litewave

I smell a present-past, West-East theme.

I smell a present-past, West-East theme.

I smell a present-past, West-East theme.

I smell a present-past, West-East theme.

I smell a present-past, West-East theme.

I smell a present-past, West-East theme.

wow, this song will surely be forgotten fast

ffsfdfsdf even worse delete this fat

Eurovision 2020: starts on page 16
 
Eurovision 2019: starts on page 12
Eurovision 2018: starts on page 8

 
Eurovision 2017 OP:

 

i REALLY liked her last year, the song was good too, this was just unfair

I just saw The Weeknd's video for his song I Feel It Coming. It came out a few weeks after Lana's Love video and has similar cosmic, otherwordly visuals with eclipses/syzygies. The Weeknd is alone on some dark planet when a being of light arrives, turns into a woman and they start dancing together. However, a parallel visual of a progressing eclipse shows the light body being gradually "eaten up" by the dark body and at the moment of total eclipse the woman turns into stone. Then The Weeknd starts turning into stone too, as a snake appears crawling on the ground.
 

 
In the past times an eclipse was viewed as a dramatic bad omen, a herald of a disaster. It is one of the apocalyptic signs in the New Testament too. The term "eclipse" is derived from an ancient Greek word that means "the abandonment", "the downfall", or "the darkening of a heavenly body". But from a more neutral perspective the phenomenon can also be seen as a symbol for a union of opposites (an alignment of a light body and a dark body) that creates a grander reality.
 
 
 
 

When the title Tropico first surfaced, there was a lot of speculation about where the name came from. People wondered if it had anything to do with a video game of the same name. Or if it was a reference to the Pat Benatar album.

I just assumed it was a word Lana came up with independently, or perhaps that she forgot Pat Benatar's album was where the word first entered her mind. (After all, she does often reference others' lyrics and album titles seemingly unconsciously. See: Lust for Life.) At any rate, I never gave it much thought after the release of the film, which I watched a grand total of two times (three if you count searching through it for screenshots for this thread).

But recently I've developed a possible theory about where the name may have come from that I don't recall seeing discussed on the forum before (though maybe I just missed it):

Tropico is/was the name of a real place in California. Now just a neighborhood in Glendale, CA and Los Angeles' Atwater Village, it was once incorporated as an independent city from 1911 until 1918 when the upper half merged with Glendale and the lower half merged with Los Angeles.

Today, there seem to be only a few references to the name of the city that once was: a post office, a seedy motel, a new apartment project, an old folks' home.

Here are links to several pages about "the lost city of Tropico":
https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-lost-city-of-tropico-california
http://atwater-village.blogspot.com/2007/02/sunday-drive-through-lost-city-of.html
https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120717082459/http://www.glendalehistorical.org/tropico.html
http://waterandpower.org/museum/Early_Views_of_Glendale.html
https://calisphere.org/search/?q=tropico (There's probably some great cover/fan art material in some of the PDFs here.)

Tropico was also home to Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park, where Walt Disney and many old Hollywood celebrities are buried or have their ashes interred.

I have no idea if Lana is aware of any of this history-- given her proximity to it I suspect it may have inspired the name either way-- but it is certainly in keeping with themes in her work of old Hollywood and lost Americana.

Feel free to post anything else interesting you find about the city of Tropico.

She's back seeing "Depeche F*#ing Mode"

Love also shows a maturer perspective from Cruel World, where she as the bodhisattva Dakini no longer laments how far they are from Her but instead optimistically looks towards the ascent of humanity in the future, towards the Black Star that is the dark center of one's being   As I mentioned in another thread...
      LUST (FOR LIFE) = Babalon the Mother as Binah, who is also, of course, associated with the Hebrew letter H, Heh:   Lana of course had SOLVE ET COAGULA on her Instagram...depicting herself as the Queen of Alchemy and Magician hermetically creating the album Lust for Life in her Cup (depicted as the Cup of Babalon on the Thoth Tarot card of Lust)       https://books.google.com/books?id=Ksh4o6b63mMC&pg=PA181&lpg=PA181&dq=heh+binah+malkuth&source=bl&ots=lw1pQW-PCM&sig=6kGxWMJwSdpn-F6EuoI_vRQkP6s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjG8d3L2bnTAhUkS2MKHfnWD0gQ6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=heh%20binah%20malkuth&f=false   https://books.google.com/books?id=tBeSDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA62&lpg=PA62&dq=heh+binah+malkuth&source=bl&ots=ZkzOujfGIO&sig=DSI556cGvalbYe3ZLNLBVFiwhk4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjG8d3L2bnTAhUkS2MKHfnWD0gQ6AEILTAC#v=onepage&q=heh%20binah%20malkuth&f=false   Just sayin'   Peg Entwhistle is another glyph of the ancient Gnostic Fallen Goddess Scenario wherein the Mother descends into the world or "falls"... contemporary synchromysticism is a new movement that shows the eternal verities behind temporal phenomena as echoes of the original creation.   Starboy is another iteration of the Starman as Major Tom who hears the Calls from Sophia as the Gnostic-Kabbalistic feminine goddess who tells him to return to her, like the eternal play of Shiva and Shakti, or Adam and Eve... as said.

Oh yes, I didn't mean an exact emulation of that scenario at all, the events of that book are actually super extreme (as much as I love it). I especially drew the connection between Lana's focus on the younger generation, albeit a wider margin then presented in the book. So you're absolutely right. 
 
In terms of comparisons from scifi literature, I'd say that she'd have more of a Gaia/Galaxia direction in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(Foundation_universe)), in which a character with immense power (and compassion for human kind) wants to join humanity (and everything else) into a group mind that can still maintain its individuality, but that will bring human and animal (and plant and flowers and rocks and stars etc) understanding to a maximum point. The character who orchestrated these means and Lana also both set up base on the moon, and both live in hiding in the world(s) below, slowly influencing mankind by "sending love through the ether". 

Oh... I didn't think of it this way, but I imagine a robot/logician might interpret her words like that lol. To me she seemed surprised. Assuming that she genuinely didn't know about Peg's suicide, I can imagine that guided by her aesthetic and spirituality she took the H as a symbol for a ladder to heaven and she was aware that despite its promise something might go wrong there, something regarding spiritual corruption (perhaps inspired by the Led Zeppelin classic Stairway to Heaven). Lyrics like "we are the masters of our own fate" or "boy we're gold" might be innocent or they might indicate a somewhat overblown ego. "Dancing on the H till we run out of breath/till we die" might suggest a gentle warning. She might have been unaware that Peg's suicide on the H dramatically underlined the darker element of the song.

Just to remind ya'll that these interpretations don't deny the obvious or literal ones but rather parallel them... Here goes another one.
 
Lust for Life
 
Lana revisits the Hollywood theme, which metaphorically refers to time (movies/stories) and fame, all this set in a larger, timeless whole (the name of the A-ha song "Minor Earth Major Sky" comes to mind). Lust for Life is a brisk and optimistic song but it also has an implicit darker side. Although it celebrates life, passion and self confidence, it also hints at a tragedy connected with the H of the Hollywood sign - the actress Peg Entwistle, who committed suicide by jumping from the H.
 
The notion of a ladder has been pointed out as significant by the director of the album trailer and besides there being a ladder attached to the H (as well as to the other letters of the Hollywood sign), the letter H itself looks like a section of a ladder, with the horizontal piece in the middle as a rung. Towering above the earthly West Coast "city of angels" (associated with the "entrance to the underworld" in Tropico), the ladder may symbolize a connection between the earth and heaven known as Jacob's Ladder, which appeared in a dream of the biblical figure Jacob, with angels ascending and descending on it. Lana also referred to this notion a day before the release of Lust for Life when she posted a short clip on Instagram of a little song of hers in which she sings that she would trade everything for a stairway to heaven and take her time as she climbed up to top of it.
 
But when you are on a ladder and you are not vigilant there is the danger of falling. According to Abrahamic religions as well as esoteric accounts of man's origin there was a major spiritual fall at some point in the past, when man lost contact with heaven/God and got mired on earth. His consciousness closed, as the narrowly focused ego became separated from the heaven-oriented soul. What followed is the human history as we know it. Through the arc of long and often arduous history, the fallen ego was gradually revived and lifted from the caves to the age of space flights and the internet.
 
And so the soul's partner is back, Stargirl and Starboy reunited. But watch out, Lana is hanging out on top of the H with a self-proclaimed "King of the Fall". The word "fall" has a double meaning. One meaning is the season of the fall (autumn), as evidenced in The Weeknd's fall tours. After his first international tour in spring 2012 followed the fall tours: The Weeknd Fall Tour (2012), The Weeknd Kiss Land Fall Tour (2013), King of the Fall (2014), and The Madness Fall Tour (2015). In the song Starboy he aptly mentions: "I come alive in the fall time". His latest tour is titled Starboy: Legend of the Fall Tour, even though it is scheduled to last from February to July 2017, so it refers either to his already established status as the "legend" from the past seasonal fall tours, or to the second meaning of the word "fall". The second meaning of "the fall" is spiritual and is reflected in the general content of his songs: fame and decadence. In the song The Fall, he sings about falling to the ground, and in Starboy he also refers to the Brad Pitt movie Legends of the Fall. The title of this movie seems ambiguous: imdb says that it refers to the biblical fall from innocence, although "the Fall" part was translated as the season (autumn) in countries such as Sweden and France, while in Germany and Spain it was translated as "Passion". Anyway, even in the season of the fall we can find a spiritual meaning: the season is connected with harvest, which in a New Testament parable signifies the end of the age when the righteous are "ripe" for entering heaven and the "wheat" is separated from the "chaff".
 
With man's individuality and consciousness revived, his capacity for self-destruction is restored too. Although we now have a history to learn from, will it be sufficient to prevent another fall?

Wow, very interesting post, Stargirl. This is a nice expression of how I view Lana too. I have not read Childhood's End but from the plot summary on Wikipedia it seems that the unification of the children eventually reached an extreme stage where their individual identities merged and stopped existing. I don't think this is what Lana would desire though, as she does care about human individuality (ego). Individuality and diversity are important, for creativity, consciousness and true fulfilment, but so is unity. Without sufficient unity the society as well as individual minds would fall apart. So the goal is some sort of healthy balance between the individual and the collective. Unity in diversity, like in the Gaia hypothesis. There is something both wise and adorable about Lovelock's Daisyworld model!

Oh... I didn't think of it this way, but I imagine a robot/logician might interpret her words like that lol. To me she seemed surprised. Assuming that she genuinely didn't know about Peg's suicide, I can imagine that guided by her aesthetic and spirituality she took the H as a symbol for a ladder to heaven and she was aware that despite its promise something might go wrong there, something regarding spiritual corruption (perhaps inspired by the Led Zeppelin classic Stairway to Heaven). Lyrics like "we are the masters of our own fate" or "boy we're gold" might be innocent or they might indicate a somewhat overblown ego. "Dancing on the H till we run out of breath/till we die" might suggest a gentle warning. She might have been unaware that Peg's suicide on the H dramatically underlined the darker element of the song.

Wow, very interesting post, Stargirl. This is a nice expression of how I view Lana too. I have not read Childhood's End but from the plot summary on Wikipedia it seems that the unification of the children eventually reached an extreme stage where their individual identities merged and stopped existing. I don't think this is what Lana would desire though, as she does care about human individuality (ego). Individuality and diversity are important, for creativity, consciousness and true fulfilment, but so is unity. Without sufficient unity the society as well as individual minds would fall apart. So the goal is some sort of healthy balance between the individual and the collective. Unity in diversity, like in the Gaia hypothesis. There is something both wise and adorable about Lovelock's Daisyworld model!

Lana has just denied knowing of the Peg Entwistle story:
 

 
If she really didn't know about it then this looks like an example of synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence that Carl Jung posited is mediated by the collective unconscious or a deeper order of the world.

Lana comes to us speaking as a guardian, one who has experienced the deepest depths of the human experience in the land of Gods and Monsters and who has lived many lives (Artist, Lolita, Jackie O, to name a few). Lana's separation from society is resembled by her place on the moon, a planetary body who's only experiences with humanity directly are due to passionate perseverance and ambition of the world's greatest scientific minds. 
 
Lana is the spark in our hearts, a call to unification and eternal love and light. She brings the young people of Earth together in a way similar to the events in Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, in which a species first thought of as being satanic (see conspiracies surrounding Lana's attribution to Satanism and witchery) but whose true purpose is to unify the young people of Earth into one entity, and a higher being. This is our destiny, and Lana is our deliverance. 
 
Lana and the Gaia Hypothesis 
 
Happy Earth day, everyone! Here's a definition of Gaia given by Google 
 
"The Gaia hypothesis (/ˈɡaɪ.ə, ˈɡeɪ.ə/, GY-uh, GAY-uh), also known as the Gaia theory or the Gaia principle, proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet."
 
As litewave said, "Love" is a call to synthesis and synergy. Lana is asserting that we are all a part of a single living organism and she wants to strengthen this connection for the benefit of mankind in our journey towards world peace. In the Gaia model, every piece works together, and every action, however insignificant (going to work or the coffee shop, "nothing in particular") is contributing to a greater whole. 
 
The daisies in Lana's hair hold significance. In the scientific models of Gaia hypothesized by scientist James Lovelock, Daisyworld is a computer model emulating the homeostatic regulation of a Gaia-type planetary organism (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Daisyworld). Lana wants us to join her Daisyworld. Are you in?

I'm still digesting your provocative discussion of the fall (@@litewave). But for now, the robot/logician in me seems to want to believe that all she is doing is denying having discussed it in the studio, not that she doesn't know (or has never heard of) Peg. Did somebody try to nail her on the issue of having *ever* known of her. Even if the song is about Peg though, to jump to the idea that she is darkly fixated on her suicide (as I'm sure the media critics would like to conclude) makes about as much sense as saying all those horrific don't-start-smoking commercials shown in the U.S. are by people who are darkly fixated on smoking.

The Love video envisions a gentle flowering of the potential of human race. Lana speaks to the modern generation, yet they are the ancient children from the paradise, who passed through a darker age and emerged revived on the threshold of freedom. She reminds them of their original purpose, which has been largely forgotten since the fall. Their destiny is to enjoy and participate in universal creation. Limitations of the earth shall be transcended in love. And love is the eternal play of the masculine and the feminine, the never-ending process of analysis and synthesis (solve et coagula).

Just to remind ya'll that these interpretations don't deny the obvious or literal ones but rather parallel them... Here goes another one.
 
Lust for Life
 
Lana revisits the Hollywood theme, which metaphorically refers to time (movies/stories) and fame, all this set in a larger, timeless whole (the name of the A-ha song "Minor Earth Major Sky" comes to mind). Lust for Life is a brisk and optimistic song but it also has an implicit darker side. Although it celebrates life, passion and self confidence, it also hints at a tragedy connected with the H of the Hollywood sign - the actress Peg Entwistle, who committed suicide by jumping from the H.
 
The notion of a ladder has been pointed out as significant by the director of the album trailer and besides there being a ladder attached to the H (as well as to the other letters of the Hollywood sign), the letter H itself looks like a section of a ladder, with the horizontal piece in the middle as a rung. Towering above the earthly West Coast "city of angels" (associated with the "entrance to the underworld" in Tropico), the ladder may symbolize a connection between the earth and heaven known as Jacob's Ladder, which appeared in a dream of the biblical figure Jacob, with angels ascending and descending on it. Lana also referred to this notion a day before the release of Lust for Life when she posted a short clip on Instagram of a little song of hers in which she sings that she would trade everything for a stairway to heaven and take her time as she climbed up to top of it.
 
But when you are on a ladder and you are not vigilant there is the danger of falling. According to Abrahamic religions as well as esoteric accounts of man's origin there was a major spiritual fall at some point in the past, when man lost contact with heaven/God and got mired on earth. His consciousness closed, as the narrowly focused ego became separated from the heaven-oriented soul. What followed is the human history as we know it. Through the arc of long and often arduous history, the fallen ego was gradually revived and lifted from the caves to the age of space flights and the internet.
 
And so the soul's partner is back, Stargirl and Starboy reunited. But watch out, Lana is hanging out on top of the H with a self-proclaimed "King of the Fall". The word "fall" has a double meaning. One meaning is the season of the fall (autumn), as evidenced in The Weeknd's fall tours. After his first international tour in spring 2012 followed the fall tours: The Weeknd Fall Tour (2012), The Weeknd Kiss Land Fall Tour (2013), King of the Fall (2014), and The Madness Fall Tour (2015). In the song Starboy he aptly mentions: "I come alive in the fall time". His latest tour is titled Starboy: Legend of the Fall Tour, even though it is scheduled to last from February to July 2017, so it refers either to his already established status as the "legend" from the past seasonal fall tours, or to the second meaning of the word "fall". The second meaning of "the fall" is spiritual and is reflected in the general content of his songs: fame and decadence. In the song The Fall, he sings about falling to the ground, and in Starboy he also refers to the Brad Pitt movie Legends of the Fall. The title of this movie seems ambiguous: imdb says that it refers to the biblical fall from innocence, although "the Fall" part was translated as the season (autumn) in countries such as Sweden and France, while in Germany and Spain it was translated as "Passion". Anyway, even in the season of the fall we can find a spiritual meaning: the season is connected with harvest, which in a New Testament parable signifies the end of the age when the righteous are "ripe" for entering heaven and the "wheat" is separated from the "chaff".
 
With man's individuality and consciousness revived, his capacity for self-destruction is restored too. Although we now have a history to learn from, will it be sufficient to prevent another fall?