Salon: "Lana Is The Perfect Artist For An America In Decline"

[Macintosh Manhattan 6,505]

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.

[drewby 9,215]

Well that expanded on something I thought

 

BTD was idealizing American ideals and crap

UV is the deconstruction and realization there's evils out there

 

so dark it's almost unlistenable ~

[Mileena 2,691]

Will they ever drop that damn quote? 

[GodBlessMe 2,141]

Very interesting

[Intriguing Penguin 867]

Intriguing. 

[veniceglitch 375]

Pretty soon Lana101 will be taught across campuses nationwide. 

[litewave 519]

Wow, what a gorgeous rant.

[slang 1,509]

It's a variant illuminati rant. The conventional illuminati (e.g. Mark Dice) see her as the devil's spokesperson. These people want to use her as a (positive?) symbol of what they fear, so LDR is kind of like a symptom of "it's all going to hell" or a symbol for a "wake up call".  Of course, LDR is simply an expressive artist and has no agenda, but these people are using her as such. I imagine LDR's reaction to this would be WTF.

 

This is also kind of disturbing and related:

https://twitter.com/robgrantdotcom/statuses/486934865481183232

[longtimeman 7,932]

There's something about Lana that makes writers want to pontificate, usually without any consideration of her as an artist, which is the only annoying thing. I'd love it if somebody actually tried to analyse her approach to persona (not what they think 'persona' means), and the unusual moral outlook of her songs and videos. Linking her to a nonsensical term like 'late-stage capitalism'* isn't doing anybody any favours.

 

*

Just like the prophets in the bible were talking about the the end of the world as being imminent 2000 years ago, and this urgency has been felt in every generation since, and will be for hundreds of generations to come, Marx was talking about the end of capitalism well over a century ago, and we'll be talking about it a century from now.

 

[sjrq 150]

The left is never going to stop trashing Lana because she is a pretty white girl who said she wasn't a feminist.

[Sitar 22,171]

I mean, these articles have their validity, but it should be noted that this all seems unintentional. While Lana's just doing her, people are finding thinkpieces and deeper meaning in everything she does. I guess that's cool for her, but I don't think she knows she's doing anything but telling her life story.

[toshi 948]

What are Candy Colored Super 8 Films?

[slang 1,509]

There's something about Lana that makes writers want to pontificate, usually without any consideration of her as an artist, which is the only annoying thing. I'd love it if somebody actually tried to analyse her approach to persona (not what they think 'persona' means), and the unusual moral outlook of her songs and videos. Linking her to a nonsensical term like 'late-stage capitalism'* isn't doing anybody any favours.

 

 

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.

 

[whitman 1,286]

I mean, these articles have their validity, but it should be noted that this all seems unintentional. While Lana's just doing her, people are finding thinkpieces and deeper meaning in everything she does. I guess that's cool for her, but I don't think she knows she's doing anything but telling her life story.

While I agree with you I can't stop thinking she's much more aware of the aesthetics she's chosen to portray in her music than we imagine. This particular quote it's pretty interesting:

 

"There is a whole new genre that nobody is observing. The American Dream and American Psycho are starting to represent the same thing. Cinema and music and life are starting to merge. Death is art. We've played pop music out. That wholesome dream is dead (...)I'm talking about epic, knocked-down, dragged-out love stories in song. That's what I'm heading towards. I want to destroy lives with my music and to understand the glamour of danger. Without Scarface would there be half the gangsters there are out there now?"

 

 For me this quote totally captures her whole persona and what she's trying to achieve in her songs perfectly. It just can't be all that unintentional, you see - or at least that's what I want to believe.

[KillKillQueen 1,298]

This is so self indulgent and flowery and ultimately meaningless, but there's something funny about the way people who like Lana relate to Lana.  There are stans who get really annoyed about young women who feel a connection to her lyrics, calling them tumblr fakes and try hards, etc, but rail against music outlets who call Lana herself a fake try hard. That's not related to this at all but it made me think of that. Just that idea of "The only person who's allowed to be disillusioned is Lana! She's the only one who I'm comfortable with having these specific feelings and damn these girls for twisting her message for their attention seeking fantasies. I think Lana is deep and little girls  can't be deep."

 

Not that Lana fans are the only ones guilty of this  because marina fans are even worse

[longtimeman 7,932]

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.

 

 

That's what I mean. Too many journalists think that they're explaining something by saying that she has a persona, or has created a persona, and then they don't bother to go into detail as to what that persona is, or what it means for Lana's art. Nobody takes her at her word that Lana and Lizzy are the same, even though it's clear that there's a logical progression from her visual and musical 'persona' that goes all the way back to her earliest recordings that we have, right through to now. The idea that Lizzy was a caterpillar and Lana is a butterfly is one of the lies that the media sells, because it's the simplest narrative to trace about her, and people can't seem to imagine any story that is different to the hundreds of movies we've seen either about how the innocent starlet comes from a small town and is exploited by the big star making machine or, on the other hand, of the careerist artist who will step on anyone and do anything to get to the top. I haven't seen anybody bother to seriously consider what it means for her to change the line of the old song to "Jim told me that he hit me and it felt like a kiss", or to write a song called "I fucked my way up to the top", and then drop the claim that she had a long relationship/affair with someone in the industry. 

 

I agree with you 100% that Lana is just a name to attach to whatever cause you happen to be pushing, and we would not be reading or bothering about any of these articles if they weren't built around (shallow) discussions of Lana. Sex sells in more ways than one.

[longtimeman 7,932]

This is so self indulgent and flowery and ultimately meaningless, but there's something funny about the way people who like Lana relate to Lana.  There are stans who get really annoyed about young women who feel a connection to her lyrics, calling them tumblr fakes and try hards, etc, but rail against music outlets who call Lana herself a fake try hard. That's not related to this at all but it made me think of that. Just that idea of "The only person who's allowed to be disillusioned is Lana! She's the only one who I'm comfortable with having these specific feelings and damn these girls for twisting her message for their attention seeking fantasies. I think Lana is deep and little girls  can't be deep."

 

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.

[Deleted User 1,353]

Loved this. THIS is a respectable piece.

[DeadAgainst 1,514]

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.

 

A rather observant statement about those who long for the dissolution of Nirvana

 

The rest is the same sort of pseudointellectual posturing that they write about people like David Lynch, which is an improvement over some previous pieces, I guess. But her message is not quite as nihilistic as they claim; this, too, is another reflection of modern journalism.

 

Which is to say, there are always escape routes being plotted

[MaraDreea 204]

I mean, these articles have their validity, but it should be noted that this all seems unintentional. While Lana's just doing her, people are finding thinkpieces and deeper meaning in everything she does. I guess that's cool for her, but I don't think she knows she's doing anything but telling her life story.

I think this article is more about the people that "follow" her and why they choose to do so, which ultimately reflects in the way we think these days and how society is overall.