Wilde_child

I agree with some of this writer's points. There's a lot of romanticism throughout LDR's body of work. Plus, another of her influences, the Beatnik movement, is about hedonism, pessimism and existential crisis. One cannot deny that.

This ^^ I've been saying this for a long time. Lana got it before most people did National Anthem, Ride, Born To Die and specially Tropico are an odissey to a decadent AMerica where the show business and politics combine in one, in another words society is making everyone famous because everyone is watching and seeing everyone. Ig and twitter. Everyone needs wants to be liked, loved, popular, famous and etc (this is as old as the times of empire but today got to a whole new level). That's what her decay means imo. It's a monetary decay, or saying America is broke, is saying the values changed too much, things are an anthem, money is an anthem. Most of her songs refer to things and use objects to describe a certain place or a certain feeling or value (cars, diamonds, books, ). People often forget Lana is a philosophy graduate (?) that grow up with both parents being from the Advertising world. Imo she's quite smart and aware of the world she lives 
 
Youtube combined sound and image like never before, it's all one now. The fastest the internet gets the more sound and image will combine. We now have streams taking lead over album sales. Why? Because we want to see it and hear it. 
 
As for the inevitable stardom that will come her way? That is something Lana Del Rey does not fear. "I know a lot of different people. When they are drunk, in the dark of the night they all want the same thing. They all want to be famous. It's innately human to want other people to bear witness to your life. It's important for people to be watched. They don't want to be alone. I don't want to be alone."

There is no such thing as a fake fan. We all like things because we think they're cool, or they make us happy, or they're associated with something that makes us feel good. Sometimes I think that Lana is not for young girls, but then I remember what I was listening to when I was twelve years old, and I have to let it go. Lana's for anyone who likes her or likes her clothes or whatever. None of us loses anything as a fan if somebody else likes her for what we think is the wrong reason.
 
It's not the young teens that are the problem, it's journalists exploiting and degrading Lana to bolster some point they want to make.

Found this facinating article from Salon website that talks about how Lana's music and fascination with death suits today's scociety. Here is the link...
 
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/08/why_lana_del_ray_is_the_perfect_artist_for_an_a
merica_in_decline_partner/
 
And here is transcript...
In case you have been under a rock, Lana Del Rey is pop music’s It Girl right now, sauntering past Queen Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus with her languid sex appeal and self-professed death wish. With a sound described as “narco-swing,” Del Rey floats through ghostly videos in various poses of drowning and despair, blowing a pouty kiss to the Grim Reaper in the guise of a Gothic pinup.
 
The kids can’t get enough. Her album “Ultraviolence” has just topped her hit debut “Born to Die” to land at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
 
“I wish I was dead already,” she confides to the Guardian in a kittenish voice (interview clip here). Asked if she thinks an early demise a la Kurt Cobain is glamorous, she murmurs, “Um, yeah,” setting off a twitterstorm in which Frances Bean Cobain, daughter of the singer who shot himself at 27, slammed her for romanticizing youthful death. “People like you think it’s ‘cool,’” blasted Cobain. “Well, it’s f–king not.”
 
But ask a Goth kid or a vampire fan, or for that matter a Pre-Raphaelite or an aficionado of European Romanticism, and you will quickly find that the pose of eroticized death has been a perennial favorite of youth culture — and it tends to crop up in seasons where young people see an epic fail in society.
 
Enter Lana Del Rey.
 
Love Story for the New Age
 
Del Rey has more than her share of detractors. Some feminists are irked by what they perceive to be the singer’s victim stance (not to mention her professed boredom with feminism), comparing her style unfavorably to Beyoncé’s brand of bootylicious empowerment. Indie music writers complain of her gimmicky transformation from under-the-radar Brooklyn songstress Lizzy Grant to pop phenom Lana Del Rey. (Do they feel similarly peeved with Bob Dylan, once known as Bob Zimmerman?)
On Del Rey’s much-panned 2012 Saturday Night Live performance, where she stood looking like she’d just popped a Xanax in pale gown, news anchor Brian Williams dubbed it “one of the worst outings in SNL history.” True, it was weird: Del Rey seemed, if anything, painfully bored with the SNL proceedings. No hopping around the stage shaking her bon-bon. No painfully earnest emotional appeals. What was this blasé siren up to?
 
Becoming the hottest ticket in town, is what. While the critics panned her, fans swooned. Angelina Jolie, remembered for her own youthful Goth phase, handpicked Del Rey to record the theme song for the summer’s hit Disney film “Maleficent.” Kanye and Kim asked her to sing at their A-list wedding. Del Rey is en fuego.
 
Too awkward for the medium of live television, too ethereal for the stage, Lana Del Rey seems to know her bread is buttered on the Internet (she is literally a child of that medium, the daughter of a web entrepreneur who made his dough hawking Internet domains). There, fans embrace her eclectic video mashups and twisted takes on pop culture clichés. There, she can be as detached, noncommittal and as rapturously bored with it all as her audience.
 
With her well-honed weltschmerz and mesmerizing monotony, Del Rey expresses the winter of America’s discontent through the eyes of the youthful bourgeoisie.
 
In “Shades of Cool,” Del Rey transforms the sunny myth of California dreamin’ into a nihilistic ride to oblivion in a Chevy Malibu. Her most recent insta-contraversial hit “Ultraviolence” throws a stink bomb into ’60s dreams of peace and harmony with a fantasy of being roughed up by a cult leader/lover. “We could go back to Woodstock,” she sings. “But they don’t know who we are.” In “National Anthem” she gives a ghoulish rendition of Marilyn Monroe’s breathy birthday address to President Kennedy, followed by assassination clips that segue to a cynical anthem about America real obsession, money, which kills every other youthful aspiration.
 
“It’s a love story for the new age
For the six page
We’re on a quick sick rampage
Wining and dining
Drinking and driving
Excessive buying
Overdose and dyin’
On our drugs and our love
And our dreams and our rage”
 
Lana Del Rey is pushing the envelope, and here’s her message, delivered with a languid pout: 21st-century America is a rotting corpse, deadlocked culturally, economically, and politically, and since there’s nothing we can do about it, let’s enjoy ourselves as the body-politic disintegrates, perhaps by savoring some toothsome bites of the past: candy-colored Super 8 films, juicy jazz tunes and clips of sultry screen sirens. The future is a retrospective.
 
All of this echoes the ancient danse macabre, the dance of death, the motif that sprang out of the medieval horrors of war and the plague. It’s a plea for fevered amusement while you’ve still got time.
 
Queen of the Damned
 
You might call Del Rey a musical Queen of the Damned: the expression of a generational sense that America has lost its way, and there’s little hope for redemption. Del Rey’s haunting sense of exhausted sadness is perfect pitch for an era when climate change threatens the planet, bloodsucking financial predators steal the future of our youth and consumer culture deadens everyone. The kingdom of wealth is sterile and limiting; perhaps the kingdom of death is preferable. Del Rey’s pose of expectant pleasure at the coming apocalypse strikes a resonant chord — a cool bravado that eases the pain. In her romantic fantasies, you can almost hear strains of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, a love story in which young lovers seek peace through annihilation.
 
Del Rey and fellow avatars of the death-and-the-maiden trope —one of the oldest in art — have been creeping onto the cultural scene since the global financial meltdown of 2007-’08, and not just in America. In Lars Von Trier’s 2011 film “Melancholia,” Kirsten Dunst’s character Justine welcomes the end of the world by offering her sprawling naked body to a rogue planet hurtling toward earth. “Life on earth is evil,” murmurs Justine. “No one will miss it.”
 
All of this is no surprise to students of psychoanalysis. It was a woman, Sabina Spielrein, who gave Sigmund Freud the inspiration for his theory of the death drive, writing of young women who dream of lying in a coffin, yearning to return to the womb through the tomb. It is women who are most acutely aware of the limitations of society’s institutions and its life-denying strictures: scripts for marriage, motherhood, and career still don’t accommodate women’s desires and creative potential. Why not just imagine sinking into a blissful abyss with your lover?
 
For millennials, the desire to reject an inhumane future in favor of a sensual plunge into undifferentiated nature is mirrored in Del Rey’s videos, where she is often submerged in water, as if suspended in Earth’s amniotic fluid. The world can be saved only when life returns to its primal source.
 
This potent combination of women, sex and death is going to be one of the calling cards of late-stage capitalism. We are experiencing fearsome global dislocations and distorted social and economic systems that are killing our life-affirming instincts. The death drive is perennial, but when a society seems to hover on the eve of destruction, these Eves of the Apocalypse — suicidal brides, young women fixated on pain and death — emerge to speak our well-founded anxieties. They signal that just now, the death drive is very strong.
 
The sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote of “anomic suicide,” a desire for death that comes from confusion and lack of social direction in the face of hard economic times and societal upheaval. When young people can’t find legitimate aspirations, they feel lost and disoriented. They begin to lose any sense of the limits of desires and become mired in a sense of chronic disappointment. A bankruptcy of expectations leads to a nostalgic fixation on the past and inability to actively meet the future.
 
What Lana Del Rey is selling is what a big chunk of America’s youth is feeling: contemporary capitalist society is a deathly bore.

She doesn't conceive of it as a "persona" but a name change. I remember her recent interviews having her say it's not an "act" that she gets into in order to entertain but more related to how she visually/sonically sees herself. The other thing I remember her saying (or at least myself interpreting) is that LDR and Lizzy Grant are one; they have the same personality/character. Maybe the video styles of the LG and LDR eras differ, but their difference could be owing to not having the resources to tell stories like the LDR-era ones can.
 
I think the real issue with "thought pieces" and LDR is one of exploitation. They are jacking her persona (which isn't a persona) and using it to promote their opinion about what's wrong with the world, or what particular problems the world has and that they are afraid of. It is exactly the same process as LDR wearing some recognized brand of clothing and having the clothing manufacturer use that to sell their clothes. Hence, LDR wears cut off jeans and Hollywood caps to prevent that. Unfortunately, she can't do the same kind of thing with the personality/character she has.
 

Pretty soon Lana101 will be taught across campuses nationwide. 

the first time I saw this "Piranha" magazine I immediately thought it was a joke! 

"Piranha" is a slang word for "slut" in Brazilian Portuguese. LMFAO!

If you've been here a while, then you'll know that this isn't the worst stalking there is on this board

This sounds very Jersey. I actually know that part of NJ well and enjoy knowing she roamed those parts. I wonder if she ever went to Satin Dolls (the strip club Bada-Bing used on The Sopranos) in Lodi. I bet she has.   
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bada_Bing

Looking forward to stormy hacker romances in future videos, when Lana decides to go cyberpunk.     

Hmm thanks... My imagination soars like an eagle sometimes LOL.
 

It was Ahmed all along

leaKer

nah probably selling firearms via the internet... guy in NJ (I think) was arrested for it ~ or was the founder of the site or something. had mob connections as well.,,

I think she alternates between the two throughout the song.

I never heard of this illegal electronics business!   I've always thought it was about drugs and stuff...

he's the leaker

Yeah... Just good friends.

i don't really think that lizzy and lana look that different if you consider how different lana looked during the beginning of the born to die era, the paradise era and nowadays.
But back to the "transition" from lizzy to lana. the biggest differences i've noticed were her lips, her hair and the way she styled it and completely different make-up like she changed the way she used to have her eyebrows, she used those long fake-lashes and this whole cat-eye thing. She also used to be very thin at the beginning of the btd era which made her face look very slim and her jaw more defined.

lbr this is the only option
 

 
and unlike some people and she doesn't come off like a tryhard copy

Yeah... Just good friends.

Lay me down to night, with the Arab girls -___-

Barrie and Lana we're separated for sure by late March/April, when he went to "emotional rehab" and had to leave their house in LA. So I imagine that all the songs were finished and mastered for Ultraviolence already.
I don't think the story of Ultraviolence is about Barrie but if she was going through a break up at the same time while re-hashing an older break up, there's certainly the time to reflect and notice some overlaps. Why devote and entire album to the story of a single man when maybe it's more the story of her relationships with men?

Listening through Ultraviolence, aside from the "I'll love you forever" tracks, songs like "Is This Happiness", "Flipside", "Cruel World", "Pretty When You Cry", etc. I fucking love. Not that I revel in her relationship deteriorating, but personally, I feel they're more relatable. And yeah, I think they're about Barrie.
 
Feels fresh finally seeing Lana with a different attitude towards a failing relationship.