evilentity

Full disclosure: I am a full-blown Barrie shipper so feel free to take this post with however many grains of salt you deem necessary. I'd actually kinda forgotten I'd written these thoughts out. But re-reading them and then comparing the "demo" lyrics side-by-side with the album is both striking and eerie. Gone are all the lyrics that I said I thought sounded harsh or unfair, replaced by more complimentary lyrics expressing regret, acknowledgment of her own role in things, and wanting him back. (Incidentally, I agree with the consensus that the new lyrics are inferior despite probably being more fair and true to how she feels now.) Now consider the first verse, pre-chorus, and chorus of the very next track, "The Greatest": H/t to @@annedauphine for helping me remember the name of a bar a profile/interview talked about her going to with Barrie. From Nylon in 2013: Now I haven't been able to confirm that Neptune's Net was specifically a "bar where the Beach Boys would go" (where's @@Monicker when we need him!), but it's a bar popular with surfers next to Ventura County Line Beach, a location referenced in the Beach Boys hit "Surfin' USA" so this seems the likely referent, which would make this a Barrie song. If so, it's pretty significant that she's effectively describing the loss of Barrie in apocalyptic terms, placing it on the same scale as the civilizational decay of this shitty timeline we're all living through right now in which the world is on fire literally and metaphorically. The greatest loss of them all. This conflation is reminiscent of her cover of Skeeter Davis' "The End of the World": Taken together, "California", as unsubtle of a let's-get-back-together-at-least-to-hook-up-if-nothing-else song as it gets, followed by "The Next Best American Record" and "The Greatest", this three-song block of Barrie songs on NFR (and there may be others) is quite a statement some five years after their break-up. Two points in conclusion: Between the Barrie songs and possible FJM references I wouldn't sleep easy if I was that Chase Stogel guy. Barrie, shoot your shot. Even if only for a booty call.

Interesting.

She's talked about this before, but it made me revisit her comments: She said she was "the littlest orphan in Annie", which would be the character of Molly. Quickly perusing the script, it's interesting to speculate what influence that role may have had on her at a young age, imitating Miss Hannigan's drunkenness and her calling it "medicine", lines like "Runnin' free in N.Y.C.", "She's famous... Wish I was on the radio", or the "Daddy" Warbucks character.

Do we know how tall any of the men recently in her life are? Because... This fits FJM to a T. Even this. These lyrics, however, suggest the song may have originally been about Barrie.

#LanaIsCancelled #Unstanning

#tbt

#nocontext

Hi Lana!

Ah, this explains why a couple albums I'd been anticipating came out when they did.

welp Fans would do well to remember this. same tbh yup yup welp again Um...

P.S. Someone buy me a set of the Chinatown or LFDR glasses and I will pose with one like my profile pic and post it on the forum.

Anybody record this?

Would you rather fight one giant Lana or 100 tiny Lanas Del Rey?

I'm not much of a merch person, and these are expensive and I'm fucking cheap, and appropriation and blah blah blah... but some of these are pretty fucking cool designs.

Hmmm... I believe you have beef with this guy: My issue isn't with her criticism of Kanye West, which is well deserved and I agree with and then some. My issue is with the context in which she places it. Agreed. Perhaps Lana should Google what Mike Love thinks of Trump. My point is that even in making an artistic statement rightly criticizing a black man for his complicity in and enabling of Trump's racism this white woman's song is still unconsciously suffused with white nostalgia bullshit that could have been avoided with even a slightly different set of references.

Not what I was expecting when I saw "Vinyl Enthusiasts" in the title. Disappointed.

Perhaps your mind needs the exercise then. In a song about civilizational decay, literally every cultural reference she makes to an idealized past is to white musicians or white-dominated music and her one exemplar of cultural decay is a black rapper. Not exactly a big reach to see why someone might find that problematic.

Kanye disses are all well and good, but I'm afraid there's an unfortunate, unintentionally problematic reading of these lyrics. She's nostalgic for the Beach Boys. Not that there's anything wrong with that. (Hey @Monicker!) But the Beach Boys exemplify and are inextricably bound up with the period when rock and roll, originally a black genre, became thoroughly appropriated by white artists (*cough cough* "Surfin' USA" *cough*). Then there's these lines which echo "So Legit" and AFFA: The so-called "death of rock and roll", largely at the hands of rap and hip-hop, newer less-appropriated black genres, is something mostly lamented by white people. She cites this as symptomatic of the cultural aspect of the civilizational decline she's singing about. And who or what does she pick as the embodiment of this cultural decline? No surprise, it's Kanye West sporting his MAGA hat over bleached blonde hair. Almost as if to say that not only has rock and roll been supplanted by rap and hip-hop, but rap and hip-hop in the degraded form of a rapper who has in some sense disappropriated his own blackness. (The blonde Kanye line reminds me a lot of that Hooper X quote analyzing Star Wars in Chasing Amy about how "Vader's beautiful black visage is sullied when he pulls off his mask to reveal a feeble, crusty old white man".) In the next line she references David Bowie, a white guy obviously. Don't get me wrong. I love this song and really feel the general civilizational decline she's speaking to and even some of the specific sentiments in isolation. But the way she strings them together, without any positive references to black artists and the only reference to a black artist being used as a sign of the decay, reads problematically.

To the extent that this is true, they would be your posts. Because as a member mere months old ( ), you couldn't possibly be anything but literally ignorant of the nuances of conversations that took place here many more years ago that are no longer archived here, some of which @@trayertrash eloquently touched on in her post. It was more about consent and power structures, what actually makes incest wrong in most cases besides a gut feeling, philosophical thought experiments about scenarios where those reasons might not apply, etc. #tbt Also, #tbt that time Ben threatened the previous owner of LanaBoards with arrest over his misunderstanding of a post dismissing a fan theory because it would have absurd incestuous implications with Lana's brother as a post advocating that theory. #YeahThatReallyHappened #GoodTimes

I said this jokingly the first time, but I mean it seriously too. We had a really good thread discussing this topic years ago and many were surprised to find that they struggled when forced to support their opinions with actual arguments. I'll go on record saying that the forum was better when we had interesting discussions like this. Unfortunately, if I recall correctly, this legendary infamous thread got deleted because it was creating a problem for Google Ads. Does anybody have a screenshot? @@Elle Is there any way to retrieve this even though it was probably "permanently deleted"? Looks like this was the URL and archive.org doesn't have it: http://lanaboards.com/index.php?/topic/2257-do-you-support-incest/

Too bad you missed the incest thread.

I think I hear "Hawaii just missed [a fireball?]" And it's definitely "Kanye West is blonde and gone" lol burn drag him

Also, there are one or two factual mistakes I made over the course of these that I'll correct if I ever finish a follow-up. Keep in mind that these originally aired/were posted in December 2012, relatively early in the history of Lana fandom, and our knowledge has evolved a bit since then. There are also a lot of outdated forum in-jokes.

I'd bet cake this is a play on words, that the world's on fire and it was fun while it lasted. Sort of her version of Jim Morrison's line "I don't know what's gonna happen, man, but I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames" which she quoted on Twitter once.