Listen: NYT Popcast "Lana Del Rey, Downcast Superstar" discusses LDR, Ultraviolence

[evilentity 13,357]

@@Monicker sent me a link to this fantastic episode of "Popcast", a podcast produced by The New York Times' ArtsBeat culture blog. A discussion between Jon Pareles, the author of that great NYT review, and Ben Ratliff, the skeptical yet open-minded host, this is the most intelligent conversation I've heard about LDR in the media ever. Truly a must listen. Apart from being just a great podcast, another reason @@Monicker sent it to me is because I'd told him he'd probably think I was crazy, but the guitar intro of "Cruel World" reminds me in small ways of the intros to several different Beach Boys songs. He did think think I was crazy at first, so we were both incredibly amused when Jon Pareles backed me up! Anyway, @@Monicker says it better than I can so I'll let him introduce it:
 

Wow, this podcast is great. One of the guys is really supportive of her and the other is rather dismissive but still open, and it makes for a really good discussion with a lot of great back and forth, both complimentary and critical, touching on so many things we've talked about over the years. I feel like this journalist can he our friend, ha. This is some of the best stuff i've heard said about her by anyone in the press. I think you're really going to enjoy it. You're also going to laugh so hard at one point. Let me just say though that i still don't hear it! You have someone to join you now in your craziness.

You can go to the episode page, download the MP3, subscribe on iTunes, or click the player below:

http://podcasts.nytimes.com/podcasts/2014/06/27/arts/music/27popcast_pod/27popcast-rev.mp3

 

Edit: If anyone wants to transcribe this podcast for quoting convenience I'd be more than happy to add it here.

Edited July 1, 2014 by evilentity

[Guest Dot]

@@Monicker sent me a link to this fantastic episode of "Popcast", a podcast produced by The New York Times' ArtsBeat culture blog.

@@Monicker is still alive?

[GodBlessMe 2,143]

This was so a interesting...

[kik 1,564]

That was great, thank you for sharing!

 

Is she documenting or dreaming? A bit of both

[HEARTCORE 18,977]

 

 

[West Coast starts playing]

BR: Welcome to the New York times podcast, your deadly nightshade of music news and cultural disputation. I'm your host, Ben Rattler.

[First verse of WC]

BR: And you're hearing the contralto of Lana del Rey. That's West Coast, from her new record Ultraviolence. John Perrels is here to talk about Lana del Rey. Hi John.

JP: Hi Ben.

BR: You flew out to the epicentre of Del Reyitude recently.

JP: True.

BR: And you met Lana del Rey.

JP: I did, at her home. You know, I've met a bunch of pop stars over the years. There were no handlers, there were no publicists, y'know, nervously fluttering in the wings. Like, she opened the door, we walked in and did the interview.

BR: Well, now let's just talk about that for a second. Listeners may not know the extent to which she is a star because two or three years ago, when the first the first flurry of news and reaction to her was happening, she seemed for a moment like a flash in the pan.

JP: She almost got a backlash before there was a frontlash.

BR: Right. So a lot of people might not know at this point that she is actually a successful recording artist. Can you, kind of, quantify that?

JP: Well, she sold millions of copies worldwide of Born to Die, her first album, and the Paradise EP that was tacked onto it. Her first big video, Video Games, has something like 100 million views on just her site alone, which is a astonishing to me - somebody's clicking on that button a lot.

 

 

I'll do the rest tomorrow, gotta go to sleep right now!

[Rem 2,392]

I love listening to stuff like this. Thanks

[YUNGATA 14,959]

someone invite these guys to lanalysis tbh

[Trash Magic 28,611]

I'm delighted to know Monicker is still a fan

[FROGGO 2,806]

thanks for posting this! i feel sometimes i am too critical a fan, and being trapped in the bubble that is lanaboards, i really easily lose of what an anomaly she actually is in the pop world and the unique talent and devotion to her artistry she truly possesses... i'm just too busy ragging on her for all the dumb shit that she says. and monicker was right about the discourse being great between the more dismissive/skeptical person and the supportive person. that was neato, i think i needed to hear these perspectives to remind me why it is i'm still a fan

two things i especially liked
1) the synthesizer is a homage to dre! 
2) there was this line was something like "lana's just not very good at explaining herself", which i think accounts for 95% of the things i give her shit for 

here is the obligatory bear gif!

 

[Ziad 188]

Podcasts are always fun    Thanks for sharing, @@evilentity

[Neptune-Avenue 220]

It makes me very happy that they stop and think of her as a person and give her credit where it is due., she gets to much crap from the press

[GangstaBoy 3,930]

Excellent podcast, really interesting

[Rebel 3,177]

How long is it? I want to listen to it on my flight!

[Aaron 163]

I really enjoyed listening to this. A good discussion. 

[horreurpop 17]

thanks for sharing @@evilentity this was quite insightful and i really enjoyed listening to it i just downloaded the mp3 so it'll probably be on repeat lol

[prostitutestare 142]

What I love about this is that these are two  well-read individuals who have truly done their research regarding Queen Lana. They are making VIABLE deductions and quantifications based on what they KNOW and have actually RESEARCHED. This is such a welcome discourse in comparison to those we are used to regarding any Lana discussion, where pseudo intellectuals and idiots bash her without any good reason. Jon, the guy who is so supportive of her, is clearly a fan. I love that. He lives for her and was defending her at every turn. I love when people find the beauty in Lana, the beauty all of us on this site find in the Queen. Amazing discussion. SO GOOD!

[prostitutestare 142]

How long is it? I want to listen to it on my flight!

 

27 minutes and 31 seconds.

[xAlex 56]

Yes! I love this. They articulated perfectly some of the reasons why I love Lana so much (how she "gets" into character in her songs) and defended her honor as an artist. This was great. 

[strange weather 1,954]

this is perfect. well-researched, well-thought out. i love that UV has changed the tide for lana and people are finally seeing what we've seen all along. lana is the real deal.

[Stormriver 397]

 

 

[West Coast starts playing]

BR: Welcome to the New York times podcast, your deadly nightshade of music news and cultural disputation. I'm your host, Ben Rattler.

[First verse of WC]

BR: And you're hearing the contralto of Lana del Rey. That's West Coast, from her new record Ultraviolence. John Perrels is here to talk about Lana del Rey. Hi John.

JP: Hi Ben.

BR: You flew out to the epicentre of Del Reyitude recently.

JP: True.

BR: And you met Lana del Rey.

JP: I did, at her home. You know, I've met a bunch of pop stars over the years. There were no handlers, there were no publicists, y'know, nervously fluttering in the wings. Like, she opened the door, we walked in and did the interview.

BR: Well, now let's just talk about that for a second. Listeners may not know the extent to which she is a star because two or three years ago, when the first the first flurry of news and reaction to her was happening, she seemed for a moment like a flash in the pan.

JP: She almost got a backlash before there was a frontlash.

BR: Right. So a lot of people might not know at this point that she is actually a successful recording artist. Can you, kind of, quantify that?

JP: Well, she sold millions of copies worldwide of Born to Die, her first album, and the Paradise EP that was tacked onto it. Her first big video, Video Games, has something like 100 million views on just her site alone, which is a astonishing to me - somebody's clicking on that button a lot.

 

 

I'll do the rest tomorrow, gotta go to sleep right now!

 

From this point i transcribed up to when the start playing Brooklyn Baby which is about 9 minutes in.

 

 

 

[West Coast starts playing]

BR: Welcome to the New York times podcast, your deadly nightshade of music news and cultural disputation. I'm your host, Ben Rattler.

[First verse of WC]

BR: And you're hearing the contralto of Lana del Rey. That's West Coast, from her new record Ultraviolence. John Perrels is here to talk about Lana del Rey. Hi John.

JP: Hi Ben.

BR: You flew out to the epicentre of Del Reyitude recently.

JP: True.

BR: And you met Lana del Rey.

JP: I did, at her home. You know, I've met a bunch of pop stars over the years. There were no handlers, there were no publicists, y'know, nervously fluttering in the wings. Like, she opened the door, we walked in and did the interview.

BR: Well, now let's just talk about that for a second. Listeners may not know the extent to which she is a star because two or three years ago, when the first the first flurry of news and reaction to her was happening, she seemed for a moment like a flash in the pan.

JP: She almost got a backlash before there was a frontlash.

BR: Right. So a lot of people might not know at this point that she is actually a successful recording artist. Can you, kind of, quantify that?

JP: Well, she sold millions of copies worldwide of Born to Die, her first album [okay] and the Paradise EP that was tacked onto it. Her first big video clip, Video Games, has something like 100 million views on just her sites alone, which is astonishing to me - somebody's clicking on that button a lot. If you go to one of her shows as I did and as I found when I looked at other shows online, there is just this devotional quality to her audience they are standing there front to back of the room singing along staring at her as if she’s some kind of vision, some kind of saint. You know you go to most arena concerts, big theatre concerts and the back of the room is where everybody’s schmoozing and talking especially during ballads. First of all, Lana Del Rey concert is all slow songs, there’s no slow fast slow fast, it’s like one dirge after another, and everybody is riveted and everybody is singing along. It’s a really different concert experience.

BR: Like, like this record, Ultraviolence is very, very slow.

JP: Yeah, not a lot of high speed stuff. I mean she calls it “narco swing”. She credited it to the producer Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys but he didn’t think it was his phrase so somewhere in their studio the word “narco swing” arose.

BR: It sounds like some kind of South American thing but the thing about everybody in the audience singing along and entering this ritual with her and kind of getting into the mood of the songs and kind of like getting into her head a little bit, reminds me a little bit of the old Cat Power shows where Sean Marshall would sing these songs and at least project the persona of somebody who was having trouble, and the audience would be completely in there with her, as if they were there to console her or share this experience with her.

JP: And also to empathise with her I mean people do have trouble. We’re not all rich perfectly toned superstars in charge of the world, we’re not world beaters like the big high definition pop stars like Rihanna. She speaks for a lot of people, they see their own weakness in her. They’re consoling themselves as well as her.

BR: So she’s a downcast superstar. And thats part of her magnetism, is the magnetism of being downcast.

JP: And she credits Cat Power too, when she was playing New York clubs she said she would think about how Cat Power could turn away from the audience and be floating into her own songs and the audience would go with her

BR: Would follow her, yeah

JP: That gave Lana Del Rey, then called Lizzy Grant, the idea that you didn’t have to be a big polished star.

BR: It kinda subverts the whole idea of performance in a way

JP: Well Miles Davis used to turn his back

BR: Sure, probably another one of Lana Del Rey’s heroes, why not? She’s so into jazz on this record. She talks about jazz all over the place.

JP: She does like jazz

BR: Alright let’s talk about that later, I’m dying to talk about that. But first, going back to 2012 and the first songs that everybody heard, and the videos that people saw, and then the appearance of her record Born to Die, can you sort of sum up the reaction to her at first and the, you know, fast forward to now, two years later, is the discourse around her being changed?

JP: Well, it’s definitely changed, I mean the reaction to her in 2012 I think was pretty unfair, I mean she was on a major label - bad thing in hipster-land - she was singing about weakness, a bad thing, I guess, if you’re a woman. She was different, she was slow, she was, in her Elevator pitch, she was the “gangsta Nancy Sinatra”. She was putting together things that won’t supposed to go together. She was putting together these sort of, seedy, decadent, rough, hip-hop scenarios with being a wilting flower. People jumped on her. I think there was almost a bullying aspect to it. You know, here’s this person who presents weakness as herself and lets jump on her. I really saw it in a lot of the, you know “she’s not authentic, she’s not real”, I mean, she’d been doing it for years, I mean she was Lizzy Grant trying to play coffee houses in Williamsburg on the Lower East Side for 6 or 7 years in New York City before she decided it didn’t work.

BR: Let’s go into that a little bit more. It couldn’t have been just that people were irritated by the projection of a beautiful loser persona, because we’re so used to that. We play that game really well. I don’t know I mean wasn’t it something else? Wasn’t it something, wasn’t it some perception of hollowness? Or she’s not what she seems? Or… something is not connected, is not in sync.

JP: Yeah, no, there was this idea that it was the major label thing, people decided that she was a corporate put-up job. If you go back, as I did, to the album she recorded as Lizzy Grant, it’s just as strange and sad and decadent and troubled as Born to Die. The sound is a little different ‘cause it had a different producer, David Kahne, it’s more upbeat, but what she was saying, her personality of Lizzy Grant in 2009, 2010, was already the same as Lana Del Rey. But, you know, for some reason people jumped on the changing her name, major label contract, people decided that she couldn’t invent herself, she had to be a put-up job. And I think that was basically wrong.

BR: Let’s bring up Kurt Cobain for a minute. I don’t know if we wanna go into the whole, back-and-forth about Lana Del Rey and Francis Cobain, based on things that Lana Del Rey has said in interviews recently, about artists who die young. But she’s been talking about wanting to die, I mean the record, the first record, is called Born to Die…

JP: Well, we do die, it’s not far from the surface, she’s a morbid girl. 

BR: The subject comes up in interviews, it came up with you, she said “I’m scared to die but I want to die”, right?

JP: Yeah, and there was more that didn’t fit on the page, I mean, she thinks a lot about death, she thinks about death as a relief and something she’s afraid of.

BR: Right, so the interview in The Guardian she said “I wish I was dead already”

JP: I mean, she says things like this

BR: Right, so, and it comes out in the lyrics too and you know you think of the Nirvana song “I Hate Myself and Want to Die”, so like the text is there

JP: Well also in her videos she shows herself being killed a lot too, she’s jumping off a bridge, she’s getting strangled, she’s bloody, she thinks a lot about death, as some people do

BR: So, but in the past, wasn’t accepted, somehow as being real enough?

JP: It was criticised as glamorizing images of death, which means we gotta take down all the True Blood billboards around town that I see all the time, but it’s on her mind, I think she was being personal when people have decided that her obsessions are being prescripted for everybody, I don’t think she’s saying “go out and kill yourself”, I think she’s saying “these thoughts go through my mind”. On the other hand she works really hard at her career so she does seem to have some future in mind.

BR: Let’s move on and hear a little bit of the song “Brooklyn Baby” from Lana Del Rey’s new record Ultraviolence.

[brooklyn Baby starts playing from the chorus]