DeadAgainst

3 hours ago, slang said:

 

One of my heroes, Philip K. Dick, had a bad bout with that, and wrote a whole exegesis trying to be clear about what was happening to him (some of it weird, but not THAT weird). He did not mean for it to be published, but it was posthumously. However, a lot of his later novels did fictionalize the very same concerns as his exegesis. I don't think LDR is in that category of wanting to communicate explicitly about that kind of stuff. I mean if she's mapping out a tree (similar to PKD wanting to "explain" his novels via his exegesis), it's not quite clear to me what the tree is for. I have to read the Wikipedia pages on esotericism and think about it (although I'd rather read a terse set of axioms, and then think about the arguments, if any). Of course, she doesn't have to explain anything. I can just appreciate her art with different agendas. 

From Philip K. Dick:

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It tells about the death of a woman.... The purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her and of her death. The Mind does not wish to forget her.... We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. 

Anamnesis. "Can you hear me?"

From "Get Free"—

"Finally, gone is the burden of the Crowley way of being"

Why did she say this? Why does she mention Aleister Crowley? Could it be she actually practices Thelema? Why does her position in the "Blue Jeans" music video mirror that of the Hanged Man in Crowley's Thoth tarot? Is this not another exhortation to "remember"? It is important to her because she believes something important has been lost; something in all of us. 

"I'm the queen of alchemy
I know a way to make gold by mixing our
Souls to escape reality"

Why does she always mention fire? Why is she always burning? 

"Anyone can start again
Not through love but through revenge
Through the fire, we're born again
Peace by vengeance brings the end"

People simply refuse to stop and think about what any of these lines actually mean. My unpopular opinion in the unpopular opinions thread.

9 hours ago, slang said:

 

The "tunnel" is also a constraint by men? "Handmade beauty sealed up by two man-made walls". Also, orgasms are exoteric, while death, by its very nature, is esoteric.

 

BTW, in Wikipedia-ing some of your terms, I've seemed to have found a Rosetta Stone for your latest post in the Paradise and the Esoteric Origin of mankind Thread. I mean I was immediately struck by the picture of the "tree of life represented by the Kabbalah" on the right (of the first link), which reminded of that (esoteric, as in puzzling) post. 

"I've had like a long time interest in all things ancient and occult like so many people and I guess I draw on a little bit of that inspiration for my music."

She's mapped out the Tree for you in her albums. The constraint built by men is the Tower; the two tigers in Born to Die. It's about anamnesis and remembering the Self within that has been abandoned. Alchemical coniunctio is a "death" preceding new life. "Knowing that you're your own doorway to the answers."

I mean, did you think she made Tropico just for fun? "Walk in the way of my soft resurrection" was her message.

3 hours ago, slang said:

I agree with both the people who are put off, and those who are titillated, with the "fuck me to death" line. However, the LDR apologist in me wants to suggest that what LDR is tapping into is the rather strange-bedfellow relationship between sex and death. Namely,

The tunnel is the threshold from the ordinary world to the reveal of the heart. This is an esoteric, not exoteric, death.

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sorry to the folks who I can only assume are super Trump/Pence supporters or hyper liberals or flip-flopping headline grabbing critics,

Enlightened centrist queen

On 7/31/2017 at 2:15 AM, LanasPhilosophy said:

he architecture of the best american record

the city streets mistake or design

every now and then the stars aline

starline tours honeymoon

fly to the moon

be my undercover lover

my old man is a bad man

leaving my old man again

play my music watch you leave

he is why the thousands of girls love the way bill plays guitar

music to watch boys to playing my guitar only one of my toys

hundred doillar bill - inventor of electricty is on that bill

body electric

bill plays guitar 

bill is code for jim

the shapes of letters hold clues

jim is everything but jim jim is other

the other woman the other man

the jazz singer the cult leater
 

  Hide contents

as architecture says(BEST AMERICAN RECORD) ITS ALL FOR YOU just like video games

everything she does is for this 1 figure..... but this person is no person at all......... everything she does is for all of us ..... we're who shes singing too

we're lost but the map is at our fingertips....... we're overloaded with information that we lost our connection to the universe......

in nevada she sings "id rather know what god knows" pawn shop blues
she is stealing the world back..... shes standing up to the disease of humanity..... truely good people do not have the energy or time or will to do what lanas done......... lana is one of us with a big secret to share.... shes truely fearless which is why shes still going...... she has the universe on her side

video games

television heaven

blue light kissing

new kind of porno

fuck me hard in the pouring rain

take offf all your clothjes ... all my dresses with the tags still on them
little red party dress im a mess im crazy
you tell me that it was good to be crazy
your fucking crazy
id rather know what god knows
children of the bad revoution partying our only soution
boarding school got a problem lets solve it
beautiful people beautiful problems
john lennon can be mentioned no problem
but she had to remoive the names in get free.......... courtney love and kurt perhaps?????|
lana is making his death worth something.... taking the baton from courtney
hole's final song hapopy ending story "the race is lost the war is won the battle noiw has just begun"
the stevie nicks presence in all courtneys music..
the cameo on beautiful problems
the newest song by courtney called killer radio
obvious shes hinting hole is retired
decode it and finish the porno
hole and nirvana create the fetus
lana is giving bith
the fans need to mother it


i can make anyone beleive this..... anyone who is in love with lana will be able 2 understand and follow me..... any non lana fans will be blind ...... this is how we win the war and change the world and be our own gods.........
children of the bad revolution
little girl she was lost
now shes found everything and shes doing it for all of us please dont let her be misunderstood
nirvana and hole were step 1
a camouflaged metaphorical fetus
as all the album titles/pictures suggest

americas sweetheart 2004 was rleeased under courtney love not hole to prve to herself how real the magic is..
she was nearly destroyed
then she returned to hole and finished with the nobodys daughter record

because a 20 year period of music between 2 real lovers
camouflaged with drugs and murder theories and cynical old ppl
a select few can understand this truth and move it forward
lana + courtney + nirvana + you     embrace it...... each lana fan has a path to the truth
mine is so extreme that i feel i must present it
others may be in doubt but have strange things happen related to lana

endless summer tour was with courtney
courtneys celebrity skin album has song called boys on the radio with layered deep meanings
in your endless summer night ill be on the otherside is a line

now lanas songs mentioning radio relate perfectly it all related and they seem 2 be best friends

give me the benefit of the doubt and lets start a project

 

there is no such thing as mistakes...... thats why her baby dances UNDERNEARTH  her archtecture
she crafted her art as a place u can move out of.....
you cannot move out of it and look in unless your in love with it...... true love
a fake scientiist cannot access lanas art code

she is real
she has power
she is humanitys last hope?

 

i wanna be the whole worlds girl gramnma, tell me do u think thats wrong? her oldest live video is that
nirvanas silver  ---- gramma take me home gramma take me home

nirvanas music displays the opposite of the meaning of nirvana
courtney love latched onto him like a supernatural parasite
he was seduced by her just like i was sewduced by lana

he decided the magic is real and he wanted to do something worthwhile
something to throw her a curveball knowing she can survive anything
the process of her survival would be so public cuz how famous he was
if there was ever a noble death it was his
he had faith in her
without kurt and courtney

there would be no lana

thats a fact

 

On 5/12/2017 at 1:34 AM, LanasPhilosophy said:

Spoiler

 

when you take every line mentioning "fire" and put them together in order from first released to last

then take unreleased mentions of fire as sidenotes

you realize fire is a total metaphor for something else


when you do this for every thing in her music

you decode the web like the secrets of the universe

for example

cherry coke         serial killer
cherry knots          carmen

strawberries, cherries, angel kiss          summer wine
pepsi cola           pussy cola

roses in between my thighs      honeymoon

guns that blaze around you

fire that surrounds you

guns and roses       guns and roses UV
into the rose garden   burnt norton
fire causes burn
guns and fire  = gunfire
roses red like cherries
lips red cherries - black beauty

burnt turns to black
pussy symbolized by roses and cola taste
cherry cola linked to cherry knots
cherry knots tied with tongue in mouth
pussy tasted with tongue/mouth
mother heard me singing in the garden - i can fly
flowers symbolize fertility and red fruits symbolize her voice and words in general
the link to mouth, pussy and gunfure is the ultraviolent relationship
the symbol is fire burning her body in an act of love making
kinda like honey synbolizing sunlight therefore firey hotness and moon .. feminine cold   honey+moon comes after ultraviolet light join ina  rleationship
got your bible and gun --- cruel world

bible is words like cherries and cherry coke links words
to pussy
the end result after combining all these and way more =  shes presenting a message through the metaphor of giving birth to a philosophy
the code for philosophy is porno
|makes perfect sense to have lyrics about relationships that can be applied to the universe/molecules and everything in between
new kind of porno one that has yet been born-o - resistance
born to die album
all the steps between birth and death are the making of the porno
ultimately since birth and death are opposite like crest anbd trough of a wave
when the death arrives and her music catalogue is complete....

it will represent a new hidden modern form of buddhism invented by her or someone
it is camouflaged due to evil world conspiracy that will not allow a a list popstar to have a posititve influence
feet dont fail me now take me to the finish line
off to the races - lyrics about her man and symbolizing the giant metaphor to begin with life as the race
every step in the race breaks her heart thats why so many songs about heartbreak also thats just glue holding the metaphor together
blue jeans and new song blue skies
connecting pants to clouds
all my dresses with ther tags still on them fine china - clue that she doesnt actually wear the clothes she sings, proof of metaphor

all dressed up with nowhere to go ---- carmen and love
tying cherry knots from carmen is like hiding messages in her songs and getting dressed up with nowhere to go in particular
favourite sweater  little red party dress on, take off all of clothes, cant keep your hands off me or yuour pants on,
the clothing covers up the body

just like the cherry knots tying in her lyrics covers the true meaning of song
fine china   and fresh linen --- the fresh linen represents all clothing
the fina china links to without you to watch her fall just like fine china "im going down now"
tonnes of lyrics about going down
but only pllace she can really be going is to the finish line like born to die says
lets go get high   cruel world heroin references
if shes using flavour to describe her pussy like cola and uses cherry cola in serial killer
this means the die in born to die uses symbol of taste therefore candy in cruel world symbolized receiving her message "i love my candy"
lets go get high and so happy now that your gone......
she loves her candy just like the song love.... she feels young and in love and genuinely seems happy
shes tasting the candy of her message
the road was long had fun in meantime on heroin and guns
but those roads were only to one destination.... the road to the birth of the new kind of porno
just like video games says everything for you,   architecture says  all roads lead to you everything i say and do
the the road is long but leads to one thing
all roads lead to death but death leads to birth if you apply buddhist principles which she clearly references alot
so now all her music architecture dancing cigarettes driving through highway
all her lyrics mentioning cars + album covers takes it to a whole nother level
nevada lyrics and may jailer lyrics prefice this born to die journey perfectly giving it more credibility without overlapping the message which why different names crucial
houses of the holy lyrics give perfect support to my theory
party favours and cherry knots carmen
like to party and have fun - cruel world
swan song put your white tennies shoes on and follow me
put your shoes on and follow her down the road
white symbolizes clean slate fresh start
feet dont fail me now
if we follow her to the finish line we would say same thing
so following her leads to freedom after retirement
when all her songs are done it will be our swan song "defition final thing done before retirement"
so first song and video born to die confirms theres a race
off to the races track 2 puts emphasis on that point
racing down the roads, love video finally goes offroad and truck floats into sun
cruel world live edit changes lyric to "im so happy now in the sun"
sun = flames and violence like jim she sings of
hundred dollar bill about a hooker and first song mentioniung jim also mentions ultra violent swing
now national anthem money is the anthem of success
if her lyrics symbolize a large combined simple message using this song to link jim and bill is perfect
hundred dollar BILL  ... chasing paper last i heart in blue jeans
thousands of girls love the way bill plaqys guitat
music to watch boys to - playing guitar only one of my toys
its all a game to me anyway  - Alan Watts philosopher always stresses life as a game
lana vs alan and rey vs watts    same letters first name opposite meaning lastname  light vs electricity
now watching boys like a video game guitar as a toy
bill and jim are simply a metaphor for her lyrical puzzel
shes the only one playing guitar
the national anthem
money isnt really the anthem to success its just used to link the names bill and jim
just so happens ben franklin discoverer of electricity is on the american hundred dollar bill
watching boys like watching a video  ---- video games
without you ---- stolen images
national anthem      "image"ination   loves me cuz im playing on the radio
links the male figures bill and jim to without you song i have nothing without you
stolen images and playing on the radio linked to  terrence loves you
similar chorus to without you
talks about transmitting through the televiosion and all the lights on
in without you all the lights mean nothing without you
now this confirms that whoever she is singing to cannot hear her
now mabye this could all be about the true self vs the false ego
and she is singing to herself all along????

 

 

please note the above post was just off the top of my head with no thinking or looking up facts or editting....
just seeing if anyone here is on a similar path as me with lanas music

 

 

Unpopular opinion: This guy took so many fucking drugs that he actually managed to pierce the veil enough to discern some part of the "deep psychological universe" underlying Lana's work.

Don't do drugs, kids. There are safer methods that won't leave you completely mindbroken.

8 minutes ago, bluechemtrails said:

Ok, we know the versions are the same, but how do we know it was ripped and that it wasn't the original version that was later uploaded to Youtube by others?

Because we have the original WAV versions and they're better quality than the YouTube rips (better frequency spectrum).

16 hours ago, honeymoon is alive said:

i can really see some change on lana's perspective on God and i really like that. since lust for life (around the time she allegedly started to frequent some services) we can see how she changed and isn't that rebel girl anymore like she was on born to die. nfr, chemtrails and blue banisters only reafirm her good relation she has with religion now like when she writes "There's nothing wrong contemplating God" or "If you don't pray you'll never learn"

I don't think she ever really changed. Born to Die was more about remembering the times when she was a rebel. She's far more open about it now; in the Banisters livestream she's going full crystal child. I think she views people like Jesus more as animus archetypes, being the "big studier of Carl Jung" that she is.

Lost but now I am found = Reference to "Amazing Grace" and finding God

"Bel Air" = Spiritual rebirth (the being "found") and asking others to follow the same path

The tracks in between are more about going from lost to found, summed up in Tropico. She said Ultraviolence was a "spiritual" album.

2013: 

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Social work involves working with people that society has forgotten or left behind, or who simply can’t function in normal society. It usually involves reintegration . . .

I’m not a trained social worker. I’ve been sober for ten years, so it was drug and alcohol rehabilitation. It was more traditional twelve-step call stuff. Just people who can’t get it together, me and groups of other people who have been based in New York for a long time working with people who need help and reached out. It was about building communities around sobriety and staying clean and stuff like that. That was my focus since I moved to the Bronx when I was eighteen. I liked music, but I considered it to be a luxury. It wasn’t my primary focus: the other stuff was really my life....

 

So your social work was based on your own experiences?

Yeah, because I was an addict who got clean....

 

So obviously it must have informed your music.

Yeah, it’s been my main influence, I would say....

 

What are some of the new themes, you think?

Well, I graduated with a metaphysics degree and I loved philosophy, I’ve kind of gone back to things that made me feel excited about learning maybe six years ago when I was in school. And I have a boyfriend I really like, I write about him a lot. That’s really it.

 

I’d read that you’d studied philosophy. Was there a certain school of thought that really interested you?

Well, I mixed it with my studies in theology, because it was the best school for the Jesuit faith and all of the Jesuits taught philosophy classes. There was just a lot of talk about going back to that basic question: Why do we exist? How did reality come to be? Why do we do what we do? And how not to become the butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker, the guardians of the middle-class—that really interested me. I don’t know. Yeah, I loved being around people who wondered why we were here.

 

Do you still pay attention to what’s happening with the Church? Like, the new pope?

Yes, I’m aware. I wish him all the best.

 

And what do you think of the Church sex scandals?

It’s hard to see other people’s bad choices ruin the mysticism that can come from inside the walls of a church. It’s unfortunate....

 

Is it because you lived in a small town in upstate New York?

Yeah, probably. It was boring. That town is crazy, too. I was a bad girl, but I’m good now.

On 10/11/2022 at 2:25 AM, Xenoblade 3 said:

I guess you’re right lol? Forget what I said then. But I don’t know, her music doesn’t strike me as religious like a church or something like that. More like questioning of existence beyond god. Philosophy more than “religious “. Like someone said.

 

Born To Die tackles intelligent design and creationism. The song itself questions it. I guess that is religious? 

 

Tropoico also had the alien thing which once again ties into her metaphysics background. I don’t think she’s in favor of Jesus but a devine being, yes. An alien could be our god and we’re simulated by a massive computer. That’s Lana’s take.

2005: First, I say my prayer, then I'm all right
I sit in my chair, you dim the light
When I look, I stare with inner a-sight

2006: "Pawn Shop Blues," 'nuff said

~2012: Is it by mistake or design

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I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world. So there is a sad tone, but also real joy. It seemed like a mix of two beautiful worlds coming together.

2011: https://pitchfork.com/features/rising/8657-lana-del-rey/

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Pitchfork: You started singing in a church choir—do you think your church would approve of some of the lyrics on “Kinda Outta Luck” like the one about hitting dudes in the back of the head with a gun?

LDR: God has saved me a million times so I think he must’ve enjoyed that song.

2018: https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/lana-del-rey-cover-story

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Do you consider yourself a spiritual person? —Ian

Yes. I believe you are your own doorway to an understanding of something greater. I never think of how I can get bigger or better, I just think, How can I go deeper? How can I know myself more so that I’m a clearer conduit for whatever else is in the ether? Meditation’s a big part of my life. I was already doing that when I was young, thinking about what I wanted to do, things I wanted to manifest.

Spiritual, but not "holy roller" religious. She mentions Kundalini yoga in Violet. Her attraction to Churchome seems more to be because it's a communal activity she can do with her friends.

And it's possible, just as Jesus is her bestest friend, some of her other songs may be indirectly referencing things in that direction. "There's so much wholesomeness there to be discovered if people looked at it from a wholesome lens."

On 6/20/2013 at 9:21 PM, sukiedelrey said:

I feel like if you have a degree in something, you should be able to talk about it. If she spent four whole years studying philosophy, I feel like she should be able to better articulate its ideas and seem aware/passionate/interested in questions regarding it. Her quotes about religion/philosophy seem underdeveloped at best and immature and misunderstanding at worst. She seems to fumble in talking about the topics  that supposedly influenced her growing up and music so much--nihilism, hedonism, free will, spirituality, fate--which should be very intimate and familiar to her. Remember that cringe-worthy interview where she defined metaphysics as "mathematically proving the reality of god"?? Maybe she was too high on ~methamphetamines~ through college to pay attention to the thing she was majoring in.

 

It's certainly a difficult thing to reconcile the stupidly hateful Lana in recent interviews with the Lana who kisses her crying fans and the Lana who wrote the sheer brilliance that is "You and Me." 

(Nothing about Lana's metaphysics, as portrayed in her work, is underdeveloped. You would have to dive deep into such subjects as Neoplatonism to know that stuff. What she said about her metaphysics in 2012-13 was.)

On 6/20/2013 at 10:22 PM, FROGGO said:

I don't think Lana ever actually graduated. I mean, the fact that she consistently flubs and gives nonanswers when talking about philosophy/metaphysics (remember that interview when she was explicitly asked about metaphysics and couldn't give a legitimate answer?), the "mathematically proving reality of God" answer was horribly ignorant, and she CONSISTENTLY says that she went to school to study metaphysics... red flags galore.

An aside—I stumbled on this nine-year-old thread and everyone was totally convinced that Lana was a complete moron, lol. She really was trying to play dumb on the metaphysics stuff as part of some weird persona that went completely out of her control. Even a decade later, people still think she's a nihilist as depicted in Ride, even though Tropico and any of her interviews in the following years would prove that wrong—"die young" was meant in a mystical sense. Like, everyone knows she’s hiding something, but WTF is it? It’s not that Interscope is writing everything, and she’s had ten years to prove that. She just wants to completely obfuscate that there’s more to Born to Die than a bunch of pop songs; it’s more like culture-jamming.

On 6/22/2013 at 1:00 PM, slang said:

It's hard not to see the "Lana Del Rey" persona as a foot-in-the-door technique to get popular, in a sense similar to Gaga, Adele, Perry, Kesha, and then to do something with her status. I don't consider this an authenticity rehash, as my thinking is that the persona was a tool to get noticed, but it's the quality of her work that got her famous. I'm hoping what she wanted to do with her status was bitch-slap the music business in the constructive sense of making it easier for diverse and retro kinds of music to become popular.

(Note how Lana always says that she wants nothing to do with the "culture"—she regards herself as a foreign invader, a chameleon, who has to play to their tastes—"I know you like the bad girls"—but badly overshot the target in 2012. I recall in one old interview, she calls herself an "introvert" and then quickly walks the statement back when she realizes it would make her sound abnormal. 2012 Lana would never say the crazy shit that 2021 Lana says, even if their beliefs haven't changed.)

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I wanted music to change in the early 2000s and I wanted it to be better than it was. I think it is and I genuinely think I had a hand in it for female singer-songwriters.... It takes a more dignified-looking person with a better reputation to call out the world, or the President or some guy who runs a restaurant. I’m going to be the person who corroborates that story, the blonde at the end of the bar… 

Which brings us back to the "Love" video—Lana's modern manifesto, with a knowing wink. Lady Stardust teaches the kids how to become Star Children and finally venture into space. Lana takes the place of the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which "seems to represent and even trigger epic transitions in the history of human evolution." Laying all the cards on the table. (And somehow predicting Elon Musk launching his own car into space the following year.)

https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/lana-del-rey-cover-story

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I think really, there’s a rise of sociopathy and narcissism, and a mental health crisis. Everyone’s kind of becoming aware of the fact that that needs to be fully addressed. Maybe there is a link. It’s probably related to consciousness.... I’m a realist as much as I am a mystic. I believe we will still be on the planet until extremely different conditions.

What about all these children and all their children's children?
And why am I even wonderin' that today?
Maybe my contribution could be as small as hopin'
That words could turn to birds
And birds would send my thoughts your way
I'd trade it all for a stairway to heaven

"I believe words are sacred." The dream that they had In the one nine sixties.

On 6/21/2013 at 11:59 PM, COLACNT said:

i kind of feel like the root of her insecurities / neuroses / eccentricities stem from the seemingly vast disconnect between her outer appearance and her inner world -- and the resulting disconnect between the way people perceive her and the way she actually is. i think this interviewer puts it best: 

 

"she is capable of shifting swiftly from a kind of coltish innocence (*2) to vampish knowingness (*1). It’s a quality that is hard to pin down ... a kind of doubleness, a sense of duality and merging contradictions. She is a person into whom you can read a lot."

 

... how do you trust that person when you can't understand or process their fundamental energy?

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The verse was about the way things were with one person, and the chorus was the way that I wished things had really been with another person, who I thought about for a long time. That was what happened, you know? He’d come home and I’d see him. But then the chorus wasn’t like that. That was the way that I wished it was – the melody sounds so compelling and heavenly because I wanted it to be that way. The verse is more matter-of-fact because that’s how it was. It’s a mix of memories and the way I wished it could have been.

This gives some good insight into how Lana was constructing her music around the time of BTD. There’s those two currents of the mundane and transcendent running through everything—or death and love, as she said elsewhere. People just could not believe how some kid obsessed with tropical kitsch could come out of nowhere with a conviction to not record "stupid music" and create this perfect pop album on the very first try, then decide she had done all she could in the genre and proceed to create the music she actually wanted to make, baroque neo-psychedelia. The whole thing was pure fucking witchcraft.

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[A]nything that came through me to help you is not even ego-based. It's so much a channel that it's almost not even a compliment. It's just awesome that it happened and came through. So I mean... If that makes any sense.

10 hours ago, Veinsineon said:

wat da hell

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Well, I mean, people aren’t going to understand.

There are seven worlds in my eyes
 
I'm accessing all of them once
 
One to draw my words from and my muses
Another one I try and harness late at night that lies somewhere
Off of the right of Jupiter
 

Inside of my stomach, the cosmos are baking
The universe hung like a mobile
The alignments of these planets unique
In me the earth moves around the sun
No land all sea

"We wanted someone with the Blessed Mother on his hands."
 

17 hours ago, Surf Noir said:

she also mentions a gate in off to the races

 

ready, set, the gate is down & now we’re going in

 

if this is in anyway interesting, it’s just a word but it seems like the way she uses it is kinda vague

It seems like there are a few possible interpretations:

• People keep breaking into her house (simple)
• She found the keys to the gate that were dropped
• The monsters used the keys to open the gate she kept shut

God knows.

Bish is over there reading Aleister Crowley and Hermes Trismegistus while y'all still think her favorite book is Lolita--

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I've had like a long-time interest in all things ancient and occult, like so many people. And I guess I draw on a little bit of that inspiration for my music and for whatever. I love to read up on stuff like that.

Every Lana interview is full of gems. For as obsessive as her fans are, they could do a better job of collating them all in one place:

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Almost every song on Born To Die is in the second person, the same goes for Paradise. To what extent is it all addressed to the same person?

It depends. It’s just like a general, spiritual collective. The ether....

 

For me, there are moments of pure happiness, but you can’t achieve that over a sustained period of time. It’s just you try to make those as many as possible.

Definitely. And I mean, it sounds really strange, but just in general, I have found that devoting your life to the people around you and caring for them is the true road to general happiness.

 

Why is that strange?

Well, I mean, people aren’t going to understand. Trust me. But I’m just saying, in my experience.

 

Well, it does seem kind of sad, it is almost as though you can’t do anything right.

Yeah, oh it is sad. Trust me. It’s not fair.

 

And do you think that’s a feminism thing? Or would you say an anti-woman thing?

[laughs] No, I think it’s an anti-me thing.

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THEOREMS
I. The world progresses by virtue of the appearance of Christs (geniuses).

II. Christs (geniuses) are men with super-consciousness of the highest order.

III. Super-consciousnes of the highest order is obtainable by known methods.

Therefore, by employing the quintessence of known methods we cause the world to progress.

 

MISTAKES OF MYSTICS
I. Since truth is supra-rational, it is incommunicable in the language of reason.

II. Hence all mystics have written nonsense, and what sense they have written is so far untrue.

I know some might find that interpretation of Born to Die to be a bit out there, but look at this very revealing quote from Lana:

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There is a message. I really do believe that words are one of the last forms of magic and I’m a bit of a mystic at heart.... I’ve got good intentions. It’s not always going to come out right – it hasn’t come out right a lot of the time – but at the core my intentions have always been so good. 

There's a new revolution
A loud evolution
That I saw

Back in 2012, she was still trying to play dumb at being some Marilyn Monroe type. They ask her about metaphysics, and she starts dancing around the subject like it's on fire:

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Well, it depends on what branch of metaphysics you're studying and sort of... I mean, the term metaphysics has been... the meaning of it, it means something different now than obviously what Aristotle meant when he wrote his first books on metaphysics and invented that term.

 

I mean, now it kind of suggests more of like a New Age way of life, which actually I'm also interested in, those New Age books, which more have to do with visualizing the future you'd like to manifest into reality, and that kind of has more of a metaphysical... You would call that like a metaphysical... but originally, it was philosophers trying to trace back the study... the origin of the soul and how the origin of reality came to be.... 

 

If we all collectively started to think about what else was out there and pooled all of our imagination, which is the most important thing, and then resources and knowledge and money and intelligence towards... what's out there even further... It's in talking about it where it all begins. And that's something... that like i was talking earlier about the spirit of the '60s and the early '70s, kind of before Vietnam, I mean, everyone was... so conversational and everyone was throwing out all these ideas.

At the end of the Tropico film, you see them ascending to heaven and flying saucers appear. From what I can gather from the crumbs she's dropped, she wanted the world to attain a higher level of consciousness so they could finally go into space and make alien contact (itself a very New Age idea). "I'm more into SpaceX and Tesla, what's going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities."

On Born to Die's meaning, the only lie is one of omission:

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I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world. So there is a sad tone, but also real joy. It seemed like a mix of two beautiful worlds coming together.

I was so confused as a little child

Born of confusion 
And quiet collusion of which
Mostly I've known

On how she uses men from her past as archetypal figures in her work (2012):

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I had met this guy and I was really struck by him visually. And when it became clear that we couldn't be together anymore, I just knew in my heart that I would still honor that relationship for a long time. It was just more about living in the memories of the best of the past and, yeah, just honoring that time and that sort of work.

On how particular she is about choosing everything in her videos to fit into her archetypal world (2014):

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I mean, obviously, for me, I storyboard every one of the videos and have a close relationship with whoever the director is, trying to sort of explain why I choose which frames I would want at each tempo change, et cetera.... I think knowing what I've wanted to do for so long and kind of being tamed in my own way for so long, the person I'm looking for is just sort of a more serene, intelligent, probably an older figure. But I was aware that people would take that literally as a sort of, I don't know, archetypal... maybe already been done, played-on relationship. But for me, I have a more personal connection with the concept of a very giving, affectionate, older... maybe older than me character. But I mean, one thing I felt that didn't necessarily get translated is that scene in the car was supposed to almost have a more heavenly filter on it. It was supposed to be more of... almost more of like a wave and a haze over the lens so that you could see that where the reality was the beach but the dream was the car with the love interest. So it's hard. Some things get lost in translation. And for that reason, I think... I'm open to more criticism because I'm exploring my fantasies. I'm exploring my kind of archetypal visions. 

Cigarettes and Robitussin

Will I ever get to heaven?

I’m gentle.

I’m funny when I’m drunk,

But I haven’t been drunk for 14 years.

Lana points back to 2006 as being the pivotal year.

Hello it's the most famous woman you know on the iPad
Calling from beyond the grave, I just wanna say
"Hi dad"

Rob still knows her as Lizzy; does she call him from "beyond the grave" because Lizzy died on the day she saw palm trees in black and white?

On how nobody understands her music and she'd like to keep it that way:

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This is Del Rey waving away the mist that surrounds her music, deflating other people’s grand ideas without apologizing, the same way her new album does. She wanted her new songs to be as legible as they could be. “I think that’s what people like about this record,” she says. “There’s clarity to it.”

 

“It sounds kind of hippy-dippy, but there is, like, a little process that reveals itself to me and is revealing to me about myself,” she says.... Wandering around the margins of your consciousness can lead you to the center of your self. Jotting down things you didn’t actually do can tell you what you’re really doing. Ultimately, it “has to do with writing one’s own narrative,” she says. “How does one do that? One actually physically writes their own narrative.”

 

As for the meanings of her lyrics, not all of them are up for discussion. Some of her most intimate and enigmatic phrases swirl alongside one another during “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing,” including the lyric, “Serving up God in a burnt coffee pot for the triad.” Would she explain what the triad is? “I will not,” she says, smiling and shrugging. “I’m not going to tell everybody everything.... There’s so much to be treasured [in a song], just keep to yourself so that nobody can trash it.”

Get out of my blood, salamander!...

And yet, everywhere I go, it seems there you are,

And there I am.

Before touching on Kundalini in a poem, Lana uses blatant alchemical symbolism with the salamander (called, like Jim, a fire-eater). The salamander being another fire emblem (not the Video Games); the Sulphur as all-consuming fire that is the source of true poetic insight. She would rather keep her inner life private, but the fire in her veins compels her. (Since this part of the board is indexed on Google, maybe I'm even giving away too much? Or maybe this is all just mad ravings.)

On fighting her Shadow and monsters:

Shaking my ass is the only thing that's
Got this black narcissist off my back
She couldn't care less
And I never cared more

In her "Money Power Glory" commentary, she mentions that it was inspired by Carl Jung and the concept of projection--but it also serves as an exorcism of her degenerate beauty queen persona (and let's face it, it was a persona).

Monsters still under my bed
That I could never fight off
A gatekeeper carelessly dropping the keys on my nights off

What gatekeeper? To what gate? The only one I can remember is from, again, "Bel Air"--

Gargoyles standing at the front of your gate

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This track and the record are about these two worlds — death and love — coming together.

On 9/17/2022 at 10:00 AM, Surf Noir said:

@DeadAgainst i just wanted to say, it makes me so, so happy to see somebody making contributions to this amazing, spellbinding thread, even if sometimes it’s difficult to keep up with it all lol!

 

do you have any thoughts about the track “born to die”? it’s a song i’ve been quite into lately, it feels significant to me, at this moment, somehow, spiritually? subconsciously? psychologically? it could be anything, but i definitely feel like there’s a lot to be said about that song, it just feels so subtle, abstract, as she said in “joshy & i” so hard to reel in

Watching the old Born to Die interviews, Lana is extremely cagey about what is happening, as she is with everything on the record; she will either have some brusque explanation about "having fun before you die" or not say anything at all. Virtually everything she says in early 2012 publicly appears to be subterfuge; a blind of normality to hide that she's "fucking crazy." Even the title, Born to Die, was not meant as a nihilistic statement of "live fast, die young." As Lana later suggested, the title appears to have been chosen because of the realization that "we were born to die" in her childhood--

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I remember being — I was, I think, 4 years old — and I’d just seen a show on TV where the person was killed. And I turned to my parents and said, “Are we all going to die?” They said “Yes,” and I was totally distraught! I broke down in tears and said, “We have to move!”

There is one frame that shows that Lana is actually showing something more:

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He who can understand that the story of his higher nature is imbedded in this symbolism will receive intimations concerning a great awakening that is possible, and will know that after the sacred Mystery of Death there is a glorious Mystery of Resurrection. (A.E. Waite)

Here is rather the "death" of Lizzy Grant as she crosses the threshold to the reveal of her heart; the Lovers an alchemical coniunctio (cigarettes always having the same alchemical fire symbolism for Lana).

Who, me?
Why?

She asks God why she was chosen bear a fragment of paradise not of this world.

Feet don't fail me now
Take me to the finish line
Oh, my heart, it breaks every step that I take
But I'm hoping at the gates, they'll tell me that you're mine

(Cf. Gargoyles standing at the front of your gate
Trying to tell me to wait, but I can’t wait to see you
So I run like I'm mad to Heaven’s door
I don’t wanna be bad, I won’t cheat you no more)
 

A double meaning; Lizzy walking the path of higher consciousness and an exhortation by the Lonely Queen to join her.

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I really did want the tigers, just because of what they symbolize to me, and just visually, they're so striking... I always like the vision of a girl in a white nightgown with two majestic tigers.

The image of the Lonely Queen seems to be a combination of two Tarot cards.

Come and take a walk on the wild side
Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain
You like your girls insane, so
Choose your last words, this is the last time
'Cause you and I
We were born to die

Another exhortation by the Goddess to walk the path that leads from death to resurrection on the "wild side" across the abyss.

Lost, but now I am found
I can see, but once I was blind
I was so confused as a little child
Tried to take what I could get, scared that I couldn't find
All the answers, honey
 

Spoken by Lana recalling life as Lizzy, searching for answers—and finding them.

Lana seems to have had two actual goals for Born to Die, to tell her story and to turn people on, in the '60s sense. Her manifesto was fully encapsulated in "Bel Air," a directive to the listener--

Mon amour, sweet child of mine, you’re divine
Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s okay to shine?
 

Don’t be afraid of me
Don’t be ashamed
Walk in the way of my soft resurrection

Darling, I’m waiting to greet you
Come to me, baby

Quote

What is the meaning and reason behind the word "paradise" for you since you've been using it often in lyrics, name for the new album and your tattoo?

 

For me, every so often, I find a word or a place that really speaks to me. so certain words... I believe words are sacred. They're the one thing that translates across all the spectrums of humanity. So I believe in the power of really loving words or really, in my case, I love really tropical words or kind of words that suggest a heavenly afterlife, like heaven or paradise or... So I just really love words that have an exotic ring to it and I kind of try and incorporate it into my music in hopes of manifesting my actual surroundings to kind of be as beautiful as those words. 

To that end, she lays within her traditional songs untraditional anamnesis triggers, usually sung in a higher register, meant to speak directly to the unconscious--

You just need to remember
I will love you till the end of time
I would wait a million years
Promise you'll remember that you're mine
Baby, can you see through the tears?
 

On Ultraviolence, she still considers this to be a worthy project; an invocation of "the freedom land of the '70s." But "Shades of Cool" expresses her frustration that she "can't break through your world." The lyrics take a more personal turn. She tries again on Honeymoon to gather the Freaks, but there is a sort of resignation—"God knows I tried."

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The veil or mask of life is perpetuated in change, transformation and passage from lower to higher, and this is more fitly represented in the rectified Tarot by one of the apocalyptic visions than by the crude notion of the reaping skeleton. Behind it lies the whole world of ascent in the spirit. The mysterious horseman moves slowly, bearing a black banner emblazoned with the Mystic Rose, which signifies life. Between two pillars on the verge of the horizon there shines the sun of immortality....

 

There should be no need to point out that the suggestion of death which I have made in connection with the previous card is, of course, to be understood mystically... the exotic and almost unknown entrance, while still in this life, into the state of mystical death is a change in the form of consciousness and the passage into a state to which ordinary death is neither the path nor gate. The existing occult explanations of the 13th card are, on the whole, better than usual, rebirth, creation, destination, renewal, and the rest. (A.E. Waite)

You say that you wanna go
To a land that's far away
How are we supposed to get there
With the way that we're living today?
You talk lots about God
Freedom comes from the call

Quote

What's the key to getting free?

 

I think going deeper, you know? Knowing that you're your own doorway to the answers and not looking for answers in other people.

"I can be smart when it's important. But most men don't like it."

(Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)

You have to take me out of this strange trailer park life

In the first known performance of "Yayo" in 2006 (? Lanapedia is unreliable on this point), Lizzy stands shrouded in darkness, wearing black. The lyrics are different. Instead of "hello Heaven," we have only (if I hear right) "I think the stars are right about there, but it's gettin' there." She immediately segues into "Pawn Shop Blues". 

In 2017, “Pawn Shop Blues” became the second song from AKA to be resurrected by Lana Del Rey:

The video is highly symbolic. Lana appears as a bride, recalling the “Ultraviolence” video. Butterflies are traditionally a symbol of Psyche, the soul; her story is told in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, AKA The Golden Ass, a Platonic allegory wherein the protagonist undergoes “a long journey, literal and metaphorical… He finally finds salvation through the intervention of the goddess Isis”. Lana stands as a pregnant Goddess, Lizzy locked like Snow White in the coffin of the depths from which she must be raised. This is a slight inversion of the usual interpretation: Lana as Self as Goddess cannot be trapped, as she is eternal; she is beckoning her from a higher plane to free her limited self, as seen in Tropico. Cigarettes are the consuming fire in this hermetic vessel that cleanses a tar-black soul.

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I want to give a shoutout to Tessa DiPietro.… the first thing she said to me was, “A question is coming off of your right shoulder that wants to be acknowledged, and that question is, how does it serve you to be submissive in your life?” And I went a shade of red you can't describe and I didn't know if it was a sexual innuendo, but I said, “Well, if you’re submissive in general, people don’t get mad at you.” She said, “It’s not a question that needs to be answered, it's a question to present to your psyche.” Since then, she's brought so many. I like the concept that she brought to light about the over-culture. You know how some things go badly in your life, things are also weird in other people's lives? There's a power of that superconscious. It's also why you'll see like five movies come out that are all about Snow White. The tone of the over-culture is very powerful.

Now that we’ve established a rough chronology, it may be possible to read “Get Free” as “her story” depicting the important moments in her recent life:

No Kung Fu/The Ocean/Kill Kill/AKA

Finally

I'm crossing the threshold
From the ordinary world
To the reveal of my heart
Undoubtedly

That will for certain
Take the dead out of the sea
& the darkness from the arts

Born to Die

This is my commitment

My modern manifesto
I'm doing it for all of us

Who never got the chance
For Amy and for Whitney
& all my birds of paradise

Who never got to fly at night
'Cause they were caught up in the dance

Paradise

Sometimes it feels like I've got a war in my mind
I want to get off, but I keep riding the ride
I never really noticed that I had to decide
To play someone's game or live my own life
& now I do

I wanna move
Out of the black (out of the black!)
Into the blue (into the blue!)

Ultraviolence/Honeymoon

Finally

Gone is the burden
Of the Crowley way of being
That comes from energies combined
Like my part was I

Was not discerning
And you, as we found out
Were not in your right mind

Lust for Life

There's no more chasing rainbows

& hoping for an end to them

Their arches are illusions

Solid at first glance

But then you try to touch them

There's nothing to hold onto

The colors used to lure you in

& put you in a trance

With Lust for Life, she was, as said at the time, jolted back to reality by the Trump presidency. The songs get political, and when she sings of Lady Liberty, there is no hint of acknowledgement of her past usage. This marks the end of what could be considered her “classic” era. Now comes a desire to take off Crowley’s uniform of imagery, strip herself down and rebuild herself anew as one engaged with the world instead of sinking in the quicksand of her thoughts.

I go on trips with my friends to the beach who don’t know that I’m crazy.

I can do that.

I can do anything,

Even leave you…

The more I step into my poetry,

The less I will fall into being with you.

For the first time since boarding school (according to her), she had real friends; who cares if they’ll never truly know who you are?

You, in your madness
The satellite that's constellating my world
Mimicking the inner chaos that i've disowned
A mirror to my past life retribution
A reflection of my sadness...
My feet aren't on the ground
 

Repeatedly in Violet she contemplates grounding herself in the exoteric and turning away from the inner life, particularly in “Never to Heaven,” a sort of modern Ecclesiastes.

Norman Fucking Rockwell was a critical triumph, and it was precisely because she stripped herself of overt symbolism, instead relegating it to the lyrical margins and enigmatic images like “God in a burnt coffee pot” that she refused to explain when asked. But the message remains open on the cover and in "Mariners Apartment Complex," the medicine now sugared to go down easier:

I'm the bolt, the lightning, the thunder
Kind of girl who's gonna make you wonder
Who you are and who you've been...

Maybe I could save you from your sins
So, kiss the sky and whisper to Jesus
My, my, my, you found this, you need this
Take a deep breath, baby, let me in
You lose your way, just take my hand
You're lost at sea, then I'll command your boat to me again
Don't look too far, right where you are, that's where I am
I'm your man
 

Overwhelmingly, the critics finally understood what she was saying when discussing the mundane life, and heralded it as a new triumph in her songwriting when, in many important ways, it was a step back to May Jailer. By doing so, she lost contact with something vital, as she later confessed; suddenly the words did not flow and she turned to poetry as a form of loosening the binds of the unconscious.

I'm generally quite quiet
Quite a meditator, actually
I'll do very well down by Paramhansa Yogananda's realization center, I'm sure

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I’m a big studier of Carl Jung, who says that the only opportunity that the unconscious has to speak to you is through your dreams, or through automatic writing, which is similar to what I do when I’m singing into my phone in the mornings. He even suggests you write with your left hand if you’re right-handed, so you can see what comes up first. Because you have to write so slowly, you might end up writing, “Help!” 

Violet presents some insights into her inner life at this time; the old symbols had been cast away, and new symbols were being modeled. Her verses are on one page allegorical and on another literal, and one is always unsure where the lines are drawn. But when she talks directly to the city of Los Angeles or Kundalini itself, we know that those lines are often crossed. Witness where she flips the tables and refers to literal beings in allegorical terms, the without always being a reflection of the within, the archetypal role in which she is always trapped:

What will it take for me not to need you

so I can just have you for fun

and for who you really are

Not you as the savior

not me as Ophelia

not us putting our faith in the public's dark art

The savior needs no explanation. Ophelia—an image from Paradise, the Self submerged beneath the waters of the unconscious. The public, the dark alchemical art of criticism that tears them apart and puts them together again. ("I get a lot.")

(Source: Shirley Alvarez)

I acknowledged who you really were for the first time.

I didn’t call you by any other name, (Axl Rose? Jesus? Jim?)

I let you know that I knew the true nature of your heart.

That it was evil,

and that it convinced me that darkness was real,

That the devil is a real devil,

and that monsters don’t always know that they’re monsters.

But projection is an amazing thing.

After you left and burnt the house down,

You tried to convince me it was I who was holding the matches.

You told me I didn’t know who I was,

But I do.

So when we turn to these lines, is this a real person? Or is this addressed to her own Shadow Self as Dark Animus, that she rejects and yet continually falls into bed with? Is this not her husband from hell?

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[T]hey battle themselves, and then they come back and they find out who they really are…. I thought it sort of resembled my story…. I revealed my heart. And then the rest is a Mystery. All I'll say.

In a 2007 live rendition of “Pin-Up Galore,” she declares herself both a monster and a being not of this world. The performance is, in a word, strange; she is melancholic, but seems to possess a greater confidence.

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In California, earth, wind, and fire are huge. All the elements are taken into consideration with my art, all the time. 

The symbolism in "My Bedroom is a Sacred Place Now - There Are Children at the Foot of My Bed" would seem to actually follow that of the Tarot, where the Devil becomes the Tower, the House of Ego destroyed in that all-consuming fire. Elsewhere, she writes in one of her most overtly esoteric pieces, directly addressing the Kundalini serpent—

I think about the curse bestowed upon Eve

That fateful eve she took that bite of fruit from that fruitful tree.

And this summer night, you in front of me,

Makes me contemplate the origins of good and evil.

This recalls not the Biblical fall, but the awakening that came in the moment that Eve, obeying the serpent, plucked the fruit and attained Gnosis to both the nature of absolute darkness and absolute light (that Sparkle not of this world) in the Abyss. She contemplates if she is, in fact, cursed, having taken the Jump that changed the entire trajectory of her life. A familiar image from Paradise.

To shut the door on the past and step

blindly

into the abyss

no destination intact

Quote

In the left hand there is a great flaming torch, inverted towards the earth…. The figures are tailed, to signify the animal nature, but there is human intelligence in the faces, and he who is exalted above them is not to be their master for ever. Even now, he is also a bondsman, sustained by the evil that is in him and blind to the liberty of service…. What it does signify is the Dweller on the Threshold without the Mystical Garden when those are driven forth therefrom who have eaten the forbidden fruit. (A.E. Waite)

 

Internally, we know that we are potential lords of creation. But here we meet a check, and there a defeat, and so we try to explain why we are not actually as free as we feel ourselves internally to be.... "What keeps me from expressing this inner freedom I feel?" At the same time, this picture indicates the correct solution to the problem, and points to the way which leads out of the difficulty.... The picture refers to man's ideas concerning the nature of that which seems so relentlessly to oppose his struggles for freedom…. Remember, too, that the Devil personifies the serpent-power represented by… Strength.

 

The name for the serpent which tempted Eve is NChSh, Nachash, and the number of this word is 358, the value of MShICh, Messiah. Here is a profound subtlety, for numerical identity between Hebrew words points to some inner correspondence of meaning. Finally, it has been said: "The Devil is God, as He is misunderstood by the wicked.” (Paul Foster Case)

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The picture shows the destruction of existing material by fire. (Aleister Crowley)

 

It signifies the materialization of the spiritual word... it is the downfall of the mind, seeking to penetrate the mystery of God. (A.E. Waite)

 

The falling figures correspond to the chained prisoners in the preceding picture. They fall headfirst, because the sudden influx of spiritual consciousness represented by the lightning-flash completely upsets all our old notions about the relations between subconsciousness and self-consciousness…

 

This picture corresponds to the second stage of spiritual unfoldment, wherein a series of sudden, fitful inspirations leads to the perception that the structure of knowledge built on the foundation of the fallacy of personal separateness is a tower of false science. At this stage, the advancing seeker for wisdom suffers the destruction of his whole former philosophy. For this tower is built upon a foundation of misapprehension. (Paul Foster Case)

You're only as happy as your least happy child
 

They don’t understand.

I’m a dreamer.

And I had big dreams for the country.

Not for what it could do, but how it could feel.

How it could think,

How it could dream.

I know.

Who am I to dream for you?

It’s just that in my own mind,

I was born with a little bit of paradise.

I was lucky in that way.

Not like my husband,

Who was born and raised in hell.

That bit of paradise was not necessarily Lizzy, but Lana Ray who was born on the day she died. Her husband is not strictly the devil of the outer church but akin to the Baphomet of Eliphas Levi.

Maybe an artist has to function a little bit above themselves

If they really want to transmit some heaven

Let me put on a show for you, tiger

Her work on Born to Die: The Paradise Edition is characterized by what one would almost call subliminal messages, encouraging the listener to follow her on the Path of Sylvia Plath, all the way from “Take a walk on the wild side” spoken by the Goddess through to “Come to me, baby,” the very last line of Paradise. In early interviews, she is evasive and constantly contradicts herself, as if she is hiding some big secret by claiming to have none--the source of the later backlash. She has the audacity to shave years off of her age and claim "Axl Rose Husband" was written at age 16, a bit of meaningless juvenilia, while striking every mention of that dead phantom known as Lizzy Grant; a creature produced by nature and not by Art. Damnatio memoriae. Is it vanity (years later, she did say, with perhaps some latent guilt, that she always forgets her birth year—but a woman can lie about that), or the realization that such earlier works gave away too much? She needn’t have worried, in the latter case.

She shrugs, putting on a ditzy Marilyn Monroe affectation, and says the songs on Born to Die are about nothing much at all, yet strangely gets upset when people treat them as meaningless. By November, the mask starts to slip, but not quite. By the time of Ultraviolence, after a year spent in cruel exile, she contradicts herself again: She doesn’t write pop songs, and never has. Those were psychological. In truth, Born to Die is a perfect and enduring pop record, camouflaged in its intent and designed to embed itself as a seed in the over-culture.

I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood

It’s apparent that she later came to view this as youthful folly, a naïveté for how little the world would understand her. Perhaps she originally planned to traffic in visions of money, power and glory as some great work of performance art that would be unveiled in Tropico, but that, too, went awry. That latent bitterness and resentment remained, and was behind her frustration that Twigs’ work was considered Art while Tropico was mocked as the work of a whore and not a poet.

But... lately I’ve been thinking that I wish

Someone had told me when I was younger

More about the inhabitants that thrive off of paradise.

That should they take too much,

There would be nothing left to give.

There's something in the water

I can taste it turning sour 

It's bitter

I'm coughing

But now it's in my blood

Lately I've been thinking 

It's just someone else's job to care 

Who am I to sympathize

When no one gave a damn

I've been thinking

It's just someone else's job to care

Who am I to want to try...

But my heart is very fragile,

and I have nothing left to give.

This rejection is what she wishes she had foreseen when younger. She grows tired of attempting to “transmit some heaven” to those who only parasitically consume. In 2019 live performances, her mind seems elsewhere, perhaps even bored. If only she had read the warning of Robert Graves that the Goddess “is hated by saints and sober men.”

She said, "You can't be a Muse and be happy, too

You can't blacken the pages with Russian poetry

And be happy"

And that scared me

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For Robert Graves in The White Goddess, “Woman is not a poet: she is either muse or she is nothing”, adding that this doesn’t mean women can’t write poems, but that the woman who chooses to do so: “must be the Muse in the complete sense: she should be in turn Arianrhod, Blodeuwedd, and the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd who eats her farrow, and should write in each of these capacities with an antique authority. She should be the visible moon: impartial, loving, serene, wise”.

This reads like a rather patriarchal and antiquated precept. But it also seems to have been Lana’s intent to embody the Goddess entirely; to be a living Muse. And now, this scares her, because her archetype is also a Goddess of Sorrows, and she stands in the way of happiness. The past years have seen her in seeming rebellion to this role as Muse, stripping away more and more layers of artifice, no longer even wearing makeup. There is a last idol to kill. The idyllic life in Arcadia where it's always 1962 under chemtrails comes to a crashing halt. She now flirts with not the Goddess in her youthful purity, but the Wild Woman, strange and free.

The power of youth is on my mind

Sunset, small town

I'm out of time

My time has run over, so the only time you'll

Ever see me is in your dreams in my black bathing suit

Lookin' at me lookin' over at you

Real cute, 'cause

He said I was bad, let me show you how bad girls do

Time weighs heavy. At her age, David Bowie had already released Tonight and would slide into artistic irrelevance for a decade; Kate Bush, shortly after releasing her Tropico-esque The Line, the Cross and the Curve, had already retired. The Goddess retreats to a land of dreams, but the Wild Woman carries on, and tries to have fun in the meantime.

"I am certainly of opinion that genius can be acquired" (Crowley)

Listening to Lana's early work, there is a marked transformation that occurs around 2007. On Sirens ca. 2005-2006, we have "diaristic" songs about life as it is; it is rightly called juvenilia. It is interesting to chart her development with her lyrics. One of the earliest tracks to show her new development is, appropriately, "Pawn Shop Blues"—its first performance was in May, 2006:

In the name of higher consciousness
I let the best man I knew go
'Cause it's nice to love and be loved
But it's better to know all you can know
Said it's nice to love and be loved
But I'd rather know what God knows

Oh-no, oh-no, oh-no, oh-no, oh-no

I can't do this once more
No man can keep me together
Been broken since I was born

So her mindset in this period is clear. She has entered a sort of seclusion to "know" God, in the Gnostic sense. 

Then in early 2007:

It's the voodoo Mississippi south
Sixty-nine million stars
Birds are comin' out of my mouth
Spirits creepin' in my yard

Oh, my head, it's tiltin' back
Something's dancin' me around
Puttin' crystals on my neck
Liftin' my toes off the ground, ah-ah-ahh, ground, ah-ha-ah-ah

Rai-rai-rai-raise me up

A great change in her lyrics is already seen; the imagery is rich and figurative. The Melancholia of "Pawn Shop Blues" is followed by a sort of resurrection—"Jim raised me up". Then a theme emerges:

I am my only God now

Baby, I have become someone
A monster, hey, yeah, yeah

Baby, I've become someone
Not of this world, hey, yeah, yeah (cf. "Maha Maha")

I remember we came in May
And we changed our names to Lana and Ray

Lizzy has become Lana Ray, someone not of this world; the truest expression of who she is "on the inside." Somewhere in this time period, she writes "Yayo," which she has said depicts a pivotal moment in her life. Its first performance is June 14, 2007, appropriately before a performance of "Pawn Shop Blues". When she re-records the song for Paradise, it is the connecting link between "Gods and Monsters" and "Bel Air"—the necessary transition from hell to heaven.

You have to take me right now
From this dark trailer park life now...

Hello, Heaven, you are a tunnel lined
With yellow lights on a dark night

Palm trees in black and white
Was the last thing I saw before I died
Bright light, right man
Right mixture of cocaine and heroin

All that's real to me is Marilyn and Jesus
Jumpin' off'a bridges, sparklers and streamers, honey
I wanna die (fly), I wanna die (fly), I wanna die (fly)

A death and rebirth. A jump into the Abyss. Visions of a tropical Paradise. The alchemical mixture of elements ("energies combined"); figuratively cocaine (white) and heroin (black?). Marilyn and Jesus, archetypal forms from an eternal reality.

You my Axl Rose husband
Blue hydrangea
White Pontiac Heaven
Me, your red, white, and blue girl
Star-spangled danger

Now a richly-textured archetypal interior world emerges, entirely her own: the white car in heaven (seen in the "West Coast" video). Lana as the embodiment of America. The pun of "heavy metal" and alchemical metals. The men she most adores now become figures of her Animus that represent the alchemical King in the coniunctio. "At night I fell asleep with visions of myself dancing and laughing and crying with them..."

You, my heavy metal king, king

I said, "Daddy, I need you" (Yes)
Greenwich, I need you
Strangled up in ivy
I'm the garden of Eden
Lady Liberty
Teal with flame I'm shinin'
Queen, queen

You're my one king, daddy
I'm your little queen, red, white, and blue

(Cf. 2009: You can be my higher power, baby
I can be your empress USA)

I can be your 4th of July

Gimme that, gimme that, gimme that crystal meth, love
Because

Feels like sugar in me

Lana, or the temple that is her body and heart, becomes America and the Garden of Eden as the fertile earth (an image repeated in "Arcadia") in which Paradise is revealed, figuratively impregnated by a deity or Animus figure. Says Crowley, the Empress "is fitted to represent one of the three alchemical forms of energy, Salt. Salt is the inactive principle of Nature; Salt is matter which must be energized by Sulphur to maintain the whirling equilibrium of the Universe." Crystal meth as the alchemical Elixir: "This liquor is the Amrita of the Indian philosophers, the Nepenthe and Ambrosia of the Greeks, the Alkahest and Universal Medicine of the Alchemists, the Blood of the Grail; or, rather, the nectar which is the mother of that blood" (Crowley). Refer again to "Paradise is Very Fragile":

But you taste like the beach and a kiss.

Candy from my eyes,

in my veins you run citrus.

Watercolor images of serpents on orange trees arise in my midst.

Kundalini, you breathe me.

Fast forward to 2009:

I got that magical trance potion
Gotta leave, I can't wait 'til I'm older

2012:

Gargoyles standing at the front of your gate (= "Spirits creepin' in my yard")
Trying to tell me to wait, but I can’t wait to see you
So I run like I'm mad to Heaven’s door
I don’t wanna be bad, I won’t cheat you no more

Roses, Bel Air
Take me there
I’ve been waiting to meet you
Palm trees in the light
I can see late at night
Darling, I’m waiting to greet you
Come to me, baby

Spotlight, bad baby, you’ve got a flair
For the violentest kind of love anywhere out there

A summation of her Work so far; the great reveal at the end of Paradise that the fallen girl in "Gods and Monsters" has already been redeemed, and asks others to follow her. Ultraviolence is foreshadowed. Violent love that offers resurrection. 

2014:

They say I'm too young to love you
I don't know what I need
They think I don't understand
The freedom land of the 70s

At about the age of 21, almost unheard of in someone so young, something happened to Elizabeth Grant; something that she will not discuss openly even now, as it is impossible to describe in straightforward words—"an obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn't even talk about it." This something changed the whole of her life to such an extent that she changed her name, changed her hair to suit the truth of her new interior reality ("the mood of your soul"), and transformed her songwriting into allegorical poetry. I hope this provides some insight into the true depth of her art, even in the earliest material.

You never liked the way I said it
If you don't get it, then forget it
'Cause I don't have to fucking explain it

On 8/28/2022 at 11:32 AM, DeadAgainst said:

It seems that there are two digital masters for this album: the original master from which the Text Book, Blue Banisters, and Wildfire singles were pulled, and a second master released on CD. You can find the original master on Qobuz and it sounds great, but it clips like mad. I suspect the second master was an emergency fix job to tame some of the egregious clipping, but in so doing it lacks the punch of the original master. You can see the Qobuz waveforms compared with the Amazon release and they're noticeably different.

 

Something for the collectors...

On 10/23/2021 at 3:08 PM, lannisterpussy said:

the clipping issues on spotify have been fixed 

Confirming two masters. I actually prefer the original; the new one just sounds like they ran some filter over it and sounds muffled. I just throw the Qobuz tracks together with the unmastered leaked tracks and the unmastered Arcadia from the Alternate Video and then only Carolina is left with any significant clipping.

I noticed on The Other Woman early version, her voice clips all over it, presumably to create some sort of vintage 78 effect.

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During that time, a reliable insider said that Del Rey had made last-minute changes to the album tracklist and title, completely altering the sound of the album and switching out many of the tracks for others. 

From Lanapedia—I'm starting to wonder if she did it herself on purpose and they had to scramble to fix it later. Someone ask her about it on the next livestream.

I find that the common interpretation of Lana's songs is that they are from a woman always longing for fulfillment in the arms of a man. Yet when she discusses this topic herself, her position is much more nuanced:

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I subscribe to the idea that what’s going on in the macrocosm, whether it be in the presidency or a virus that keeps us isolated, is a reflection of what’s going on in the individual home and inside bedrooms and what people intimately talk about. I think there’s been existential panic for a long time, but people haven’t been paying attention to it... you have to look at your partner and be like, “I’ve lived with you for 20 years, but do I even know you?” You realize maybe you’ve only ever allowed yourself to scratch the surface of yourself because if you went any deeper, you might have a mild meltdown for no reason, just out of the blue, and no amount of talking could explain why. It’s just a part of your genetic makeup. You could just be prone to panic. I think a lot of people are that way. I got a lot of shit for not only talking about it, but talking about lots of other things for a super long time. I don’t feel justified in it, because I’m not the kind of artist who’s ever going to get justified. I will die an underdog and that’s cool with me. But I was right to ask, “Why are we here? Where did we come from? What are we doing? What happens if this insane, crazy, sci-fi crisis happens, and then you’re stuck with yourself, and you’re stuck with your partner who doesn’t pay attention to you?”

 

...I’m not trying to say I’m a holy roller because I’m not, but I think people are looking up to the sky a bit more and being like, “Why? What’s the reason?” 

If you think that you know yourself, you can come over

Here she invokes the Hermetic image of the microcosm and Macrocosm. But who out there listens to a Lana Del Rey song and understands that her intent, in her own words, is to ask the great questions of the soul's origin and its return? A casual listener would probably say they're about drugs and daddy issues. And from the Variety award show, she expresses the same Hermetic belief:

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I’m really always grateful for any acknowledgement and also super grateful for all the criticism – I get a lot. What’s good about it is I really believe what’s reflected back to you is in some way a mirror to what’s going on in your inner life. It’s given me a huge opportunity to look inward and to look at my family of origin, look at my lineage, see what’s going on up there....

Why there's a price on my head

It's nothin' to do with them (= the critics)

It's my karmic lineage...

Untraditional lover

Can you handle that?

I guess I'm complicated, my life's sorta too

I wish you could see to my soul through this black bathing suit

You don't know me any better than they do, baby

'Cause I sing like an angel, my heart's like one too

Her frustration in matters of love seems rather to be that her men do not "know themselves," and thus cannot know her soul (she once said she could only marry someone exactly like herself); the subject-object problem, that of Shiva and Shakti as one flesh in perfect Tantric union, remains unresolved.

The goal of Kundalini yoga is to burn away one's karmas ("through the fire, we're born again"); even in such an incongruous place as an award ceremony, she mentions that she is always in a process of going deeper—but only in the song does she explain that this lineage is karmic. It is interesting how she will self-censor, in one interview only mentioning "genetics" rather than some concept of ancestral karma ("let's ch-ch-change our DNA").

And to return to her own perspective on Get Free:
 

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For Amy [Winehouse], and for Whitney [Houston]. "And all my birds of paradise / Who never got to fly at night, / 'Cause they were caught up in the dance." It's about people who don't get to reach their full potential because they let controlling people stop them from being free....

 

What's the key to getting free?

I think going deeper, you know? Knowing that you're your own doorway to the answers and not looking for answers in other people.

Repeatedly, she says that "the culture's" modern malaise is precisely that they seek fulfillment from others without looking within themselves. She contemplates the image of marriage and domesticity in Blue Banisters, but does not quite assent to it. It is a far cry from what people like Lorde saw in her music, but she leaves this for people to puzzle out for themselves, despite dropping hints at every opportunity.

Because I'm going deeper and deeper (deeper)
Harder and harder (harder)
Getting darker and darker
Looking for love
In all the wrong places
Oh my God

There’s a hole that’s in my heart

All my women try and heal

They’re doing a good job convincing me that it’s not real

It’s heat lightning, ooh

‘Cause there’s a man that’s in my past

There’s a man that’s still right here

He’s real enough to touch in my darkest nights

He’s shining

The new dichotomy in her work—trying to ignore the promptings of the soul but knowing that it is always there, beckoning to go deeper. Per Wiki, "the Great Work... is considered to be the pursuit of self-knowledge to, as Crowley said in The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, 'obtain the knowledge of the nature and powers of my own being.' However, Crowley continues, the Great Work should also be something that is integrated into the daily life of all. Although Crowley often discussed the idea of 'succeeding' or 'accomplishing' in the Great Work, he also recognized that the process is ongoing." No chasing rainbows and hoping for an end to them.

He's Jesus Christ
And I’m his baby doll...
Jesus is my boyfriend

He's my personal savior
He's my personal angel
My God thinks I’m smashing
He thinks I’m fine
My God takes me dashing 'cross the party line

He's my personal savior
He's my personal savior

My God treats me special
Gives me lots of things
I had some of his boyfriends offer diamond rings

He's my personal savior
He's my personal savior

He's my personal angel
He's my cherry pie
Said to call him "Dick Tracy"
He's my private eye
When I get in my gown
He comes to me in the night

During this era, she commented that she didn't censor herself as much as she did later. These lyrics, though rough, bear a strange similarity to "Yayo"; interpreted first as a Jim(my Gnecco) song and then the mysterious Rob. Fervid Lanalysts, if I read the thread right, seem to have come to the conclusion that it is pure fantasy—real people that then transform into archetypal Animus figures in an interior psychic landscape, as concrete as Jesus or Axl Rose. As a long-time studier of Carl Jung, she would know of this well. Again...she calls this song a un moment fondamental de ma vie. Un déclic. But how can it be if nobody can confirm a single bit of it happened IRL? These are the questions I keep coming back to, trying to measure the lines drawn between the ordinary world and the extraordinary. But to open up her current work, I first need to read Women Who Run with the Wolves by another Jungian.

Other books she's mentioned--

A Course in Miracles - Helen Schucman (Lizzy era)

Hollywood Babylon - Kenneth Anger

Autobiography of a Yogi - Paramahansa Yogananda (source)