The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (6 page)

The songs from these sessions were split into two releases, the
Kill Kill
EP and her debut album. According to Nichtern, after the release of the EP, the singer said she wanted to change the name she recorded under. “First it was ‘Del R-A-Y,’ and then she settled on ‘R-E-Y.’ This story that it was anyone but her making the decision is complete fiction,” says Nichtern. “If she is ‘made up’—well, she is the one who made herself up. She has very strong ideas about what she does. The idea someone could manage her into a particular shape—it’s impossible.”

Shortly before the full-length was to be released, Nichtern says Del Rey decided she was unhappy and wanted to add tracks amongst other changes. “It became difficult to go forward,” he explains. Del Rey decided to shelve the record, and 5 Points obliged, striking a deal for her to buy back her masters. Nichtern is adamant that the deal’s dissolution was all aboveboard and there were never any hard feelings. “She is a great artist,” he says, “a real artist. I have always thought so and still do.”

“It was very unusual,” says Interscope’s Executive VP of A&R Larry Jackson of his first serious meeting with Lana Del Rey. “We sat for an hour and talked, without her playing any of her music. Just conversation, honing in on the philosophy of what she was doing, what she saw for herself. It was a totally unorthodox meeting, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to do this.’” When asked if anyone else was involved, if there is someone orchestrating Lana from behind the curtain, Jackson is emphatic. “The only Svengali in this thing is Lana.”

“I’ve never understood this controversy about whether she is real or fake,” says rapper/producer Princess Superstar. “All artists have a persona.” A year prior to the Interscope deal, the two women spent a few months honing Del Rey’s songs, with the rapper serving as mentor. “She’s not put together by some company. These are her songs, her melodies, her singing—she’s always had this ‘60s aesthetic. Look at Katy Perry and Beyoncé, and you see that they have a team.”

Interscope don Jimmy Iovine gave Jackson his blessing to sign Del Rey on the basis of seeing an unfinished version of “Video Games” on YouTube. Del Rey signed a worldwide, joint deal with Interscope and Polydor in March 2011, making her, officially, a major-label recording artist a full six months before anyone was pondering whether the former choirgirl was a plasticine creation.

II. The Look: Baddest of the Good Girls

A pretty singer with a cool voice is one thing, but Lana Del Rey fascinates because of the tension in her persona. She’s the good girl who wants it all—the boy, his heart, and nothing short of pop stardom, even if that ambition ends up making you look pretty ugly. In short, Lana Del Rey is Amy Winehouse with the safety on. While Winehouse was unrepentantly bad, Del Rey plays it differently—she’s a bad girl who knows better, the bad girl being held back within the good girl. Her ballads are about self-control (or sometimes lack of it) and being hopelessly dedicated to bird-dogging dudes (“You’re no good for me / But, baby, I want you” goes Del Rey’s “Diet Mountain Dew”). The Lana of “Blue Jeans” and “Video Games” is charmed by the darkness, thrilled by the prospect of losing herself in this bad boy, finding form in his needs. The Lana of these songs is alive in that vicarious freedom—evidence that there’s still some teenage-crazy, ride-or-die bitch lingering around her Chantilly edges. “I’ve had to pray a lot because I’ve been in trouble a lot,” she told
GQ
last year.

“I remember that she had really specific feelings about what she wanted to portray about girls,” recalls Kahne. “We were talking about Marilyn and Natalie Wood, these iconic actresses of the ‘50s, and she said, ‘They were good girls.’ She liked that image.”

“In her, I do see the struggle between the good girl and the bad girl,” says Larry Jackson. That duality was part of what made him want to sign her. After a dinner meeting in Los Angeles last spring, he saw her kick a cab that cut her off as she was walking away. “She cursed out the cab. I saw her do it, but she didn’t see me. She epitomizes the loose-cannon star.”

In a YouTube video from 2008, back when she was still firmly in Lizzy Grant mode, Del Rey gives a writer from
Index
magazine a tour of her New Jersey trailer park. Gracious and proud, she smiles easily. It’s a year after Winehouse’s “Rehab” hit ubiquity, and Del Rey is done up in a Jersey approximation of the singer: She’s wearing a silk bomber, her white blonde flip teased to a bouffant puff and tied up with a bandana do-rag, batting long fake lashes. She looks miscast—like a too-young housewife—a child bride trying to look grown. Her baby face and coquettish giggle give her away. The sound on the video is awful and the questions tepid, but Del Rey answers the two most important ones clearly and directly to the camera: This is where she wrote her record; and she moved to Jersey for the state’s surplus of metal boys. There is no mistaking what matters to her.

“She has many different qualities that women in our culture aren’t allowed to be, all at once, so people are trying to find the inauthentic one,” says Tavi Gevinson, the founding editor of teen-girl mag
Rookie
. “She’s girly, but not infantilized. I relate to her aesthetic the way I think other girls relate to Taylor Swift lyrics—her femininity isn’t too sexy or too pure, and that’s something I can get behind.”

How Del Rey defines herself in the classic-pop cosmos has changed as her music and image have evolved over the past year: “Gangsta Nancy Sinatra” gave way to the slightly more finessed “Lolita lost in the ‘hood.” More recently, she catchphrased her major label debut
Born to Die
as “Bruce Springsteen in Miami,” trading up on that Jersey striving.
Born to Die
features familiar Springsteen tropes—no-future kids tangled in sin and forever promises; Del Rey’s songs are like answer-back dispatches direct from “Candy’s Room,” but the door’s slammed shut and the stereo’s up. She’s telling the missing side of the story, revealing a new, true character living behind that scrim of male desire:
Born To Die
is the good girl who wants it just as bad as he does.

III. The Backlash: It’s About the Music, LOL

The issue with Lana Del Rey is not whether she is a corporate test-tubed ingénue, but why we are unwilling to believe that she is animated by her own passion and ambition—and why that makes a hot girl so unattractive. The big question here is not “Is she real?” But, rather, why it seems impossible to believe that she could be.

On its surface, the Lana Del Rey Authenticity Debate™ swings between two depressing possibilities: (1) That’s she’s all but the fourth Kardashian sister, Frankensteined together (by old white guys) in order to exploit the now sizable “indie” market, or (2) that she is a moderately-talented singer who is getting over by pushing our buttons with nostalgia and good looks. This is the distracting crux, a pointless debate that casts a long shadow over
Born to Die
. For critics and anonymous commenters alike, the reality of Lana Del Rey seems to be an unsolvable equation: the prospect of an attractive female artist who sings plainly about her desire because she has it, with an earnest vision, who crafts her own songs and videos, who understands what it takes to be a viable pop product and is capable of guiding herself to those perilous heights. It’s seemingly beyond possibility. Yet, Lana Del Rey is doing it all, before our very eyes.

Being sexy and serious about your art needn’t be mutually exclusive, even when your art involves being a pop package. Defending herself to
Pitchfork
last fall, Del Rey said, “I’m not trying to create an image or a persona. I’m just singing because that’s what I know how to do.” If her ambitions were to “just” sing, she’d still be making the rounds at Brooklyn open mics—but here she’s attempting to refocus our attention on her music. Which, for a short time, was the reason we cared about her. Perhaps, if she’d faked us out with a record on a modest indie label like Merge first, some hesitation towards major labels or the mainstream, all her ambition would’ve been palatable instead of outrageous.

The central, mistaken assumption being made about Del Rey is that she is a valence for DIY/indie culture, which she’s never been. She played daytime, industry showcases at overlit venues in Midtown for years, and was taking meetings at majors since mid-2010. These are the steps of someone who wants to be a pop star, not signed by Matador. Bloggers and tastemaking websites believed they noticed her first, when, in fact, they were two years behind a pack of lawyers and A&R scouts who were eager to sign an artist who was the total package.

While a few (two) blogs got on the Del Rey wagon early—successive waves of attention in late spring of 2011 were prompted by press releases. No one rightly discovered her and even the coolest blogs were being jumped into by publicists or “grassroots” marketing firms, their LDR posts repeating the story as it was fed to them. Many of these same blogs are now indignant, fronting like they were duped into caring about her or lending her credibility—though they certainly weren’t so discerning before. They were just eager to claim “first,” as is the law of the jungle.

In the weeks surrounding the release of Del Rey’s
Born to Die
, every interview and TV performance became a new proving ground. Video interviews showed Del Rey as both self-aware and funny, as when a VH1 interviewer condescendingly comforted her for not being on this year’s Coachella lineup. She deadpanned, “Aw, thanks,” before cracking herself up. Her much-maligned Saturday Night Live performance sounded just as awkward as every other band that performs on the show. Still, her unevenness was taken as resounding proof that she was Born 2 Fail by no less an authority than NBC news anchor Brian Williams.

In other interviews, Del Rey has talked about studying cosmology and a six-year stint doing homeless outreach, suggesting that she’s more engaged in the real word than her ardent critics. Though she aims high, she’s still hardly acting like a star, telling MTV, “I consider being able to pursue music a luxury, but it’s not the most important thing in my life. It’s just something that’s really nice that ended up working for me for right now.” Still, she doesn’t bother hiding her ambition—she’s cited the self-actualization classic
Think and Grow Rich
as her recommended reading.

Surprisingly, it’s still easier for people to believe the ancient model of a major-label star system—girl of moderate talent is groomed and posed to appeal—rather than accept that a young woman could plot her course by her own animus. Meanwhile, sexist critiques of Del Rey’s appearance, songs and videos get spun as incisive discernment, offered up as knowing analysis of a deceptive product. Her songs are assailed as “trying too hard” to be sexy, as if we have slept through the past three decades of liberated pop-diva sexuality as written by Madonna/Janet/Britney/Rihanna and are now shocked by Del Rey’s slight approximation. She’s by-the-book, and yet she’s seen as breaking the rules. It’s doubtful we’d even be intrigued by a female artist being subtle or modest. As an audience, we make a big stink about wanting the truth, but we’re only really interested in the old myths.

TAYLOR SWIFT, GRIMES AND LANA DEL REY:
THE YEAR IN BLOND AMBITION

Village Voice
Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, January 2012

It seems so long ago—certainly more than 52 weeks—since we were all flustered by the audacity of Lana Del Rey. Her crimes, it seemed, were legion and very, very serious—concerns that trumped consideration of whether or not her music was any good. She was bad on Saturday Night Live. Her lips, perhaps, had collagen in them. A few years ago, she was playing A&R showcases backed by hired guns, and suddenly she was all over
Pitchfork
like a real-deal indie ingénue, but (gasp!) it turned out she already had a deal with Interscope. Her name was not actually Lana Del Rey, and, unlike any artist in the history of ever, she’d attended private school.

As we enter the new year with a clean slate and hindsight, it seems fair enough to chalk up our lil’ Lana freak-out to our long-standing weirdness with women’s ambition and the antiquated notion that image consciousness is somehow antithetical to the making of true art and is, in fact, a sin against rock’s visceral mandate. It’s a problem we tend to have with girls and women more than with the boys (word to Jack White’s continuing Campaign 4 Realness). This past year proved there is a special sort of animus reserved for women—Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift and Grimes’ Claire Boucher—whose ambition seems especially naked and, if you will, feminine.

It’s only natural that young female artists engage us with and communicate through their image(s) as much as they do with their music. Image is a more effective vehicle for expression than songs. No girl escapes teenhood without a keen awareness of exactly how the world sees her, what it expects of her; she knows the weight of the world’s desire for her down to the ounce.

When it comes to music, image is believed to be the teen girls’ area of fascination and special expertise; young women’s arduous fandom is often taken as the very proof of a performer’s artlessness. The perception being that girls are so rapt with an artist’s surface image that it supersedes any sort of real connection with or understanding of the music itself. Though Swift and Boucher placed high in this year’s Pazz & Jop—Lana less so (
Born to Die
, #54 album)—the critique with all three has often regarded the seeming purposefulness of artifice in their image, as well as their dutiful maintenance of it.

We took Lana’s ambitions personally—as if she was preying upon us, marking us as hornball simps so seduced by her porny licking of her fake/not-fake lips that we’d buy in on whatever it was she was selling. The offense being? That we’d actually fall for something so constructed? Or was it the fact of the construction itself?