Best Lana Del Rey Writing 2012 (part 1 of 1961)
Most of the tracks were produced by Emile Haynie, who has mostly recorded hip-hop until now—a slightly misleading credential, since “Born to Die” sounds only intermittently like hip-hop, and there is nothing like rapping (except for a few Dad-like eruptions of vernacular in the midst of all the beehive boilerplate lyrics, like “fresh to death,” in “Blue Jeans”). Some beats poke their heads up, but the template is very strict: strings dominate every song. The production is almost distractingly even, as if everyone involved had been locked in a room for a month with the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” which has itself been accused of being derivative. In fact, “National Anthem” sounds more than a little as if it were based on that song’s famous string part, though the only relevant piece of music Del Rey has mentioned is Thomas Newman’s score for “American Beauty.”
The album that lurks behind “Born to Die” is Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” which is one of the most visible and successful marriages of sharp hip-hop edges and the luxurious drape of a string section. That album finally equalled the conspicuous consumption he loves to talk about, sounding like what would be playing in a house filled with gilded bathtubs and expensive art. But, unlike West, whose lyrics convey real complexity, Del Rey doesn’t have the emotional and psychological depth to support all the satin and spotlights. Her invocations of Sinatra and Lolita are entirely appropriate to the sumptuous backing tracks, but, when it comes to lyrics, she and her collaborators get lost in a tangle of keywords.
The conversation surrounding Lana Del Rey has underscored some seriously depressing truths about sexism in music. She was subjected to the kind of intense scrutiny— about her backstory and especially her appearance— that’s generally reserved for women only. But the sexual politics of Born to Die are troubling too: You’d be hard pressed to find any song on which Del Rey reveals an interiority or figures herself as anything more complex than an ice-cream-cone-licking object of male desire (a line in “Blue Jeans”, “I will love you till the end of time/ I would wait a million years,” sums up about 65% of the album’s lyrical content). Even when Del Rey offers something that could be read as a critique (“This is what makes us girls/ We don’t stick together ‘cause we put our love first”), she asks that we make no effort to change, escape, or transcend the way things are (“Don’t cry about it/ Don’t cry about it.”) In terms of its America-sized grandeur and its fixation with the emptiness of dreams, Born to Die attempts to serve as Del Rey’s own beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy, but there’s no spark and nothing at stake.
This is the point where I concede that it’s impossible to talk about Lana Del Rey without delving into the reams of criticism that attack, defend, or otherwise analyze her existence. It’s the lyrics to her songs themselves that prove there’s no way to think about her on her own terms — she doesn’t have her own terms. What she wants so desperately is to know what we — that is, the default heterosexual male listener — make of her.
Del Rey is tireless in driving home this point. “Do you think we’ll be in love forever?” she wants to know in “Diet Mountain Dew.” (Yes, that is really the song title.) “I’ve heard that you like the bad girls. Honey, is that true?” she teases in “Video Games.” On “Radio” — a pre-fame song about achieving fame — she demands, “Is my body sweet like sugar?” On “Without You,” it’s, “Am I glamorous?” Sometimes she recalls observations her lover has made about her in the past: “You said I was the most exotic flower,” she sings on “Million Dollar Man.” Listening to Born to Die straight through, it becomes clear that there is no Lana Del Rey, really. Not only does she not have a fixed meaning or character, she wants you to tell her what she means.
And climactically, “This Is What Makes Us Girls,” whose title alone is just trolling you so hard. Wherein a pack of small-town Lolitas booze it up, trigger catcalls, skip school, break into pools, steal police cars, maybe hit the pole, etc. etc. This is all breathy, breathtaking bullshit, a shameless jumble of Rebel without a Cause, Fast Times at Ridegemont High, Twin Peaks, Showgirls, Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” video, Gossip Girl, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. But if you forget to approach this with a cynical, detached remove — if it catches you Internet-distracted and momentarily vulnerable — the last verse will, for a split-second, whack you across the nose with an old Vanity Fair: “They were the only friends I ever had / We got into trouble and when stuff got bad / I got sent away / I was waving on the train platform / Crying ‘cause I know I’m never coming back.”
This, too, is objectively ridiculous (even if it’s apparently true), but she sounds so serious and genuinely despondent. This all has been so absurd: Who cares what percentage of that, or this record, or her is true? What do you care? Whether Born to Die sells 100,000 copies or 10,000 or 1,500, it has served a valuable purpose as the Internet’s insta-backlash, hype-vortex tipping point, the darkest night yet of our Tumblr-ing soul. A cautionary tale. We should be ashamed; what we did to Black Kids looks rational and nurturing by comparison. This record is not godawful. Nor is it great. But it’s better than we deserve. We broke her; we bought her.
Exploring “what a woman should be” is boring and cliche in the 21st century, and perhaps that is why Lana Del Rey seems to many to be so bored and sad on stage. So let’s take Lana Del Rey for what she is—a pop star playing a role, a woman whose real life we know nothing about—and learn from what she’s taught us about our own insufferable addiction to a vapid version of femininity. In the future, I’m hoping we’ll accept more female artists who are interested in mining the depths of who they really are.
These days, I am less interested in femininity as it exists today and a lot more interested in expanding the definition of what a woman can be. To me, the second represents the far more important project.
