and search your favorite artists, by typing their name in the search field. If they've had grammy activity, you can see what it is (e.g., Depeche Mode, 5 noms 0 wins; Carly Simon 15 noms 2 wins; David Bowie 19 noms 5 wins-- 4 wins posthumous, and oddly they don't count his "lifetime achievement award", wtf). You can even find out what artists were nominated and won for by following the artist-name link. I find that capability at their website a refreshingly honest admission from them. Taylor winning AOTY is definitely consistent with "popularity contest". However, I didn't mind too much, because her acceptance speech was a bit dissful to the awards (paraphrasing here): "hey, winning these awards has no more dopamine for me than just getting the bridge of a song right". Maybe LDR could take solace in that. It was also "nice" LDR had such a great seat and a "virtual tour" of what it's like to be accepting the AOTY award from the podium (bummer it wasn't real, or bummer that paradoxically it was real). The whole thing seemed very surreal (sort of the opposite of when Kanye refuted Taylor's grammy win over Beyonce**), and the image of Taylor dragging LDR to stage is definitely going to be a keeper for me. Misc comments: A song like A & W isn't going to win song of the year; it's just way too dark and lyrically inappropriate. OB is definitely an alt-album, but also very unpopular in its artistic choices (e.g. Fingertips being like a Gregorian chant in single-voice; I wouldn't expect that to catch on much, though I still like the song a lot). LDR performing the title track at the grammys might have been great restitution for her no wins, and I think she would have actually liked to do it, even knowing she were going to lose every nomination (i.e., as many have noted: "when's it gonna be my turn?" is an iconic lyric). Finally, her dress was an interesting choice. Someone close to me (but not an LDR-scholar/fanatic, like I am) opined it looked like a mourning dress, which I think is reasonable, given some of the mourning-type lyrics found on OB. ** oh no, it was the VMAs, so I'll just leave this erratum note here

When the smoke clears (i.e., significant time elapses), science-fiction, fantasy, and horror are going to be recognized as the most important fiction of the 20th century. It all sort of depends on civilization not ending, of course. I'm not sure about the 21st century, where role-playing games might significantly compete. On the third hand, literature might have its own "extinction event", if it's primarily written by AIs in the future.

But "nobody ever called Pablo Picasso an asshole". Well, I'm curious. Is it the fact that one interpretation of the song is that she's directly comparing herself to Picasso that pisses people off (i.e., "beautiful like you", where you = Picasso?). Or maybe it's the possibility that Picasso's "Blue period" is his least famous (Idk, I'm not a Picasso aficianado)? So why would she be praising it? On the other hand, the drum-less piano accompaniment (as well as the singing) lives up to the name of the song, imo. It also kind of makes a good companion song for this song (which is a cover). I'm willing to grant that this is a better song (at least for my tastes), especially the way Bowie does it. However, I hardly think, it's because the lyrics are better (again, imo).

Ok, now I hear it your way; genuinely weirded out. Wish they just post the lyrics.

Yeah, that's an important line to hear correctly.

I'm thinking it's LDR's song -- topic wise -- else why would JB have made it a bonus track; also if LDR wanted to hide the fact that it was her song -- topic wise -- putting it on somebody else's album is a pretty good way. Technically a good collab in the sense LDR is used a lot, but I don't know if I like the fundamental gloominess of the song. So "life lesson" is a "one that got away" type song, with some characterization for both POVs of the relationship. I like the lyrics off of a youtube comment for the track (at Jon Batiste's channel, I don't know if the link will work as intended, unless pasted into the browser's URL field): Edit: no the link didn't work, but @Nada-yj9eg were the lyrics referred to. In terms of lyrics' interpretation, the cold vs. hot theme-ology would appear to refer to temper, so "you're icy till you're hot" [in the OP "Yeah, I see into your heart", which I don't hear as much]. "He got so mad, there in a flash, in just one second I became his life lesson" Speculatively, the "cold" in the part below, is actually a wish that temper is restrained. I hope it's cold where you reside You wake up late at night & I would reckon That you'd be guessing I'm, I'm your life lesson Another interesting difference is that the commenter's lyrics ends the song with "Amen", which I swore I heard the first time, but in fact the ends with "A-", so you're garden pathed there, although "it" works too, but damned if I can hear any final "t".

If you like artists diverse and eclectic and with interesting evolution, AKA fits right in as a masterpiece. That is, if you like unpredictable artists, it seems a shame AKA, May Jailer, and more of her unreleased are not proper parts of her catalog. I have to conclude that tiktok people (or newer fans) just aren't as much interested in diversity and/or have narrow taste in music. I don't know what tiktok people actually find popular, as I avoid the venue, but if they like LDR that's fine, though I can't imagine they like her too broadly (e.g., as many stans for summertime sadness as heroin on tiktok?). AKA is a no-brainer for re-release, and there could easily be a bonus disc of unreleased material that has a vibe consistent with it, although that isn't a requirement for making re-release attractive (for me). However, in a re-release, I'd still quote the original title, as the album title (as I'm anal about history being accurate), and then identify the artist as Lana Del Rey. There's also something very "next level" about an artist's debut album having an album title referencing the fact that the artist just changed names! It's like she's footstamping the idea her thoughts are so fleet, you won't keep up with her; disco-ball mind, indeed!

For me, it's different outcomes for each case I can think of, with regards to a syndrome, or phenom, of people liking the original unreleased over a later (changed) released, or people liking the unreleased more as unreleased than being actually released (e.g., Blue Bannisters songs). In terms of just liking unreleased better (i.e., not controlling for song), I'd term it a "forbidden-fruit" effect, such that when they're released, you don't want it as much (it's no longer forbidden). However, it's more important to consider that any unreleased compilations that will happen are going to be more impactful to newer fans anyway, because that's just the way novelty works. Also, there's at least one case of a "meta-release" being more popular than its earlier proper release: the summertime sadness remix won a grammy, while LDR's version did not (how sad is that?). While this might suggest why (some) people like NA and TIWMUG demos more than the album versions, it doesn't work for why (some) people prefer the Blackest Day, LFL, or Freak demos over the album versions. To me everything just looks like special cases of preference, and having a few anecdotes about unreleased-over-released fan preferences doesn't seem convincing.

I've found from a PC, that if you paste the youtube link into your post and THEN manually edit it to put line spaces (i.e., carriage return characters) before and after the link, the youtube video self-embeds (and you can see it in the preview). You also have to put CRs to get paragraph spacing you like. BTW -- these sad-core kings really broke out with this video and changed the face of popular music to embrace sad cosmic-dread-type horror-sf themes. Oh wait -- nevermind -- that was a parallel universe. Curiously, parallel universes were never much sung about in their horror-sf laden ouevre. .

I know Frank's voice better than Beyonce, because I have albums of Frank and none of Beyonce, but having heard Frank's AI Video Games, I can say Beyonce sings Chemtrails better than Frank sings Video Games. Part of the problem is Frank seems to have no conviction for the song, and I think his AI is working a bit under duress, actually. I'm still trying to figure out the basic metaphor for the technology. But I think it's something like copying and pasting Frank's vocal timbral attributes -- including mean pitch -- as digitally represented, onto LDR's performance. That is, LDR's performance is still used as a template for his somehow. In that case if you play the original video games with Frank's they should coincide nicely, and AI Frank did sound better in a really tight micro-fugue with LDR's original (i.e., lagged about a half-second behind), which sort of supports that notion. But still, the way Frank uses his pitch and timbre to convey conviction would obviously be completely different from LDR, and I think that's what's missing here. So you need a song where LDR actually has Frank's vocal swagger to have a Frank AI do well on it (and so vocal AIs are still pretty limited in this way, imo). I would suggest Groupie Love (and maybe replace A. Rocky by Nicki Minaj) as a song where LDR actually tries to have a Frank swagger.

It gets some things that reminds me of her, but seems kinda flat. I'd love to actually hear her do this with more of the vocal dynamics of Shades of Cool. The AI tech is scary interesting. I wonder if it's just neural-nets brute-force learning or whether they're working with an actual physical voice box model that gets tweaked. Computers didn't put live chess competitions out of business, so hopefully ... Also, the AIs don't write the songs yet.

He could have done the Eilish, Sia, Pink, or other songs he covered, so Lana's song was definitely a choice. Artists' nods to other artists far exceed any critics' nods to them, imo, so this must be considered great press for her. BTW- The studio version is better with an instrumental outro (somewhat more UV-esque) and somewhat better respect for tempo contrasts between sections.

She basically has a video about filming a video that you're gonna see but you never do see (unless she premieres the actual video they were filming unexpectedly 6 mnths down the road, and it turns out to be very very "nasty"; I don't think that's gonna happen, but she definitely wants me to think it's a possibility, so ....). Fourth walls broken out to kazoo. It's definitely a unique and worthy addition to her videography, which is to say a really great video.

If you're talking about songs with dynamic sections, in released I'd say Heroin (with Off To the Races, Honeymoon honorable mentions). In unreleased I like mashing related-vibe songs together and imagining a prog epic (e.g., Dum Dum followed by Live or Die immediately sounds cool). AKA, the album, is pretty chaotic, in the sense that you don't expect songs like Pawn Shop Blues and Smarty to be on the same album (and those are not the only song pairs one could mention).

I agree with what you say (mostly), but I don't think she becomes overly acute at what you describe, until OB, where maybe she weaponizes her authenticity some ("weaponizing" being a new vogue term in the US for medias, judicial systems, and such). But I don't know if you could say it's a dominating trend for her since NFR. I mean she writes differently that timespan, but not all of it is so idiosyncratic as OB. The other thing is: she's always written about her life to some extent (e.g., Sirens, e.g. Aviation), so it's not such a big deal for me, unless her next album is similarly as self-referential and idiosyncratic. BTW- she really needs that unreleased album release. "Songs never heard by nobody" would be a cute title for it, given her past flirtations with double negatives (an idiosyncratic reference only her most crazed fans might understand).

You're not a big fan of the unreleased collection idea then, I would guess (assuming that ever happens). In LDR's case more is better, and an album just doesn't have to be a well-conceived "concept" piece to be enjoyed (thoroughly), but as it happens, I think of BB as her Broadway-style album (i.e., sort of Songs Without a Show). Oh yeah, gotta make this post relevant to OB somehow ... Nobody gives the robot Yorkshire Terrier at the end of Fishtails enough love, imo. Genius production.

Disclaimer: Following Judah's interlude ending disclaimer, this post will be more about slang than LDR or Ocean Blvd. Took me awhile to formulate opinions (and keep up to date with the post-release thread). I think OB is easily Norman quality and I'd rate it high (although I like BB more than NFR, especially since she's shaded/dissed BB recently). I'd describe OB as an emotional scrapbook or mobile (that decorative thingee), as some songs seem yoked, or balance each other off. You can also think of the overall album structure as symphonic-like, with songs coming in coherent stretches of mood. So the spacey/trancey, topic-compatible Kintsugi/Fingertips, is stuck in the middle as a kind of slow movement, between more dynamic sections. The opening 3 songs are wholesome/family-oriented and define a retro movement, being gospel and two pre-rock-era torch songs. The stretch from A&W to JBI is an existential-nausea movement (and I like the proggy elements), dealing with not-so-wholesome ideas/activities, with JSI turning up there, as a curious balance to the JBI, the latter something like a drug trip description? Classic LDR wtf stuff. The 4 songs after K/F, Paris through Margaret, are lighter. Paris (Texas) balances Margaret, as both songs are opposite topic-wise. Finally, the last tracks are more rambunctious, as last movements usually are. Fishtails evolves to Peppers, as does Taco Truck to VB. The VB reprise was cool, imo, especially if it means that the stretch of albums from NFR to OB form a complete arc (i.e., VB being used as a "reminiscenza", as with symphonies that end with themes that refer to the first movement). What's good about that interpretation is she's about to start a different album arc. However, the reworking was actually good enough, to have it preserved, as a kind of acid-flashback, which her lyrics somewhat suggest. I really wonder whether this version of the VB outro was earlier than the NFR-version (receipts?). random ravings: I get trippy double-image effects throughout, where I'm not sure if she's talking about dead people, boyfriends, dying/getting boyfriends, or all at the same time. So the Grants start off pleading with a guy, but turns out to be more interested in taking family memories when she "goes". Is "when's it gonna be my turn" in OB referring to a stable relationship (as suggested by the word "love"), or the"taking of memories" stuff (suggested by the word "death")? In Kintsugi does "daddy, I miss them" refer to dead people or boyfriends; I'm guessing both here, given she name-checks Donoghue (a first in a released song?). Let the Light In & Fishtails give me Barrie-vibes a bit, not with respect to his music, but more about him. Also I couldn't find Cold Coffee (his first album, which deals with his breakup with her) on Amazon or Itunes, and in Spotify it's greyed out. So I'm wondering why he's AKA'ed that album. Hopefully it's temporary. The idea of LDR writing new song verses on top of older, other-artist songs was unsettling at first; however, the results for the 3 songs here were tremendous. BTW, Playing Dangerous is also a great example of this (Gato Barbieri, who scored Last Tango in Paris (not Texas), plus a catchy sampled drum solo from somewhere, to which she added, impressive original melodies). The not-so-familiar-features strategy (along with familiar ones: FJM, JB, and "Bleachers"), as well as the interesting feature approach, may work in her favor regarding AOTY prospects, if she's nominated. Winning means all participants get a grammy, and an underdog-seeming album, with some obscure-ish -- but substantially used-- features, might be favored in voting populations.

She should do whatever she likes, of course, but I'd quite like it if she embraced her full diversity as an artist and did something with the unreleased/leaked catalog. To be clear whether AKA should be re-released or Sirens released (and how they should be) is not the same issue as this. Also, just to be clear, people who think songs that have leaked shouldn't be released, just because they're leaked (and they can play them anyway), should also think that albums that are released should go out of print soon, because they are also "leaked" (but in a different way). I'd also recommend her releasing her May Jailer stuff as May Jailer and her unreleased/leaked stuff as Lizzy Grant, just to keep critics confused on the authenticity issue, which they obviously don't have a clue on, or for that matter what artistic growth/exploration, means. I mean, Damon Albarn belongs to two bands (Blur, Gorrillaz) and releases solo stuff, so why can't LDR enjoy her multitudes, as well.