Vertimus

I'd like COCC to sound like: Cola Bel-Air American Ride Angels Forever West Coast Old Money Terrence Loves You 13 Beaches Thunder The Greatest

That's true, but she did go all out with the 'Doin Time' video, and it is also conceivable that her team had a COCC single video shot sometime between January and March, though that's unlikely. Foresight and planning hasn't been their forte. Very true. She is terrible at describing her forthcoming albums, typically because whatever the words 'Hollywood sadcore,' 'witchy,' 'beauty noir,' or 'Hawaiian Glam Metal' mean to her, they mean very different things to other people. Fair enough, I guess, but "so we never really know what we’re getting until it actually comes out with her" is 100% accurate

From all the Covid-19-related commercials we've seen from major and minor companies on television, we know that commercial filming of all kinds has continued to some degree. Obviously, most, from Kraft, Pepsi, Carvana or multiple insurance companies have not been vitally important to society, and yet they've managed to be been made with the government, at some level, interfering. Most have continued to push their product and then tag on some sort of 'wear your mask!' message towards the end. So while it's still unlikely, it's not impossible that LDR's team was able to find some company that would produce a COCC video for LDR.

A friend put you up to that? I only quoted and applied the rules of the ‘Golden Ratio,’ which in your actual, authentic ignorance you prefer to deny and mock. That’s your choice. That’s what genuinely ignorant people often do. You could have looked up the Golden Ratio theory, which has been around under different names since the days of Ancient Greece, on Google, on Wikipedia or on Amazon, but you prefer to remain unlearned. I even posted a link about the Golden Ratio from Oprah Winfrey’s website, among others. Ignorance—willful ignorance—isn’t bliss, and it’s not ‘sexy’ or attractive either.

‘Velvet Crowbar’ is also very dark and very sharp, very cutting. “You’re not that bright for a start...” Surely the artist who wrote ‘Gods & Monsters’ is capable of writing almost anything.

I said it, and I stand by that opinion. Darkness is the province of the artist. LDR is obviously assuming a murderous, psychopathic character in the song. It’s not who is she, anymore than Marilyn Monroe was an actual killer in 1952’s ‘Don’t Bother to Knock.’ It’s a role.

I never rant; I think. You troll. You try to rise to being a bully, but you end up just being a troll.

I prefer LFL to UV and HM, and certainly to NFR. LFL has several great songs on it. LDR has proven herself to be a great songwriter with songs like 'Summertime Sadness,' 'Video Games,' 'Yayo,' 'Black Beauty,' 'Old Money,' 'JFK,' 'Angels Forever,' 'Cola,' '13 Beaches,' 'Terence Loves You,' and 'Gods & Monsters.' Listen to the instrumental piano versions by a studio group called Piano Dreamers, and you can see, stripped to just piano, how brilliant her melodies are. So what I'd like to see on COCC are more classic LDR songs that will live beyond her and us.

It's not a question of 'controversy' and/or LDR writing about controversial subjects for the sake of controversy, it's a question of approaching the topic, whatever it is, in an interesting, dramatic and dynamic way. She does this on 'The Greatest,' I agree, on NFR, but not, for me, on most of the rest of NFR, with the exception of 'Hope.' There's a lot of uninspired writing and some lazy retreads on NFR, and it's usually not a good sign when an artist starts repeating her- or himself. Tori Amos, for example, started turning out retreads of her own songs between her six and seventh album ('Carbon' and 'Barons of Suburbia,' for example, or 'Gold Dust' and 'Toast'), and Joni Mitchell's 'Don Juan's Reckless Daughter' is a rewrite of her own 'Coyote' from the previous album; the music for both is almost identical. For me, there's barely a good LDR song that does not have some kind dynamic tension inherent in it*, even if the song is still performed in a breezy manner, as the great 'Thunder' recently was. So regardless of the subject or topic of the song, regardless of whether it's broadly masochistic in approach or domineering or somewhere in the middle, sad or happy, deeply personal and intimate or simply a subject she wanted to essay, I'd like the songs on COCC to be passionate, genuinely inspired, dramatically presented, and inherently dynamic. All of her best music you can listen to over and over for years and never tire of. She also used to produce clever, humorous 'little' songs like 'Radio,' 'National Anthem,' 'Hollywood's Dead,' 'Making Out' and 'Meet Me in the Pale Moonlight' which were like satires or parodies of contemporary pop songs, and which she was very good at. I wish she had continued writing these, as they were a good offset to her more serious songs. * 'Video Games,' 'Blue Jeans,' 'Summertime Sadness,' 'Radio,' 'Cola,' 'American,' 'Gods & Monsters,' 'Yayo,' 'Wait For Life,' 'West Coast,' 'Old Money,' 'Black Beauty,' 'Swan Song,' 'Salvatore,' 'Religion,' 'Terrence Loves You,' 'Music To Watch Boys To,' '13 Beaches,' 'When the World Was At War,' 'Heroin' and, from her unreleased catalog, 'Angels Forever,' 'Hollywood,' 'Hollywood's Dead,' 'Making Out,' 'Meet Me in the Pale Moonlight,' 'Live Or Die' 'Fine China,' 'Color Blue' and others.

Absolutely, the early version, where, as she and her lover slaughter people, like a cheerleader, she cries, 'HEY!' It's brilliant. I consider it one of the 3 or 4 top 'statements' that rock and rock-influenced music has made, the others being the Rolling Stones' 'Gimme Shelter' and Nico's 'Genghis Khan,' which opens, 'I have come to lie with you, I can come to die with you.'

Thank you, and thank all of you who commented in the affirmative to my posts. She has to become a purist as an artist again, one who doesn't consider what this or what person or community might think of a lyric or title. That's the only way authentic art flows. I am still dazed whenever I hear her psychopathic, completely politically incorrect masterpiece 'Live or Die.' THAT'S what she's got in her, that amount of darkness, several rows of actual teeth like a great white shark. After 'Live or Die' or 'Gods & Monsters,' "You fucked me so good that I almost said, "I love you"" is pretty pathetic and sounds calculated.

EXACTLY. She realized, finally, what the 'fake Woke people' and 'fake Woke critics' wanted from her and gave it to them. She appeased them and hit the nail on the head. They knew she was kissing their bums, and so gave her their approbation. They were controlling her, as they wanted to. They tamed her, heeled her. I don't see 'VB' as being unsafe from a certain vantage, because it was a little safe snippet of a song that Jack then created a 7-minute instrumental for.

Full agree. NFR is a chore to sit through, at least for me. I greatly prefer LFL, with all its failings. At least it has more 'real moments' than the narcotized NFR. I want the confident, deveil-may-care LDR back again, the breezy goddess who was above it all and didn't give an apparent damn what the critics or anyone else thought. Far from being a 'Lolita lost in the Hood,' the early LDR was a strong, dynamic woman and individual, who could be vulnerable and philosophical--as on the BTD title track, 'Bel Air,' 'Yayo' and on 'Old Money'--or absolutely crushing, as on 'Cola' and 'West Coast.'

'Hope' is obviously not a 'safe' song lyrically, and 'TG' is an interesting and unexpected take on the end of the world. But the lyrics for most of the rest of the album are flaccid and toothless, and I don't think that the "you fucked me so hard I almost said I love you" lyrics came across the way LDR hoped they would. I feel like rolling my eyes when I hear them. I still feel like most of the album could have been written by LDR in her sleep; the songwriting, for me, was very, very lazy, like 'C,' 'CG' and 'FIILY.' EXACTLY. She doesn't want to be trolled by thousands of "fake Woke people" and from where I'm sitting, that certainly included "fake Woke critics," all the ones who attacked her over the years for being "inauthentic," for "Daddy bought me a career," for being, in their minds, "anti-feminist,' or for, in their minds, perpetuating a "I'm nobody without a man" attitudes. But you can't appease those 'fake Woke People'--FWP--for very long, ever. They will attack anyone and dig at anyone's life or art until they find some other issue to attack. They're parasites who have no power or authentic identity of their own. They're trolls, plain and simple.

I agree she's been behaving in a PC manner since LFL, because she's trying to appease a certain audience that's difficult to appease and impossible to appease for very long. It's sad to now hear the 'Lust For Life' Demo # 1 and then listen to the anemic pop ditty it became--all the best parts of the song, everything that made it Lana, were cut out. I didn't mind most of the political stuff on LFL because I felt it worked, with the exception of 'Change,' which felt rushed and awkward, and needed additional arranging. Also agree that NFR was lyrically 'safe,' a few cheap 'fucks' don't change anything, like the toothless 'bitch' added to 'White Mustang.' For COCC, I am looking for what I consider the authentic LDR, who we recently heard on 'Thunder,' which, for me, was better than everything on NFR and better than 2/3rds of LFL. It has the same breezy confidence she used to have, with none of the effort showing.

I was just listening to Julee Cruise's 'Floating Into The Night' album yesterday, and thinking almost the same thing; how cool it would be for LDR, on COCC, to do an atmospheric project like that, a whole album's worth. As far as the release goes, since, when 'NFR' was released, she said that she was just going to drop 'White Hot Forever' without any fanfare or build-up sometime in 2020, and now we believe 'WHF' is 'COCC' and not a spoken-word album, I don't expect a single beforehand, or much notice in the press, I just expect COCC to drop on 9/5, as she said it would. Maybe she learned a hard lesson from the 'NFR' fiasco, and perhaps just isn't in the mood for all that goes into the build-up and prerelease, the video shoots, interviews, magazine covers, heavy media scheduling, etc. Now that she's been very successful, she probably no longer looks forward to any of that as exciting, fun or a new experience, it's probably just tedious work for her now. Just as many famous bands can't wait to be be successful and tour, but touring quickly becomes tedious, so much so that some bands break up or fire founding members because of their lack of interest in touring.

When LDR announced 'White Hot Forever,' she said she might just drop it without any promotional build-up. And that was before the pandemic. A lot of cultural products of all kinds that were planned for March-April 2020 were actually released, but their promotional legs cancelled--like Tori Amos's book tour to support her new volume. The pandemic and the confused response to it will very likely still be with us in two months, so LDR may continue on as planned and drop COCC on September 5th, or Interscope and/or other forces may convince her that we're still in a cultural 'dead zone' and September 5th will mean suicide for the project. The latter is not true; look how well Bob Dylan's 'Rough & Rowdy Ways' is doing. People need music now more than ever, as many are home-bound and bored to death.

The thing is that the 'chemtrail,' as an idea, is 15-20 years old at least, in terms of actual chemtrails as such, and the conspiracy theories about them, having any cultural relevance. Todd Haynes' film 'Safe' came out in 1995--25 years ago--and that's like a century in a culture that moves as fast as we do today. And as an idea or conspiracy theory, 'chemtrails' never caught on in a big way in American or Western culture, any more than 'orbs' in photographs did---most people were smart enough to realize that chemtrails are just that--the exhaust left behind by jets, often during training missions. That's why so many here had no idea what 'chemtrails' referred to. It's not as if the word 'chemtrails' had immediate impact like the name 'Roswell.' So it will depend on what LDR does with it (assuming she does something with it). It could still work, and the obscurity of the term might work in her favor. Full agree again. She seems to feel obligated to 'mature,' 'tackle the problems of the moment,' and 'prove to the world that she's a legitimate artist,' but I think she came across as more mature and fully-rounded in her earliest LDR incarnation, when she had a light, deft, effortless and confident touch. Since then, the effort has shown itself in the work again and again, which is never a good sign in an artist, and she appears to be stumbling from album to album and Instagram post to Instagram post--in fact, everything seems to be full of effort with increasingly less result. The same thing happened with Madonna. Even though she had 'conquered the world' in a manner almost no other musical artist before her had, she felt pressured to be 'taken more seriously' and so started producing thick, dense and cumbersome albums that people tolerated while they hoped for something freer.

I agree with this too. Nothing is better than when a capable, talented artist tackles 'the darkness,' because that's really the essential territory of the creative personality, not the common, mundane world of the everyday. I have an entire playlist called 'Darkness Makes It Easy' that includes only songs that deal with everything we reject as 'negative,' 'shadow' facets of human existence like rage, jealousy, greed, betrayal, dominance, loss, loneliness, arrogance, selling out, settling, frustration, resignation and even garden-variety hate. I've added quite a few LDR songs in it, like 'Gods & Monster,' 'Old Money,' 'Swan Song,' '13 Beaches,' 'Heroin,' and 'The Greatest,' but also unreleased tracks like 'Velvet Crowbar' and the ultimate LDR dark song, 'Live Or Die.' Where would Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Led Zeppelin, Nico, Marianne Faithfull, Elton John, The Eagles, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, REM, Tori Amos, 10,000 Maniacs, Natalie Merchant, Fiona Apple, Will Stewart, Brett Detar, Kaleo, Kassidy and hundreds of other artists and bands be without exploring the darkness?

Absolutely agree. When she steps away from tired 'romance' cliches, she writes dynamic songs like 'Cola,' ''Gods & Monsters,' 'Old Money' and 'Swan Song' that no one else could have written. If she wants to utilize romantic cliches, let her save them for her fun satires of contemporary pop, like 'Making Out' and 'Meet Me in the Pale Moonlight,' which unfortunately seem to be a thing of the past. That's part of what sunk NFR for me, the fact that at least half the tracks were, lyrically, 'things she dreamt up in the tub,' as one reviewer once said about Kate Bush, songs LDR could have written while in a coma. It's usually not a good sign when an artist starts repeating themselves, and LDR has begun doing that.

Regarding COCC, well, LDR wore me out with both the LFL and NFR lead-ups, especially the latter. I care little about the COCC pre-release period or that of either of the poetry books/albums. When COCC is finally released is okay with me. The entire NFR period burnt out my appreciation for LDR as a professional. So if there's one or two good tracks on COCC, great. Tracks like 'Thunder' and the LFL demo remind me she's very talented. IF she's consciously 'playing a game' with her fans, it's a totally self-defeating one. That sort of thing has gotten old, especially after NFR. That trend is over. Look how many people were on the endless NFR pre-release thread, look how many pages were generated, and compare it to how many are here, and the album's theoretically only two months away. She drove a lot of people away with her indecisiveness and unprofessionalism.

'Thunder' sounds like the old LDR I love. Light, fun, carefree, confident. Not trying to prove anything. Nothing sounds labored. The vocals are the like the old LDR too. It gives me hope for the CTOCC, even if it's not new.

She said in an interview about the time of the release of LFL that 'Roses Bloom For You' was only an intro and outro to the LFL album, so it's very likely that what we know of RBFY is the entire song. There is not more. Remember, there were several different conceptions of what LFL was intended to be; it changed a lot. One version probably introed and outroed the entire album with RBFY, with the second track, and first full song, perhaps being '13 Beaches,' since it feels like an album opener or closer. One day soon she'll do a career retrospective like Tori Amos's 'A Piano,' and then we'll get songs/tracks like 'Yosemite,' 'RBFY,' the 'political songs' she left off LFL, some of the material deleted from UV, etc. Kate Bush has also released such a large set.

There's a sort of Fortean 'conspiracy' out there, and there has been for at least the last 25 years, that some branch of the federal government, like the CIA, is experimenting on America citizens via the heavy use of chemicals released from planes in their 'chemtrails,' which then float to Earth and influence and affect the population in mystery and probably negative ways. This theory has apparently arisen because of training missions by the Air Force and others which left the skies overhead certain areas heavily crisscrossed with 'chemtrails.' Do a Goggle Image search and you'll find plenty of photos. Nothing has ever come of the theory and no one has proven that the 'chemtrails' are nothing more than the usual vapor and exhaust that jets leave temporarily behind before dissipating. I don't think there's a single scientist that takes it seriously or promotes it. It's like the 5G conspiracy today, that 5G causes coronavirus. So for LDR, the entire album title may be literal or symbolic, i.e., 'mysterious, probably dangerous government experiments taking place over a ritzy, exclusive country club where the wealthy think they're safe,' something along those lines, or symbolically to mean something like "some people think they're better than the rest but are equally threatened by social forces beyond everyone's control." For more on the entire idea of environmental pollutions 'everywhere around us, affecting us in every way, very dangerously,' see the Todd Haynes movie 'Safe' from 1995, in which Julianne Moore becomes convinced that all the problems in her life are due to a environmental pollutions and retreats to a 'safe haven' where the isolated residents where plutonium suits some of the time and generally freak out if even a plane flies overhead in the distance. It's a pretty spooky film and may have given rise to the whole 'chemtrail' conspiracy theory. I do think the point of the film, or one of the points, is how some people can be convinced of anything, and start to imagine problems they don't have or blame others for conditions that don't actually exist in the manner they perceive them to. The 2007 Ashley Judd movie 'Bug' has a similar theme, in which a wayward couple become convinced that they've been infected by some shadowy governmental agency with a microscopic insect that lives under their skin, and they quickly go crazy together, even though their 'condition' is actually very likely a complete delusion. That's the general idea, though those look more like crop dusting planes than the sort of high-flying jets that leave chemtrails.

It's political if you believe 'the personal is political,' and that almost everything is political. Every time an artist mentions another in a song, which happens all the time now, or other piece of art like a film or television program, is that political? Obviously not, and it's been going on since the dawn of recorded entertainment. She knows Kanye personally, which we all know, and he did dye his hair blond, and he showed up in the Oval Office of the Trump White House, so she's very likely referring to her disappointment in him. So for LDR to sing, "Kanye West is blond and gone" is not necessarily political, just a statement of fact as she sees it, and also a reflection of her feelings about his apparent defection. It's definitely not political in the traditional sense of the word.