Vertimus

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.

And those 'rules' are changing constantly from one person to another, one subculture to another, one coast to another, one class to another.

It doesn’t bug me. I said that. I am talking about from the POV of the wider culture in this MeToo age. Just as she uses a song title, Venice Beach, which would upset some as degrading to women if Harry Styles named a song that. I am just pointing out that different rules often apply. I am sure there are some feminists find the VB title degrading and not empowering.

Some here are clearly not educated, and are hostile, irrational trolls to boot, who loves taking things out of context and attempting to bully whomever they can from the relatively safe distance of the internet. They’re everything that was wrong about the pre-NFR thread, and worse, hiding pathetically behind masks of liberal tolerance and ethical standing.

Yeah, it sorta tries to be clever and fails. And California is practically the capital of serial killers.

The "you're just a man, it's just what you do line" seems a little sexist in 2019, and wouldn't be tolerated by some of the same audience if the gender were reversed and sung by Harry Styles, Twenty-One Pilots or Justin Bieber, I don't think. I'm not bothered by it. Also, "if he's a serial killer, then what's the worst that can happen to a girl who's already hurt?" seems laughably naive if taken literally. I assume it was just a sort of fun, throw-away line. Serial killers sometimes dismember their victims, they eat them on occasion, they torture and kill them violently, they bury them alive. All of which is a lot worse than being emotionally hurt, which most or all of us are at some time in our lives.

'AF,' so simple, so fantastic, so powerful and confident, and yet never put on an actual release. The same with 'Hollywood'--perfect, powerful, straight-forward, uncomplicated, masterful. That's the LLDR I fell in love with, and why I object to some of her more recent tracks, which seem fourth-rate by comparison (I'm thinking of the weaker tracks on LFL).

Since NFR has been done for 6-8 months, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were half finished already either, at least the record itself. Clearly, the production of the cassettes, albums, various color vinyls, album art, uploads to various platforms, music videos and tour schedules takes a great deal of time too. Probably more than we tend to think.

You’re in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass.

Ella has started a thread about it—LDR is writing songs, which she described as ‘cute,’ for a film about the real lives of the people involved in the writing of the Alice in Wonderland books in the 19th century, which will also include, apparently, vignettes from the Alice stories themselves.

As someone else wrote, perhaps the messy mixing was done on purpose? What songs do you hear it on? I hear it on CG—do you? I think most of us are sort of cynical about all aspects of the production on her records after LFL, and I would personally extend that to parts of UV and HM. For me, Paradise has the best over all production.

We can hope. Good news about Jack if accurate. Does this mean Elle has to start a White Hot pre-release thread?

Oh No. Not again (though I am sure many of us suspected this had to be true). Will 13 months turn into 18? Will we have a thread with 5,000 pages? No word on the producer though. And the Alice project in between.

The true story of Lewis Carroll and the real Alice, Alice Liddell, is a truly rich source of material, so this sounds promising—I wouldn’t want to see just another straightforward attempt to film the Alice books. No previous effort has come close to getting them right. Viva Lana!

‘California’ and ‘Bartender’ benefit the most from finally hearing them in HQ. ‘California’ sounds remarkably better. I really like what they did with HTD. The new arrangement, production and guitar solo make the song for me. Also, she sings it less mawkishly. The title track musical arrangement, and especially the strings, seem influenced by the overall production of Joni Mitchell’s classic ‘Court & Spark’ of 1974. TNBAR still sounds clumsy and ‘clearly from another project.’ It has that same muffled, foggy sound that several songs on LFL had, as if it were recorded with a pillow over the mic. WHY they didn’t completely re-record it, with all their money, I will never understand. For me, the highlights are TG, ‘California,’ ‘Bartender,’ ‘CG,’ MAC and VB. I still can’t appreciate HIAB. It still sounds like three different songs mashed together. Maybe one day.

It’s a take on the famous Fifties B-film, ‘Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.’