lili

For the record, I have listened to Jack's LDR albums on many different setups, from AirPod Max-es, Grados, my parents home theatre setup, to my Q Acoustics bookshelf speakers. They are comparatively (to most other albums) bad on every setup I have access to. Now I am not an audiophile, and I am sure my setup isn't as fine tuned as it "should" be, but the Antonoff+LDR albums are noticeably poorly mixed compared to my other albums. 

The intro of Mariners, the song that made me a stan again, is diabolical. I would kill for a remastered version.

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.
 
 
 
 

He does that on purpose to make it sound "unexpected", which he thinks translates to genius. 
A while ago, someone on here shared soundcloud links to Jack talking about the production in The Greatest and if i recall correctly, he talks about it in that. (Here's the short version- not sure if this cuts it out tho https://youtu.be/fWkf0KCRbGg).
When I was listening to the full version, I could almost begin to appreciate Jack's thought process and production as he explained it all, but then when I listened to The Greatest again, I really couldn't pick up his "genius"...
 
There is such a contrast in what people think about NFR, it's almost like the Laurel vs Yanny thing, where both might be correct. Its either her best or her worst and no in between.. 

I think that because we all think so highly of her we expect something different from her this time sound-wise  

Completely agree. I often wonder how I would react to it if it was the work of another artist I've just discovered. When we're familiar with an artist's ouvre, our understanding of a specific work is naturally marked by everything that precedes it. I'll try listening to it again, separately, on its own, not in the context of listening to the whole discography and of course, still it will be imbued with implications of my idea of her art but maybe I'll come to a better understanding.

Omg, enough said!! 

I've tried doing the exact same thing multiple times and it doesn't work 
I really wish I could tho. 

Ah, thank you but Lana used it herself while describing her work in the studio with Dan Auerbach. I'll update this post if I ever find that interview. 

Completely agree. I often wonder how I would react to it if it was the work of another artist I've just discovered. When we're familiar with an artist's ouvre, our understanding of a specific work is naturally marked by everything that precedes it. I'll try listening to it again, separately, on its own, not in the context of listening to the whole discography and of course, still it will be imbued with implications of my idea of her art but maybe I'll come to a better understanding.

I'm starting to really think it's the base and strings missing. And no, Lana's songs don't require base and/or strings to be amazing songs, but they definitely give the depth. 
Then again, I also understand they were not going for that depth. But since I always associated her music with depth and texture, I can't see NFR as free and breezy, I can only see it as lacking. 
 
Edit: I think your use of the word "alchemy" is perfect!

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.

I had a plan to listen all of Lana’s discography yesterday. When I reached NFR, I realized something. I love the idea of the songs on it, but not the songs themselves. I love the title track, MAC, Venice Bitch, think they’re great but also can’t help but feel annoyed… like they’re missing something, like they’re songs that couldn’t reach their full potential somehow. Anyway, I turned it off after Love Song.
 
My personal opinion on what Lana and Jack do together is that I love and get the idea that is there, but it seems to lack the “alchemy” Lana said to have with Dan for example. I’m not saying I want Ultraviolence 2.0, Ultraviolence was a gem on its own, but because I believe in her ability to play in new, exciting soundscapes, I do hope she finds that “alchemy” with another producer. This is just my take on the situation as a listener though and nothing else.
 
 

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". 

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.

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?

Your posts are always so intriguing. Thank you for sharing. I absolutely love reading them!
 
It is certainly an odd occurrence to have Lana mention all these specific details connected to Peg Entwistle's story but for her to not be aware of their symbolic significance. So many of the lyrics make sense in light of the Entwistle story.
 
"Climb up the H of the Hollywood sign, yeah
In these stolen moments, the world is mine (do it, do it)"
 
​The symbolism of the H is probably the most identifiable symbol, obviously having jumped from it and falling to her death, but the "do it, do it" part especially haunts me, as I interpret it as Entwistle's inner consciousness telling her to commit suicide. 
 
"We're the masters of our own fate
We're the captains of our own souls"
 
This part also seems relevant to the story, perhaps acting as a justification of leaving behind the world, since we are all in control of our own fate and our own souls under this philosophy.
 
"They say only the good die young
That just ain't right"
 
Entwistle died at a very young age - 24 to be exact.
 
"Then, we dance on the H of the Hollywood sign, yeah
'Til we run out of breath, gotta dance 'til we die"
 
That last part has an uncanny resemblance!
 
It really is unusual that Lana has written this song, unaware of its other meanings. I like the theory that this is a case of Jungian synchronicity

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.

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?

@litewave I adore your contributions!!

Best American Record
 
Damn this is a good song.

In Lana's art, America is a symbol of God's creation, from the heavenly East Coast to the earthly West Coast, with the nostalgic 1950s-1960s period representing the garden of Eden/Paradise. In the beginning the music of creation unfolded harmoniously under God's benevolent guidance. But the ego of man tried to be too much like God and "write the next best American record", which was an obsession that led to man's extreme self-assertion, separation from God and soul, and falling out of universal harmony.   The soul sings:   My baby used to dance underneath my architecture   The architecture here is the celestial firmament, the spiritual realm of the soul. The baby is the soul's individual expression, the ego, which went down to earth, to the material realm. In the beginning the ego was full of joy and energy, derived from its dynamic contact with the soul. This means that man's spiritual and material sides were in a healthy balance.   To the "Houses of the Holy"
 
"Houses of the Holy" is a Led Zeppelin song from the 1970s, where the singer courts his girl to let him take her "to the movies, to the show". It is a sexual song with spiritual overtones and also with references to Satan. The relationship between the ego and the soul has a masculine-feminine dynamic, which is reflected in human sexual relationships.
 
Smoking on them cigarettes
 
Turning white into black (innocence into experience), burning with passion, breathing the spirit of life.
 
He was seventies in spirit, nineties in his frame of mind
 
Although influenced by the 1960s hippie ideals, the mood of the 1970s turned from the hippie emphasis on community toward individualism (the "Me" decade). This individualistic trend continued in the 1980s and received a new boost in the 1990s from the collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union, even as the boundaries between countries and cultures further weakened and unification of the world accelerated. Individualism is the nature of the ego, while collectivism is the nature of the soul.
 
The ego did need to distance itself from the soul - but only for a while, in order to build the mental and physical structures that the soul could infuse at their reunion. But the ego became "obsessed with writing the next best American record", for fame. Its focus on self-aggrandizement and self-gratification isolated it from the soul, from others, and from a larger reality. Man became trapped on earth, ran out of energy and ran out of life.

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).

By far the most interesting thread is read on here! Wow!

So I am not as articulate as the other members on this forum, but the other day, I had bought a book from a thrift shop titled " Four Metaphysical Poets" discussing the works of John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughn, and Richard Crashaw. There was a poem that I found by John Donne under the section Love Unfulfilled  and I saw a poem called Loves Deity.
 
" I long to talk to some old lovers ghost
  Who died before the god of Love was borne"
 
I thought these two lines, with emphasis on the first line, kind of reflected one of Lana's themes in her music which is reminiscing over a lover that has left this world (K). It didn't really hit me until I watched the music video for Shades of Cool, where Lana appears to be a ghost narrating the life of an old lover that she had before she died.
 
This is something that stuck out to me, that's all.