Vertimus

I agree with both of you. Getting two of the best songs a year in advance didn't help, and then 'Doin' Time' as well. 'Hope' might have been a lot more impactful if it hadn't been released in any form until the album dropped. 'CG' is my favorite but even on it, the production seems lacking--it could have been so such tenser, suspenseful, dramatic and powerful with just a few key production shifts. Instead, I like it best by default. I also like 'Bartender,' but it seems more like an interesting bonus track than a great LDR song. 'Cigarettes & Lollipops' and 'Wild On You' both played randomly on my 'My Top Rated' playlist yesterday, and how much more interesting both seemed to me than all of NFR. I also prefer 'LFL' to NFR, vastly. The world understands, by 2019, as it did by 2015 and 2014, that LDR is not just a pretty flash-in-the-pan pop star who got lucky with 'VG' and who can write clever little pop ditties like 'Radio' and 'National Anthem.' I still feel LDR is motivated to prove to the world that she's a legitimate artiste and is going to continue banging us over the head with that fact until she gets it out of her system---if ever. In the meantime, she's driving a lot of fans away and releasing mediocre albums (but then, I don't see her an an 'album artist' anyway, though of course it would be great if she were). Being dour and severe doesn't make one a better artist, just as writing 'noble songs about social causes' doesn't. To me, she's like a great natural comedian who has decided that comedy is for children, and always will be, and so she's decided to give it up for a 'serious acting career' a la Meryl Streep. LDR can certainly write terrific 'serious' songs like 'Old Money' and '13 Beaches,' great dramatic tracks like 'Cola' and great middle-of-the-road tracks like 'Ride,' but I really miss the uber-light touch, energy and enthusiasm she brought to 'Radio,' 'National Anthem,' 'American,' 'Hollywood's Dead,' 'Making Out,' 'Meet Me in the Pale Moonlight,' 'Hollywood,' 'JFK,' 'AFFA' and so many others. So I see her wasting one of her greatest gifts. I felt NFR rated a 'C' and no better or worse upon release, and I still feel that way.

What about ‘Playing Dangerous,’ where the young pyromaniac seduces the police officer? Maybe it’s been one of her fantasies for a while. ‘Centerist’ she may be, and she may have been raised to be a Democrat like most of NY State, but I have seen conservative elements in her songs and vision since Elizabeth became LDR.

I agree 100%. The 'happiness is a butterfly' part is good, but the other parts are hilariously bad, especially at this point in her career, and BaAy-A-Bee' and 'oooh-hoo-oohhs' are so lazy and pedestrian.

Whatever happened to ‘Talk Like An Answering Machine’?

I like your description/prediction. I would love that. I personally would like something sonically like AFFA or ‘Hollywood,’ as well as ‘JFK’ and most of the Paradise tracks. For me, HM was a little cold, so I would like some of the heated emotions of ‘Cola,’ even if fake/artificial. All art is artifice!

LDR is not necessarily over the ‘artificial’ style of BTD/P. She did say HM was “closer in style to the first two” several times upon its release, and ‘Art Deco’ and ‘Religion,’ and even ‘TLU,’ seem very much like BTD/P tracks, as do a couple on LFL. And then there's CG on NFR. I like the ‘artificial’ style best. I am sure it will come and go on her releases.

I just heard ‘Making Out’ for the first time in a while and it sounded so much more robust, witty, creative and free than most of NFR... I really hope LDR, one day, will want to make fun, clever and slightly satiric pop music again. I hope that that is direction WHF moves towards.

All her albums have problems for me, except for P, which only has the cover of BV I don’t care for. That’s why I don’t think of LDR as an album artist. I like as many songs on each album as I dislike, and I am fine with that, because those I like I really like. Jack just did a so-so job with the production, but the songwriting isn’t uniformly her best either. The lack of bridges doesn’t help. But I do expect her to work again on WHF with Jack, especially due to the critical notices they’ve received, and clearly they get along well.

Absolutely, when Lana was still fun, and producing these half-satiric takes on pop music, like ''Making Out' and MMITPM. I don't mind a little sadness and seriousness, like the BTD title track, 'Ride' and '13 Bitches,' but the too-heavy, too serious, too 'I-take-myself-ultra-seriousness-now' Lana is a drag. To me, it's like she's beating a dead horse on a lot of the songs from the last four albums. At least on WTWWAWWKD, 'God Bless America' and 'BPBP,' she added some levity to the lyrics and music.

That was her best sound, production and persona for me.

I agree. 'Cinnamon' especially sounds thick and muffled, as if it were recorded with a pillow over the mic, unlike, say, TG. I like the arrangement on 'Cinnamon,' but the engineering is awful. Compare it to ‘Hope.’

What about the use of industrial/ ‘thunder’ noises in the ‘Cinnamon’ outro? I loathing they’re a plus, but haven’t seen anyone else mention them.

I wish this song had been on NFR. The ‘Carefree Lana’ persona is the best Lana to me.

Full agree! ‘Meet Me in the Pale Moonlight’ is fantastic. ‘Making Out’ too.

I have always said this is one of the kinds of music she does BEST. ‘Light’ is not necessary bad. LDR is great at straight-up POP music.

Right. We're not talking about which project or song is objectively better, but our own personal impressions of NFR as a whole, sometimes in relation to her recent past. Not only did she say she was burned out, but she said, in regard to the glamour girls and debutants in the Slim Aarons' book, "I'm not that," and mentions how hard it was for them to live up to some impossible social standard of beauty and decorum. Surely that is a reflection on her initial LDR persona, and why she's now presenting herself less glamorously unless she's at a red carpet event or something similar? Presenting herself perhaps as realistically as possible, as close to her real, daily self? I don't like the album cover at all, but for overall aesthetic reasons only. I like the interior shot of her standing against the sail very much.

Full agree about the dangers of the precarious public persona and how it relates to authentic identity. There are examples everywhere in popular culture--from the 1947 'A Double Life' with Ronald Colman, whose character slowly goes mad playing Othello on Broadway, to how Nico and Marianne Faithfull couldn't continue to manage their pop star personas and became junkies for over a decade, to Heath Ledger dying after playing the Joker and admitting that he couldn't rid the character from his psyche. There's also typecasting--which ended the careers of numerous actors, from George Reeves to Jerry Mathers. The Wilson sisters of Heart started out doing exactly what they wanted to do and writing some pretty strong songs from an earthly, lustful female perspective, like 'Devil Delight,' but then got criticized by their own friends for it and immediately buckled down and became whitewashed, politically correct, 'nice' versions of themselves. When that failed, they transformed into even further whitewashed pop princesses, a million miles from their personas ten years earlier--and then, after that collapsed, they blamed the record companies for forcing them to play pop princess roles, as if they had not agreed to it themselves and willfully entered into the bargain. Hence, they're not generally respected today. LDR should have stuck to her guns, is my opinion, though obviously her initial LDR persona was easy to parody and satirize, as SNL cruelly did one week after her singing debacle on their show. And she was, at the same time, being attacked by Lorde for being "inauthentic," and singing about the Hamptons when poor Lorde was still in New Zealand looking for a ride home from a party. Why did LDR buckle under that sort of pressure from Lorde? And then she accused Lorde of stealing the very sound LDR used on BTD for Lorde's own debut. Thus, 'Ultraviolence,' a completely new sound for LDR, but not one I have personally ever found convincing, except on 'West Coast,' 'Old Money,' 'Is This Happiness' and 'Black Beauty.' I think that's a very good point, and I do think it's reflected on both LFL and NFR. To me, LDR is not an album artist in the sense that she makes masterful albums that are cohesive and great from start to finish, like, say Joni Mitchell's classic 'Court & Spark,' the Beatles' 'Abbey Road,' or Tori Amos's 'Boys For Pele.' I expect to like half the songs on a new LDR release at best. Even on my LDR favorite, 'Paradise,' I don't care for the 'Blue Velvet' cover.

I agree as well, though I gave NFR as a whole only a 'C' after two days, and I still feel that way. I lost interest in it immediately. C'mon--it's not a folk record. That's an absurd description. I think I see what she thought she was accomplishing, especially with the title track and the album as a whole, but she failed at that. No one, ever, in the years to come, is going to describe NFR as 'Lana's folk record.' There are a few great and very good songs, but also a lot of tepid, undynamic material that just sort of sits there and goes in circles. 'Hope' is a powerful song in many ways--but is it what more than a handful want from LDR? Except for a few hundred Stans, I don't think so. It's not what I want from her. To me, it's like her 'Sister Morphine,' Marianne Faithfull's failed commercial attempt at an 'artistic' song that came at the end of her 60s pop career. Like so many pop stars before her, especially female pop stars, from Marianne Faithfull to Joni Mitchell and Madonna and on, I think LDR started out happily producing songs with a broad range, from the BTD title track (which I love) to 'Radio' and 'National Anthem,' but then forces in the industry, including critics, male pop stars and female competitors, snidely said, 'Look at her--another disposable pretty girl pop tart, blindly enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame, thinking she's all that," and when those words reached LDR's ears, instantly she did the same thing that Faithfull, Mitchell, the Wilson sisters from Heart, Madonna and others have done: she decided that she will prove to the world that she's an artiste--not a silly flash in the pan--and with a vengeance! And so the playful, seductive LDR of 'Cola,' 'American,' 'Summertime Sadness' and 'Diet Mountain Dew' vanished, and the 'serious,' spooky LDR of 'Money, Power, Glory' and 'Ultraviolence' appeared. And that's led us right to NFR, after a detour through some of the songs on LFL, which were weak attempts to create commercial pop songs again. Do I think she's sure of the road she's on, and has been sure? No. I think she's had nothing but anxiety about her public persona, who she is as an artist and where she's going since releasing 'Paradise.' But this is certainly what can happen when, within 12 years, you adopt the name and think of yourself as Elizabeth Woolrich Grant, Sparkle Jump Rope Queen, May Jailer, Lana Del Ray, Lana Del Rey and God only knows what else. I'm not blaming her for anything--I'm saying this is what can happen when you mess around with your identity and persona. We see actors reporting it all the time--Joaquin Phoenix just said it,again, like Heath Ledger before him--that playing the Joker for a few months really messed with his mind.

I'm not surprised LDR was angry about the Ann Powers review on NPR. It's fine for Powers to intellectualize and analyze as she did in the review and to publish her thoughts--those are her interpretations, perceptions and standards--but to hold LDR, or any other artist, to those standards, or particular vision, when those interpretations are that complex and that individualized is absurd. LDR is not Ann Powers, just as Powers is not LDR and does not have LDR's often-extraordinary music talent. LDR is a pop star who is also branching out into other kinds of writing, like poetry, and artist. LDR's talent would probably come to a screeching halt if she tried to 'intellectualize' her every creative impulse to attempt to meet some sort of impossibly high standard that in fact has nothing to do with her life or even with music ` that in fact, belongs to someone else. A massive case of writer's block would result, even if only temporary. I say, 'Art For Art's Sake,' first and always, and then yes, let the artist take responsibility for whatever she or he creates, as art that is made public in any way does not exist in a vacuum. I think of really creative artists like Blondie and Kate Bush, who have written songs about virtually everything--adult/child sexual attraction (Bush, 'The Infant Kiss'), alien abduction (Blondie, 'Shayla'), sister-brother incest and suicide (Bush, 'The Kick Inside'), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Blondie, 'War Child'), death pacts between young lovers (Blondie, 'Suzy & Jeffrey'), bank robberies (Blondie, 'The Hardest Part,' Bush, 'There Goes A Tenner'), sound weapons created by the government used against the public (Bush, 'Experiment IV'), Wilhelm Reich (Bush, 'Cloudbusting'), the end of the world by meteor and by nuclear war (Bush, 'Hello Earth' and 'Breathing'), seductive computer programs that paralyze the user (Bush, 'Deeper Understanding'), sex for sale (Blondie, 'Call Me'), blue collar life (Blondie, 'Union City Blues'), etc.--that have had absolute creative freedom to write about whatever interests them at the moment or strikes their fancy. The burden of history should not rest on their shoulders every time they pick up their pen or sit at their keyboard. Elisabeth Grant, over the course of her musical career, including before she became LDR, has written about a great number of things, and I have been saddened to see the scope of her writing getting narrower with time and with what seems like necessary seriousness ~ thus I am happy with the ending of 'The Greatest,' which suggests she and others are watching the end of Earth from another planet. Serious yes, but visionary and literally other-worldly.

Saint X de Renoir, I think there's something about the loose, meandering structure of the songs that works against them, at least for me. I like the more dynamic LDR songs with a 'harder' structure, with tension between the various parts, like 'Cola,' where the chorus, refrain and bridge play off one another. Even 'Yayo' had a definite tension within it, despite essentially being a NFR-like song, and if approached, arranged and produced like an NFR track, it could have come from NFR.

I can't connect to it on a personal level either, and I assimilated it all very quickly, so it feels 'used up' already, whereas I can still listen to songs like 'Ride,' 'Old Money,' 'Terrence Loves You' and 'Summertime Sadness' and they feel fresh and full of 'underground currents' for lack of a better term.

I hear the birds on the summer breeze I drive fast...

I like the ‘Cinnamon Girl’ outro a great deal, especially the sounds that seem like thunder, and wish they were slightly clearer. ‘CG’ overall sounds a little too muffled and badly-produced, which we discussed here a few days ago. I also like the ‘bells’ or tambourine on HTD, in fact the new arrangement brings the song to life for me, and lessens the mawkish emotion. She also sings it a little less emotionally, which I also like.

Exactly. Think for yourself; think things through to their rightful conclusion without merely adopting them because it's popular and trendy to do so, and because, above all, it hopefully makes you a part of a group (or mob); apply social theories, 'rules and regulations' and laws evenly and objectively to all. Recognize when you're being programmed and being targeted as a "useful idiot" to spout Stalinist slogans and propaganda. Sexual harassment can happen to either females or males; women can sexually harass other women, men can sexually harass other males, women can sexually harass males, males can sexually harass women. Stalkers can be male or female; and sexist comments can and do come from the lips of male and females alike. Trolls, as we well know, can be male or female. A lot of this started not as a general argument, but because I said that 'you're just a man, it's just what you do' which I myself am not bothered by, could be seen as sexist in some quarters, just as many (though not necessarily here) would find it offensive and demeaning if a popular male singer wrote, "You're just a woman, it's just what you do," therefore reducing the female individual in question to "just a women" who acts the way she does because she's "just a woman." In the city I live in, people are hyper-partisan above statements like this, and a man who would say such a thing to a female colleague at work might find himself without a job.