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Vertimus

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Everything posted by Vertimus

  1. I agree with your assessment of her tenor over the last several years, but I don't think it's fans or stans per se, but just her moving into a different stage of life, getting fed up with the music business and all the extracurriculars it entails (costume design and fittings, concert and festival appearances, schedule changes, band members, national and international travel), and all the impingements on her free time—and LA burning---most people would have gotten burnt out a while ago. She's a very hard-working individual. She probably has as little perspective on her life as we do, being on the move as she constantly is—she may have sung about walking to the mall, watching tv, and doing the laundry, but I bet she's doing very little of any of those things. She's probably just psychically and emotionally exhausted.
  2. Lana has done spooky before with Gods & Monsters, Cola, Fucked My Way Up To The Top, Music To Watch Boys To, Salvatore, The Blackest Day, Swan Song, 13 Beaches, Heroin, Change, The Greatest, and Hope Is....so I can easily see her doing some kind of Southern Gothic. There's also Live Or Die, Cry Die Kill, Last Girl On Earth, and Us Against The World, and, in covers, Heart-Shaped Box and Season Of The Witch.
  3. The problem for us, as I see it, is that what we largely consider country today is really country pop, not the purer country music of 70 years ago and earlier. Today, country pop has more of its roots in pure pop—music made for the radio from the early 1960s forward and designed to be catchy above all else—like Sugar, Sugar by the Archies--than in country. I don't care for the country pop of today; country pop really took hold in the 80s and 90s and has been with us ever since. Today, younger people don't even realize they're not listening to pure country, but a bastardization of it. Country pop also tends to have cliched lyrics about cliched themes: And I can take you for a ride on my big green tractor We can go slow or make it go faster Down through the woods and out to the pasture Long as I'm with you, it really don't matter Pure country or real country, comes straight out of 18th and 19th century Americana, was originated by the settlers from the British Isles, and actual country living in the Deep South and the West—whether it be the mountains, the plains, swamps, or relatively flatter lands like Tennessee. Real country music has a sincerity of feeling and intent that slick country pop does not have. Today, I call pure country music Americana instead, and some of the artists who make it are the Brothers Comatose, Paul Cauthen, Rayland Baxter, the Secret Sisters, Brandi Carlile, Cobi, Anderson East, Parker Millsap, Frankie Lee, the Cactus Blossoms, and Dylan Leblanc. Perhaps unfortunately, almost all of these artists are inconsistent songwriters, and, as time passes without major commercial success and recognition, they tend to abandon the instruments associated with country music and add pop elements to their songs until some of their songs/albums are pure pop--not even country pop. I loved Rayland Baxter's trip hop album, If I Were A Butterfly, his best, but it's certainly not Americana or country of any kind. So the question is, when we're talking about Lana producing a country album, what do we mean by country? What does she mean by country? The waters are further muddied by Lana comparing Video Games and Ride to country songs or saying they're essentially country songs in their structures. Time will tell when the new album is released.
  4. A lot of her songs could be given countrified arrangements, including, as someone else mentioned, Angels Forever. She has a lot of songs that lend themselves to that sort of thing, like Bel Air, American, Love Song, How to Disappear, Mariner's Apartment Complex, Tomorrow Never Came, White Dress, Yosemite, Arcadia, Violets For Roses and others. If it were done right, no one in the audience would know they weren't country or country-esque songs to begin with.
  5. But a new album would start the process over and probably be another year. How about Okefenokee Swamp Queen?
  6. My understanding is that TRPWS is not just Lasso retitled, but Lasso reconceived, and maybe radically so. If Lana was so concerned about other musicians releasing a country album, why would simply retitling it and delayings its release make any difference?
  7. I'd accept one from Lana at any time. In its pure form, it's the oldest American genre; it's beyond trendiness. I don't understand why she abandoned Lasso due to some other non-country artists were producing their version of a country album about the same time. We know she has a unique idea of what a country song sounds like. If Ride is country, then I'm all for it, as it's one of my all-time Lana favorites.
  8. And let's not forget Ann Powers writing about how Lana should or must feel and think on any number of issues as a woman and female. Otherwise, Powers implied, you're out of the girls' club, you're foolish, you're a puppet of male influence, a manipulated media creation, retrogressive, etc. Here's one Powers snippet from the NFR! era: "Lana Del Rey is all about wrong combinations: sunset dreams and dirty water, Mexican-American braids and a wetsuit, hip-hop flow and torch song feeling, conventional feminine submissiveness and post-feminist self-possession. Cognitive dissonance is the essence of her art, the way she builds her dream logic...The tone of her voice as she uttered these words [in Video Games] was forever after labeled "sad," but was really something different. My mom would have called it "needy"; today, more common descriptions are "disempowered," "self-sabotaging," "unwoke."" Kim Gordon, the respected co-founder of Sonic Youth, also came out against Lana for being retrogressive and backward. "The Sonic Youth founder says: “Today we have someone like Lana Del Rey … who believes women can do whatever they want, which, in her world, tilts toward self-destruction, whether it’s sleeping with gross old men or getting gang raped by bikers. Equal pay and equal rights would be nice.” I say, let Lana be. People have a perfect right to like her, love her, dislike her, or dislike who they perceive her to be even if they continue to like her music, and say so, as all of us do about any performer or anything at all. If Lana is anti-feminist, then she has that right (though I don't think she is). Politically and culturally liberal artists (and cultural institutions themselves) like Joan Baez, Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, Courtney Love, and Bruce Springsteen--would hardly support Lana is she was the way the media has painted her. I note most or all of them believe in the relativity of belief and the depth and complexity of individuals. What's fascist is to say, "You must think this way about feminism," "you must believe as I do about Marxism, Wokism, or MAGA-ism," "there's only one way to think about _______," etc. We'll see what the lyrics and album concept of TRPWS will add to this ongoing conversation and debate.
  9. No more than any of us would. We know little to nothing about their relationship, we don't know Jeremy, and we don't know Lana either. It's none of our business. 'Facts,' suppositions, and opinions about her political beliefs have varied widely over the last decade or so, largely based on brief sound bytes like 'I don't find feminism a very interesting idea,' or whatever her exact wording was. She wrote at least one song against Trump during the his first administration--When the World Was At War--and the other political songs from LFL were dropped. Based on what we know or think we know, we can stop stanning her or drop her completely if we want to. We have choices. TRPWS is, I think, unlikely to have any direct political content.
  10. This is a smart move in every way. "Man does not live by Lana alone." Making a pure cult figure of an artist is bad for the cultist and bad for the artist too.
  11. And many artists don't even creatively last 10 years--they fizzle quickly. Lana's output has been of extraordinarily high quality. She's never released a purely bad album (knockwood) like so many other reputable contemporary artists have. I may not care much for OB, but I can't objectively say it's a bad album.
  12. A-men. I didn't mind FJM on LTLI, but the production almost ruined the song for me. Margaret was unstructured by JA's tender vocals and then LDR's "let's waltz this out." I didn't care for the interludes or the background vocalists opening The Grants. I'm hoping for a completely different tone for TRPWS. And Nikki, yes, please, no Nikki.
  13. LanaBoards is pure sociology. I've been saying it for years.
  14. That could be, but I think it's just a general expression of a general idea. She's had a lot of lovers, boyfriends, and crushes, the details about which we know very little--very little. Who broke up with who, or who called it off or why, we don't know. To me, 'staying' isn't necessarily a good thing in and of itself--it reminds me somewhat of people who marry at 18 to 21 and both parties say, 'I will never look at, touch, or lust after another man/woman/person for the next 60 years!," which, to my mind, just sets an impossible standard that ends up crushing the relationship if they hold themselves and one another to it. To me, "treat me well, and I'll treat you well, and if we remain in love and attracted to one another, we'll stay together, but if things turn sour or you lose interest, let me know,' is a more realistic option. Keep in mind the hideous rollout of NFR! and Lana saying, several times publicly after the release of MAC and VB, "I don't know when it's coming out." That went on for over a year.
  15. I think it's quite possible they were shouting Black Lives Matter while walking to the mall, after they laughed about nothing.
  16. And it's beautiful how this deep normality settles down over them.
  17. I think she's doing the laundry, then walking to the mall and stopping by the children's school for coffee. Then she's just watching tv.
  18. I would also welcome the return of Pop Lana, Trip Hop Lana, two of the best Lanas.
  19. I agree—it's very creative and unique. I'd love to see an entire album of new LDR songs or classic Americana recorded and produced in that vein.
  20. Yup. Of all the artists I've followed over the years, and stanned, Lana is the only artist I've come across this problem with. Rest in peace, Marianne Faithfull.
  21. I heard Last Girl on Earth last night…so great, generally forgotten, and another LDR song about the end of the world. Right now, the culture is not lit, that's for sure, especially in NYC, which is still dying a slow but obvious death (which has been going on since the 2008 financial downturn and the rise of Amazon, which wiped out NYC retail, and shopping generally, completely).
  22. A-men. I don't care for anything she did with Nikki Lane, including Breaking Up Slowly.
  23. Lana knows the truth if she spends any amount of time here. Not being a cultist doesn't make me or anyone else a hater.
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