Vertimus

Right. It’s interesting how Mitchell often wrote about ‘the star-making machinery behind the popular song’ and the critics ‘bringing out the boards and the nails’ to wall-off and get rid of artists they had grown tired of. Rolling Stone famously voted her ‘Old Lady of the Year,’ which she found insulting. 40 years ago, she was going through much the same thing that LDR is now, and also in LA.

Like everyone, she has crises and hassles in her life, which is far more complicated than most of ours. I sensed a crisis after ‘Paradise,’ with the public feud with Lorde, falling out with BJON, the SNL disaster two weeks running, and then the eventual birth of UV, which was radically different from BTD/P. I think she’s going through a similar upset and re-evaluation of her life now, and where her career fits into it. We don’t know what the hell is going on, but it’s very likely that something is. Maybe like so many other artists, from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell to Kate Bush, Fiona Apple and Marina, she’s just tired of being a celebrity and wants to reclaim her privacy; and she may be additionally conflicted about THAT. Maybe she’s just found herself in a huge muddle that only time and rest and relaxation will fix. Maybe she feels like she simply cannot make a decision about anything.

Agreed. She doesn’t OWE us or anyone else anything, but it’s just common sense and professionalism in this era of instant communication to update your fandom once you’ve made a claim that has turned out not to be accurate. I think she doesn’t know the release date due to some mysterious goings-on about which we can only speculate, and simply fears making everything worse by saying ANYTHING at all. Which, with her track record, might be a smart move.

Full agree.

Because we’re discussing her stepping into lyrical roles as a narrator or song protagonist, and whether doing so makes her ‘fake’ or ‘inauthentic’ or simply creative, and I used ‘Old Money’ as an example.

. The main thing for me is that the narrator is singing about the past “when we [and, later, ‘the kids,’ by which I think she means their children] were young and pretty,” and remembering regretfully about their failed love and well as their lost youths. Maybe she’s as young as 35, who knows? I see the kids as no longer ‘young and pretty,’ therefore at least 18 to 20. That would make the narrator approximately 40 or older. I see her as older, especially as she says, “I’m out of time.” This is an interesting example of how various individuals see and interpret things very differently.

I don’t think she’s sometimes projected a sad or unhappy POV for no good reason. Which of us have not been emotionally badly hurt, rejected, bullied or found themselves isolated or alone? Or experienced unrequited love or an abusive relationship within one’s family, or without? We know she had a painful, disappointing and perhaps abusive relationship with Barrie. We know she said she fell under the sway of some kind of ‘cult leader.’ Those alone are enough for me, especially since I already know the tragedies most or all people experience in their lives.

Very well said. If only 100% emotionally-sincere music were valid or acceptable, we wouldn’t have any of the music which isn’t feeling-based. Look at something like ‘Meet Me in the Pale Moonlight’—everything about the track—which I love—screeches satire, humor, exaggeration and lack of relationship to genuine emotion. It’s a satire of a uptempo dance track and romantic attitudes that is nonetheless enjoyable in itself, and it can be embraced on different levels, or various levels of it can be ignored. The same thing is true of ‘Making Out.’

Look at ‘Old Money’ for example—did anyone really believe she was a mature woman in her late 40s, 50s or 60s looking back on her life and failed marriage? Of course not. That was simply the persona she stepped into for the sake of the song. It was not ‘fake,’ ‘inauthentic,’ not a lie or a deception of any kind.

She’s not lying. Not all art, by any means, is of the ‘sincere’ kind. Creativity in and of itself traffics in what is imagined , what is reconfigured or conceived or reconceived in a new form, and that involves artifice and distance. It has nothing to do with deception or lying. What I initially said was that she’s been playing roles for well over a decade, assuming, playing in, and then abandoning those roles. Whether that was ‘Jewel-like folkie,’ ‘Mafia princess,’ ‘Lolita in the Hood,’ ‘trailer park goddess,’ international style icon or whatever. Natalie Merchant posed as the various characters from her songs on the album art for her record ‘Ophelia,’ and Tori Amos poses as the different female characters represented in the songs on two different albums—‘Strange Little Girls’ and ‘American Doll Posse.’ That doesn’t make that theatrical approach to the album art ‘deception’ or ‘inauthentic.’ LDR is just doing the same thing, but taking the poses much further, adopting them for months or years at a time. And then moving on to something else. It’s a form of acting, of Hollywood, or playing roles. That doesn’t make her ‘fake,’ it makes her a kind of performance artist. Does she probably get tangled and sometimes defeated by her own personas? It certainly appears that way. Are such things easy to juggle psychologically? Usually not. Are we seeing ‘the genuine Elizabeth’ now, with songs like MAC? Or is this just another pose, the pose of ‘the authentic person I genuinely am’? Who knows?

The simple truth is that all those that I have come across who have gone out of their way to attack LDR have been on the Left. Like Kim Gordon and those that went after her for saying she didn’t think feminism was an interesting idea. Just because a person says ‘on the Left’ to refer to others who took a particular course of action doesn’t mean they are not also on the Left.

I do think most people suffer a series of actual, legitimate traumas over the course of their lives—spouses dying, children dying, siblings dying, bad car accidents, losing everything in a fire, drug overdoses, addiction and alcoholism, parents with dementia, brain tumors, being unfairly fired and not being able to find another job, being harassed and bullied for a given period of one’s life, being mugged or robbed, being raped...these things happen to people in America and the world every day. They’re not rare. As far as LDR ‘playing the victim’ and/or romanticizing victimhood or playing ‘the vulnerable woman,’ that is exactly what a lot of people on the Left have charged LDR with. My feeling is that she has the right to write songs about her own experiences, weaknesses and inner habits—if she does tend to be attracted to callous men who mistreat her, she still has the right to explore it lyrically. No one has to like it or listen to it, and, like Kim Gordon, can call her out for it. Maybe the writing of such songs will be LDR’s road out of that frame of mind, eventually. We know she told Barrie where he could go. Tori Amos did the same thing, took the same essentially masochistic position, but she was probably just being honest with herself: “boy, you sure look pretty...when you’re putting the damage on.” Many on the Left like to think male screenwriters and movie producers created masochistic roles for women like Marilyn Monroe and other female actors that fostered these attitudes, and that such attitudes have no other reality, certainly not in women’s own minds and psyches. Thus some on the Left get doubly angry at musicians like Tori Amos and LDR for writing and releasing songs like ‘Putting the Damage On,’ ‘Yayo,’ and ‘Blue Jeans,’ and continuing to enact the role in other people’s songs, like ‘Wait For Life.’

No doubt she has suffered trauma, sadness, heartache, fear and disappointment just like the rest of humanity, and her time spent volunteering in homeless shelters, and other such acts, were probably sincerely motivated too. It’s just that, as an artist, she works in artifice as well as sincerity. I don’t think she’s mocking anyone, she’s just using all facets of life and others’ reality as her creative clay. That’s all. Artists have been doing it through history—LDR will respond to whatever inspires or moves her, or catches her enthusiasm at the moment.

Bravo, full agree, though I would say she’s “playing with artifice” rather than being fake, which, as an artist, she’s of course free to do. It’s a facet of creativity. She did the ‘white trash’ thing for a while, then tired of it, and moved onto playing international glamour starlet, and was a ‘mafia princess’ in between. These are a series of poses, just as the multiple stage names are. I think she’s been occasionally brilliant at all of this, which is why I am a fan. Right now she seems—seems—to be asking us to accept the REAL Lana—that is, the real Elizabeth—with songs like MAC and HTD, but I am not sure we’ll ever see that individual in a pure state, though at least a few cells of the real Elizabeth probably exists in every track she’s ever recorded. I’m telling you, we’re in ‘Vertigo’ territory here. By the way, a good example of a contemporary, genuine ‘blue collar’ track that is neither sentimental nor patronizing is Parker Millsap’s ‘Central Pacific.’

And I welcome her exploring it--she's explored so many lifestyles, social classes, POVs, themes, subjects, genres--she's been very creative that way, the same way, over the course of their careers, Blondie and Kate Bush have--they've explored everything from incest, UFOs, the Palestine conflict and Houdini to synchronicity, secretive homosexual lovers and the robbing of banks. I welcome that. But the LDR of HTD seems mawkishly emotional rather than movingly sincere and genuine to me, and I don't care for the specific use of the line, "crack another beer." I think she's attempting to be sincere. She just doesn't succeed for me. Maybe when I hear the final version I will find it moving, but I don't think I'll ever like the 'beer' line.

I am not objecting to her or anyone else drinking beer in any manner or amount, or of any brand. It's the expression, "crack another beer," specifically, as a sort of sign of their hopelessness, that I don't like, and the way it is used as a refrain in HTD. That's all. I wouldn't like it if she used "hold my beer" as the refrain to a song either. Parody and exploitation are both approaches she's used to blue collar themes in the past (as she has with other subjects), as well as some slight sincerity on the subject, as I see it. As I said above, HTD is a straight-forward, apparently sincere song about lower economic life, and I don't see any vision, revelation or genius in it, any insights, I just hear a sort of pathetic, pitying and self-pitying attitude, and a tacked-on 'happy ending.'

I know those older songs, the photos and the 'looks,' and I feel she was just exploiting those elements--the cutoffs, cheap nails and tube socks--having fun, playing with them, fantasizing, using them, playing 'blue collar dress-up' for the day, just as she played 'Mafia princess' for a while, 'stripper,' and 'international glamour queen.' With her several enormous homes, sports cars, many millions of dollars and recent photographic legacy, nothing will convince me that she's essentially 'blue collar,' nor does she come from that economic class. She may sympathize or be drawn to blue collar life, because, as one female writer said, "poverty is the great reality, that's why artists seek it," and maybe she finds blue collar men attractive, as many do. I think most Americans are sympathetic to 'working class life,' so-called, as we all struggle, especially economically, especially since 2008 and the financial downturn.

But with those songs, she's commenting on what she sees of lower economic class life, entering into the stories she's presenting as a persona, and sometimes satirizing them, exploiting them or using those elements--gas stations, trailer parks, drunken young men--as a kind of creative novelty or lyrical fantasy. As she is in many cases, she's sincere and insincere simultaneously, to varying degrees, which a lot of critics misunderstood and attacked her for with BTD and called her 'inauthentic.' I thought then, and still think, that that balance of the genuine and the artificial is her genius. But with HTD, she's singing a straight-forward, one-level, no-subtext, apparently sincere ballad to blue collar life, a la Springsteen ('Racing in the Street,' etc.) or some eras of Billy Joel, though she again places herself directly within the story. I understand people have varying tastes, I'm just sharing that that isn't a LDR I'm interested in. The way "crack another beer" is used as a recurring motif and refrain seems coarse and almost a caricature of what it seems to me she's attempting. The emotions seem common and mawkish---to me. I appreciate that others feel differently and I'm glad others like or love the song, and are anticipating it. The more satisfied people In the world, the better a place it will be.

I appreciate your tolerance of my particular taste then all the more. Sometimes it is relatively minor elements in a song that ruin it for us, like, for me the way she inexplicably emphasizes the word ‘parents’ in ‘Coachella’ or how she pronounces ‘beings’ in ‘Change’ as ‘beins.’

But ‘open up a beer’ sounds so much smoother and less vulgar than ‘crack another beer,’ don’t you think? And just ‘flows,’ even phonetically, within the context of all the other VG lyrics? It’s the specific expression, “crack another beer,” and the self-pitying/pitying way she sings the line, that I find especially rankling.

. HTD is somewhat polarizing, I think. I will withhold final judgment until I hear the finished track, but LDR writing a Springsteen-ish/Billy Joel-ish blue collar/working class song with the coarse line “they just crack another beer” is both hilariously funny and also fairly depressing, as is the maudlin obviousness of the song, especially the syrupy ending. I know she likes to try all genres and pulls many off well, but ‘blue collar Lana’ is not one I am interested in hearing from. If LDR sang about spilling a martini, it would suit her image or former image, but LDR “cracking a beer”?? Intended seriously and not as a parody or satire? What’s next? Opening a can of Spam or changing a dirty nappie? I know she’s said, in the last year, that she’s “writing the most beautiful songs,” but I hope she doesn’t think HTD is one of them. For me, it’s way down on the LDR totem pole and doesn’t, in my opinion, hold a candle to ‘Video Games,’ ‘Summertime Sadness,’ ‘Yayo,’ ‘Ride,’ ‘Cola,’ ‘Gods & Monsters,’ ‘Old Money,’ ‘Black Beauty,’ or ‘Terrence Loves You.’ To me, it seems be among her worst tracks since she took the LDR name.

LDR had a great talent for clever, slightly cynical social/cultural observations in her early work as LDR, and many of her initial songs, like ‘Radio,’ ‘Diet Mountain Dew,’ ‘Hollywood’s Dead’ and ‘American,’ seemed like intentional, pseudo-satires of Britney Spears tracks—as well as being sincere in their own way nevertheless. That is what I thought her particular genius was, achieving that balance. So I have been disappointed to see her subsequently literalize her songs, sound and lyrics. So many young musicians and vocalists start out wanting to be pop stars, but, once they achieve that, many quickly want to become ‘respectable’ ‘artists’ that are critically admired instead. I can understand the desire to evolve, and clearly LDR had the goods to produce songs like ‘Old Money.’ But now she’s even becoming ‘woke’ and PC in her work, which I feel is a further mistake. A little of that goes a long, long way. She was much more successful in the BTD/P period, making those clever, subtle little asides about the current state of America than she has been commenting on the Trump presidency and its ramifications. I don’t want to be lectured on morals or ethics and I don’t want any pretentious virtue signaling. Still, it’s a shame that that light, effervescent touch of some of her early tracks was lost. So much of her post-‘Paradise’ work seems labored to me, too calculated, too self conscious and lacking in the BTD/P confidence. That’s what I like about VB—it’s different from her early LDR material in almost every way, but it still has a light, spontaneous touch and feel.

My thoughts: ‘Doin’ Time’ a step in the right direction musically, because the trip hop LDR is the best LDR for me. However, it’s way too short, doesn’t build to anything, and since the vocalist has no emotional investment in the material, even in the sort of ‘pretend’ way she did on ‘Diet Mountain Dew,’ it seems even shorter and hollower, more like a demo or a throwaway B-side than a finished track. The music and the musicians are the stand-outs, rather than LDR. Her voice sounds good, but she seems to breeze through the song without any sense of commitment, style, or care.

I hope she doesn’t get too virtuous, and especially too PC. MAC strikes me as moving as far in that direction as I would like her to go. I like the more irresponsible LDR of many of her unreleased tracks, since a certain ‘moral compass’ is obvious in many of her songs—‘BTD,’ ‘Ride,’ ‘American,’ ‘Old Money,’ etc.

Agreed. And what’s “gross” about their age difference? Why does that matter at all?