Vertimus

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

Okay the fact that she's deleting comments seems to be very telling about the album. I wouldn't be surprised if she has scrapped it after all this time. @@GeminiLanaFan I know you're gonna pull your hair out at my comment, but something smells fishy here right now, so I can't help but really wonder if this is the case.
 
Maybe not even scrapped it, but she could be re-working some new songs to replace the 'oldies' MAC and VB. I mean c'mon. It would be ridiculous to keep them on NFR even though your entire fanbase has heard them since last year. But I could be wrong too.
 
Who knows what's up. Maybe Lana just wanted everyone to focus on DT, but is instead being bombarded with NFR questions so she got salty and is deleting them out of annoyance. This isn't a drag @ anyone who asked her about NFR, I would have done the same tbh.
 
But yeah...something's up.

Well said.  Lana "playing with artifice" and Lana being "occasionally brilliant" have never been mutually exclusive ideas, and that's why I still stan even though it's been a rough few years as a fan.  And bonus points for the "Vertigo" reference.  Would love to see her reference Vertigo in a music video sometime.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.’

She’s a rich white woman, she never actually experienced poverty
What you’re talking about is the romanticisation of poverty which was a theme throughout her career. She has never experienced that life ergo she her heart cannot speak to it
It’s all fake. When Lana talks about the 50s, it’s fake. When Lana talks about daddies, it’s fake. When Lana talks about gangsters, if’s fake. Lana is fake, to a certain degree, because the name itself is a persona. And that’s largely why she was interesting in the beginning

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. 

i agree uwu

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.’

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.’

I get what you're saying, but I think she should be able to relate to at least half of the song. It's similar in theme to BAR, and the elements you mentioned are there. Loneliness, relationship breakdown, loving someone who's bad for you & a bad person in general, having a cold/neglectful lover, being cheated on, being miserable in a relationship, fantasizing about killing your significant other, etc. There might not be a Bradley, Ras MG or Louie in her life, but overall I wouldn't say Doin' Time is outside of her regular themes at all. I could definitely see this being an original LDR song with some minor changes (pronouns, names, etc)