Vox Article- The life of Lana Del Rey & Album Projections

[delreyfan 2]

http://www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5814038/heres-why-lana-del-rey-is-so-controversial

 

This is probably one of the best articles I've read. It highlights different aspects of her life and explains why she is so controversial. The closing was awesome because I agree 100%. Also, they predict that Ultraviolence could sell between 175,000-200,000 copies in its first week! Exciting   

[Macintosh Manhattan 6,511]

http://www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5814038/heres-why-lana-del-rey-is-so-controversial

 

This is probably one of the best articles I've read. It highlights different aspects of her life and explains why she is so controversial. The closing was awesome because I agree 100%. Also, they predict that Ultraviolence could sell between 175,000-200,000 copies in its first week! Exciting

Now this is how you write an article. No lies no bullshit just pure fact. Some of the so called crirtics could learn a thing or two by reading this tbh. Anyway mini rant over. I really like this article it's very well written and the guy/girl who wrote this did there research...

[lafleursauvage 324]

Amazing article!!!

[Angel Forever 146]

Now, that's an authentic article. Recently, LanaBoards on twitter said that Fucked My Way Up To The Top is about Taylor Swift, and this article mentioned Taylor right when they were talking about authenticity, lol. Well, in the end, I think Ultraviolence is media's chance to redeem all that bullshit they created when Born to Die dropped and all that hate on her [supposed] inauthenticity.

[DominicMars 1,763]

I don't see what makes LDR inauthentic? Or even still, she is far less manufactured than her peers. Shes been cowriter or sole writer on every song, which is not something Katy, Rihanna, or most of pop music in general. Hmmm

[AngelHeadedHipster 2,838]

Hey can anybody please paste the article here,,,, for some reason this website is blocked for me

[GodBlessMe 2,141]

Hey can anybody please paste the article here,,,, for some reason this website is blocked for me

 

 

 

Singer Lana Del Rey, who dropped her new album Ultraviolence on Friday, June 13, is certainly one of the most controversial pop stars of the moment. While her fans (which include Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who had her perform at their wedding events at Versailles) love her hyper-stylized aesthetic, detractors have branded her a fraud. "She seems to be both trying too hard and not trying hard enough," as Slant's Paul Rice puts it, "stoking questions about whether she even means any of what she's singing."

 

But ultimately the controversy that surrounds Lana Del Rey made her into a star, and it won't stop people from buying her new album.

 

The Creation of Lana Del Rey

 

Lana Del Rey performs at Amoeba Music Hollywood. Kevin Winter/Getty

 

Lana Del Rey was born in upstate New York as Elizabeth Grant, the daughter of a millionaire entrepreneur who sold internet domains. Grant went to boarding school in Connecticut, and studied metaphysics at Fordham University. She started writing songs after high school and signed her first recording contract in 2007 with indie label 5 points at age 21. She released an EP with them , Kill Kill, under the name Lizzy Grant.

 

Here's a video of Lizzy Grant performing:

 

 

 

In this video, she's self conscious and awkward. She hangs on to the microphone like a life raft, and her voice is muted as she sways aimlessly from side to side. Grant must have known, on some level, that what she was doing wasn't working. She had released her debut-full length album titled Lana Del Ray (note the different spelling) on iTunes with 5 points, but it received little attention or praise.

 

She hired a new manager, Ben Mawson, and set off to reinvent herself. To become a self-made pop-princess sensation, she had to seem self-made, and Lizzy Grant had to die to make room for Lana Del Rey. But she made a major mistake. She bought back the album rights to Lana Del Ray, pulled the original EP from the market, and swept clean her internet presence. This "clean slate" came back to haunt Del Rey when members of the music community began to question her authenticity.

 

After throwing out Lizzy Grant's persona, Lana Del Rey dyed her hair brown, upped her old Hollywood look, and became a sensation. The created persona of Lana Del Rey was an ode to the Hollywood of yore. Her videos were lavishly produced, over-the-top, and completely eccentric. Her voice got deeper, her mouth became poutier, and she added as much confidence as eyeliner. She describes herself as a "self-styled gangsta Nancy Sinatra" and is known for packing her songs with pop cultural references from the 1950s and 1960s.

 

With the YouTube release of her song "Video Games" in June 2011, Del Rey took off:

 

 

 

Six months later, her second studio album Born to Die debuted at number 2 on the U.S. Billboard 200. Since then she has released a short film, Tropico, and an EP titled Paradise. Her third studio album Ultraviolence was released last week. But none of that came without controversy.

 

How Lana Del Rey became a polarizing figure

When "Video Games" premiered it was labeled as a "self-release" and grew viral among indie-bloggers within a few weeks. Pitchfork awarded "Video Games" a Best New Track label. Del Rey claimed to write her own songs, and was credited with creating the video for the song herself.

 

She gave an exclusive interview to Pitchfork in August 2011. She said that she'd been singing in Brooklyn since she was 17 and "no one in the industry cared at all. I haven't changed a thing since then and yet things seem to be turning around for me. Perhaps the angels decided to shine on me for a little while." But that bliss didn't last for long.

 

As early as September of 2011 — less than a month after Pitchfork sang her praises — the tides began to turn. Indie-music blog Hipster Runoff labelled her the "most controversial broad in indie right now," saying that she carefully planned the hype around "Video Games" and was trying to trick the music world into believing that she was a self-made, American Dream Achieving, Indie-pop princess. Hipster Runoff split her coverage into two distinct camps (#teamlana and #efflana), with critics claiming that she was a poser and just a "failed mainstream artist." By October the critiques had become personal: Del Rey was criticized for having lip enhancement surgery (which she denied). Despite the criticism, Lana Del Rey signed to Interscope records.

 

In fact, all of this criticism was making Lana Del Rey a figure of public interest. By January 2012, it looked like Lana Del Rey was set to take over the music world. As she neared the release of her "debut" album Born To Die, her popularity soared.

 

 

In 2011 De Rey's only haters were the music bloggers. But in January 2012, in conjunction with the release of Born to Die, Lana Del Rey was chosen as the musical guest for Saturday Night Live opposite host Daniel Radcliffe. It could have been huge moment for Del Rey to shine, but she flopped.

 

 

 

For most of the performance, Del Rey just swayed back and forth. She was nervous. She looked like the shy, t-shirt-wearing Lizzy Grant she was supposed to have discarded. She looked beautiful but her performance fell flat. Brian Williams, the anchor for NBC Nightly News, said, "Lana Del Rey had one of the worst outings in SNL history last night," and that she was "the least-experienced musical guest in the show's history." Her only defender was Daniel Radcliffe, who did not even see the performance.

 

It's important to remember that at this point, Del Rey still had not put out a full-length feature album. Lana Del Ray was well-buried from the public. For her to perform on Saturday Night Live was a huge boost for her album before she had even released it.

 

When the album did drop, though, the backlash was swift. Jon Caramanica of The New York Times wrote that "The only real option is to wash off that face paint, mess up that hair and try again in a few years. There are so many more names out there for the choosing." Even Pitchfork, who had lauded "Video Games," gave Born to Die a 5.5 out of 10 calling it "the equivalent of a faked orgasm—a collection of torch songs with no fire."

 

 

Lana Del Rey poses in front of an American flag. Jason LeVaris/Getty

 

Lana Del Rey's SNL performance, regardless of what the critics said, piqued listeners' curiosity. All of the bad publicity drew more people to her music, and when Born To Die dropped, it hit No. 2 on the Billboard album charts. Born To Die sold more than three million copies, and was the fifth best-selling album of 2012. Since then, her 2013 Paradise EP debuted in the Billboard Top 10, and she has had two platinum singles with a remix of her song "Summertime Sadness" and her single for The Great Gatsby, "Young and Beautiful."

 

Did any of the controversy matter?

 

Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift. Dave J. Hogan/Getty.

 

Perhaps — but if it did, it probably helped her. Creating a stage persona is one of the oldest tricks in Hollywood, and it's been done by some of the biggest pop stars. The name change in itself is also not uncommon. Rita Hayworth was born Margarita Carmen Cansino; Kid Cudi changed his name from Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi. Hell, one of the most iconically "authentic" artists, Bob Dylan, was born Robert Zimmerman. Authenticity itself is a construct of the music industry.

 

In some ways, Taylor Swift is a perfect mirror of Lana Del Rey. Swift started out as an "authentic" country star with her big curly hair and songs about teenage love, but over time she has become sleeker, more polished, and much more popular. Like many stars before her, Del Rey realized what she was doing wasn't working, so she changed it. Lizzy Grant was never going to have a hit song, but Lana Del Rey has and will. "It's not that there's anything 'inauthentic' about Del Rey," Nitsuh Abebe wrote for Pitchfork. "It's just that the aesthetic references surrounding her are all already so pungent, evocative, and well-worn that it's hard to reshape them."

 

But if we look at the timing of Del Rey's controversies, detractors could easily argue they were planned, that her public dust-ups were, like the rest of her persona, manufactured. She gives a miserable SNL performance, spurring hundreds of headlines the week before the album drops. Then, when she's set to release a new single "Ride," she adds some controversy to her publicity by wearing a full Native American headdress, an appropriation of another group's culture. "Lana Del Rey may be more in control of her career and her life than most think," Louise Webster wrote.

 

 

When Del Rey released her short 27-minute art film, Tropico, in December 2013, she again found a controversy by appropriating Latino gangster culture. "Dressing up like an entire culture and calling it 'fashion' is offensive," Hillary Crosley wrote for Jezebel. "using another person or culture as an outfit to make your art edgy is in poor taste."

 

It's no surprise, then, that the release of Ultraviolence was accompanied by still more Del Rey controversies. She declared she was not a feminist to Fader, saying, "For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. "I'm more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what's going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities." She also told a Guardian interviewer, "I wish I was dead already," while discussing the early deaths of Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain.

 

 

 

Lana Del Rey performs. Nick Pickles/Getty.

 

But none of this controversy changes the fact that Ultraviolence is a better CD than Born To Die was, and that people will still buy it and listen to it. Ultraviolence is more rock-heavy than Del Rey's earlier work and built on a themes of desperation and loss. Even Pitchfork, who demolished her first album, gave Ultraviolence positive review, saying Lana Del Rey is "a pop music original full-stop, and there are not nearly enough of those around." Overall, Metacritic gives it an average score of 76, or "generally favorable," which is significantly higher than the 61 Born to Die received.

 

The cult of Lana Del Rey did not just survive the controversy of inauthenticity, it thrived through it. Ultraviolence is on track to sell between 175,000 and 200,000 copies in its first week, which could land her in the #1 spot . But even if this album doesn't become a number one hit, or sell platinum, Lana Del Rey is not going anywhere soon.

 

 

 

 

[FormerLanaFan 170]

This is a mediocre article twisting facts with some inaccuracies, revels nothing worth the reading. It's a negatively biased article regurgitating most of the authenticity BS written about her. She was born in a millionaire family? I'm not even sure that papa Grant has today millions of $ in his account. He has a portfolio of domain names (that maybe worth million of $) but this business was a financial burden for the family for most of the time. Why was a bad thing that she bought back the rights for an album that was shelved for three years? Why are people thinking that she tried to hide anything? She "appropriated latino culture" LEL! that is some "deep" Jezebel level of criticism (I don't care about Tropico it was a misguided and poorly executed project btw). She's controversial because she has commercial success and she doesn't sing the same BS as the Top 40 pop stars and she has more appeal with her music and her looks than most of the indie wannabes. She's envied from everywhere and that's the real source of her controversy. And suggesting that the (unprepared and lazy = bad) SNL performance was what fueled her sales because "there is no bad publicity" it just lacks logic. BTD has sold well because it's a good album, and has sold well in places where nobody gave a shit about SNL or the authenticity debate (Europe).

 

Nobody would buy an album just for the sake of controversy in the Spotify era

[tiffanydale 193]

I HATED how they made it seem like Lana said that she wished she was dead like it was her conscious doing to create controversy about herself. Honestly, that was the least of her intentions. They also failed to mention the article explaining that the interviewer took her too literally...

 

Overall, I think that this article was very one-sided. They talked about all the misleading facts that make her seem "manufactured" but ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about how all the awful things the critics say about her really does hurt her. Lana takes bad reviews personally but this article twists that and makes whoever is reading believe that Lana Del Rey will purposely create controversy to make her albums sell better when that's not the case AT ALL.

 

God, this article makes me so fucking mad.

[MaraDreea 204]

She's envied from everywhere and that's the real source of her controversy.

 

Nobody would buy an album just for the sake of controversy in the Spotify era.

 

[slang 1,532]

I wasn't impressed by the article either. The comments about SNL performances were biased. The "truth" is that there is a fence and about half the people on one side of it like the SNL performances and on the other side of the fence they hate it (actually the likes exceeded the dislikes something like 60/40 on youtube when SNL performances were on LanaDelReyVevo). I for one see those performances as the official start of my fandom. The other thing the article did, which was kind of shameless, is represent Lizzy Grant's persona with the performance that best illustrated the idea that the LDR transformation from Lizzy Grant was "inauthentic". If they'd have used her 2008 NY Living Room performance of Yayo instead, people would be much more confused about who would win a fanciful bitch fight (Lizzie Grant vs. Lana Del Rey). However, the article does provide the SNL Video Games performance, which is surprising to me because I thought LDR shut them all down. I predict that video will be gone soon, so enjoy it (or not) while it lasts!

[GodBlessMe 2,141]

I wasn't impressed by the article either. The comments about SNL performances were biased. The "truth" is that there is a fence and about half the people on one side of it like the SNL performances and on the other side of the fence they hate it (actually the likes exceeded the dislikes something like 60/40 on youtube when SNL performances were on LanaDelReyVevo). I for one see those performances as the official start of my fandom. The other thing the article did, which was kind of shameless, is represent Lizzy Grant's persona with the performance that best illustrated the idea that the LDR transformation from Lizzy Grant was "inauthentic". If they'd have used her 2008 NY Living Room performance of Yayo instead, people would be much more confused about who would win a fanciful bitch fight (Lizzie Grant vs. Lana Del Rey). However, the article does provide the SNL Video Games performance, which is surprising to me because I thought LDR shut them all down. I predict that video will be gone soon, so enjoy it (or not) while it lasts!

They took all the youtube videos of the performance down but not the vimeo ones...

[Greaser Prince 200]

 

 

 

Singer Lana Del Rey, who dropped her new album Ultraviolence on Friday, June 13, is certainly one of the most controversial pop stars of the moment. While her fans (which include Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who had her perform at their wedding events at Versailles) love her hyper-stylized aesthetic, detractors have branded her a fraud. "She seems to be both trying too hard and not trying hard enough," as Slant's Paul Rice puts it, "stoking questions about whether she even means any of what she's singing."

 

But ultimately the controversy that surrounds Lana Del Rey made her into a star, and it won't stop people from buying her new album.

 

The Creation of Lana Del Rey

 

Lana Del Rey performs at Amoeba Music Hollywood. Kevin Winter/Getty

 

Lana Del Rey was born in upstate New York as Elizabeth Grant, the daughter of a millionaire entrepreneur who sold internet domains. Grant went to boarding school in Connecticut, and studied metaphysics at Fordham University. She started writing songs after high school and signed her first recording contract in 2007 with indie label 5 points at age 21. She released an EP with them , Kill Kill, under the name Lizzy Grant.

 

Here's a video of Lizzy Grant performing:

 

 

 

In this video, she's self conscious and awkward. She hangs on to the microphone like a life raft, and her voice is muted as she sways aimlessly from side to side. Grant must have known, on some level, that what she was doing wasn't working. She had released her debut-full length album titled Lana Del Ray (note the different spelling) on iTunes with 5 points, but it received little attention or praise.

 

She hired a new manager, Ben Mawson, and set off to reinvent herself. To become a self-made pop-princess sensation, she had to seem self-made, and Lizzy Grant had to die to make room for Lana Del Rey. But she made a major mistake. She bought back the album rights to Lana Del Ray, pulled the original EP from the market, and swept clean her internet presence. This "clean slate" came back to haunt Del Rey when members of the music community began to question her authenticity.

 

After throwing out Lizzy Grant's persona, Lana Del Rey dyed her hair brown, upped her old Hollywood look, and became a sensation. The created persona of Lana Del Rey was an ode to the Hollywood of yore. Her videos were lavishly produced, over-the-top, and completely eccentric. Her voice got deeper, her mouth became poutier, and she added as much confidence as eyeliner. She describes herself as a "self-styled gangsta Nancy Sinatra" and is known for packing her songs with pop cultural references from the 1950s and 1960s.

 

With the YouTube release of her song "Video Games" in June 2011, Del Rey took off:

 

 

 

Six months later, her second studio album Born to Die debuted at number 2 on the U.S. Billboard 200. Since then she has released a short film, Tropico, and an EP titled Paradise. Her third studio album Ultraviolence was released last week. But none of that came without controversy.

 

How Lana Del Rey became a polarizing figure

When "Video Games" premiered it was labeled as a "self-release" and grew viral among indie-bloggers within a few weeks. Pitchfork awarded "Video Games" a Best New Track label. Del Rey claimed to write her own songs, and was credited with creating the video for the song herself.

 

She gave an exclusive interview to Pitchfork in August 2011. She said that she'd been singing in Brooklyn since she was 17 and "no one in the industry cared at all. I haven't changed a thing since then and yet things seem to be turning around for me. Perhaps the angels decided to shine on me for a little while." But that bliss didn't last for long.

 

As early as September of 2011 — less than a month after Pitchfork sang her praises — the tides began to turn. Indie-music blog Hipster Runoff labelled her the "most controversial broad in indie right now," saying that she carefully planned the hype around "Video Games" and was trying to trick the music world into believing that she was a self-made, American Dream Achieving, Indie-pop princess. Hipster Runoff split her coverage into two distinct camps (#teamlana and #efflana), with critics claiming that she was a poser and just a "failed mainstream artist." By October the critiques had become personal: Del Rey was criticized for having lip enhancement surgery (which she denied). Despite the criticism, Lana Del Rey signed to Interscope records.

 

In fact, all of this criticism was making Lana Del Rey a figure of public interest. By January 2012, it looked like Lana Del Rey was set to take over the music world. As she neared the release of her "debut" album Born To Die, her popularity soared.

 

 

In 2011 De Rey's only haters were the music bloggers. But in January 2012, in conjunction with the release of Born to Die, Lana Del Rey was chosen as the musical guest for Saturday Night Live opposite host Daniel Radcliffe. It could have been huge moment for Del Rey to shine, but she flopped.

 

 

 

For most of the performance, Del Rey just swayed back and forth. She was nervous. She looked like the shy, t-shirt-wearing Lizzy Grant she was supposed to have discarded. She looked beautiful but her performance fell flat. Brian Williams, the anchor for NBC Nightly News, said, "Lana Del Rey had one of the worst outings in SNL history last night," and that she was "the least-experienced musical guest in the show's history." Her only defender was Daniel Radcliffe, who did not even see the performance.

 

It's important to remember that at this point, Del Rey still had not put out a full-length feature album. Lana Del Ray was well-buried from the public. For her to perform on Saturday Night Live was a huge boost for her album before she had even released it.

 

When the album did drop, though, the backlash was swift. Jon Caramanica of The New York Times wrote that "The only real option is to wash off that face paint, mess up that hair and try again in a few years. There are so many more names out there for the choosing." Even Pitchfork, who had lauded "Video Games," gave Born to Die a 5.5 out of 10 calling it "the equivalent of a faked orgasm—a collection of torch songs with no fire."

 

 

Lana Del Rey poses in front of an American flag. Jason LeVaris/Getty

 

Lana Del Rey's SNL performance, regardless of what the critics said, piqued listeners' curiosity. All of the bad publicity drew more people to her music, and when Born To Die dropped, it hit No. 2 on the Billboard album charts. Born To Die sold more than three million copies, and was the fifth best-selling album of 2012. Since then, her 2013 Paradise EP debuted in the Billboard Top 10, and she has had two platinum singles with a remix of her song "Summertime Sadness" and her single for The Great Gatsby, "Young and Beautiful."

 

Did any of the controversy matter?

 

Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift. Dave J. Hogan/Getty.

 

Perhaps — but if it did, it probably helped her. Creating a stage persona is one of the oldest tricks in Hollywood, and it's been done by some of the biggest pop stars. The name change in itself is also not uncommon. Rita Hayworth was born Margarita Carmen Cansino; Kid Cudi changed his name from Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi. Hell, one of the most iconically "authentic" artists, Bob Dylan, was born Robert Zimmerman. Authenticity itself is a construct of the music industry.

 

In some ways, Taylor Swift is a perfect mirror of Lana Del Rey. Swift started out as an "authentic" country star with her big curly hair and songs about teenage love, but over time she has become sleeker, more polished, and much more popular. Like many stars before her, Del Rey realized what she was doing wasn't working, so she changed it. Lizzy Grant was never going to have a hit song, but Lana Del Rey has and will. "It's not that there's anything 'inauthentic' about Del Rey," Nitsuh Abebe wrote for Pitchfork. "It's just that the aesthetic references surrounding her are all already so pungent, evocative, and well-worn that it's hard to reshape them."

 

But if we look at the timing of Del Rey's controversies, detractors could easily argue they were planned, that her public dust-ups were, like the rest of her persona, manufactured. She gives a miserable SNL performance, spurring hundreds of headlines the week before the album drops. Then, when she's set to release a new single "Ride," she adds some controversy to her publicity by wearing a full Native American headdress, an appropriation of another group's culture. "Lana Del Rey may be more in control of her career and her life than most think," Louise Webster wrote.

 

 

When Del Rey released her short 27-minute art film, Tropico, in December 2013, she again found a controversy by appropriating Latino gangster culture. "Dressing up like an entire culture and calling it 'fashion' is offensive," Hillary Crosley wrote for Jezebel. "using another person or culture as an outfit to make your art edgy is in poor taste."

 

It's no surprise, then, that the release of Ultraviolence was accompanied by still more Del Rey controversies. She declared she was not a feminist to Fader, saying, "For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. "I'm more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what's going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities." She also told a Guardian interviewer, "I wish I was dead already," while discussing the early deaths of Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain.

 

 

 

Lana Del Rey performs. Nick Pickles/Getty.

 

But none of this controversy changes the fact that Ultraviolence is a better CD than Born To Die was, and that people will still buy it and listen to it. Ultraviolence is more rock-heavy than Del Rey's earlier work and built on a themes of desperation and loss. Even Pitchfork, who demolished her first album, gave Ultraviolence positive review, saying Lana Del Rey is "a pop music original full-stop, and there are not nearly enough of those around." Overall, Metacritic gives it an average score of 76, or "generally favorable," which is significantly higher than the 61 Born to Die received.

 

The cult of Lana Del Rey did not just survive the controversy of inauthenticity, it thrived through it. Ultraviolence is on track to sell between 175,000 and 200,000 copies in its first week, which could land her in the #1 spot . But even if this album doesn't become a number one hit, or sell platinum, Lana Del Rey is not going anywhere soon.

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for posting this! good article in general.