Who is Lana Del Rey?
It’s a question I found myself asking in a media law class last week after my professor oh-so coolly dropped her name. Remembering an essay in Esquire magazine comparing her to Florence Welch, I figured it was time to investigate.
I guess I do get paid to know this stuff.
Three hours of late-evening First Amendment examination left my brain a little soggy, so I forgot all about Del Rey by the time I got home. Divine intervention seemed to put me back on track, however, because David Letterman’s guest on “The Late Show” was none other than the enigma herself.
So this is Lana Del Rey. Huh.
I forgot all about her until the next day, when Facebook took my hand and led me to a strange music video for “Born to Die.” More of an animated .gif than a video, a naked Del Rey hugs some dude with tattoos and earlobe plugs while an American flag waves proudly in the background. It’s the same 10-second clip. Over and over.
More bored than anything, I left my computer to brew a cup of coffee and sit on my balcony to watch the ducks.
Lana Del Rey came with me.
Songs don’t usually lodge themselves in the folds of my brain like “Born to Die” did. I had to unearth more. I found her “Saturday Night Live” performances (unforgivingly awful), read the lyrics to “Blue Jeans” (insipid), looked up her real name (Elizabeth Grant) and caught up with what the critics were saying (she’s “an industry-backed ‘fake’ posing as a self-made artist”).
Then I downloaded the album, also named “Born to Die.”
Holy cow.
This album is beautiful. It is haunting. It wraps a pair of warm little hands around my heart and helps it beat—makes me long for something I can’t quite place. If there really is a sacred chord that David played and it pleased the Lord, this album is a symphony composed solely of that chord.
I don’t know if Lana Del Rey is responsible for that beauty. I don’t know if it’s her producer, or some nameless songwriter, or a room full of bespectacled executives who wipe away their sweat with wads of cash. But you know what? I don’t care.
I spent the first half of my teen years ditching punk bands that ventured to close to the “mainstream.” Rancid, NOFX and AFI suddenly had too many fans, so I dropped ‘em like the sellouts they were. Many people would describe the latter half of my teen years and early 20s as my “hipster” years, but that condescending word exists only to vilify people with particular tastes. Let’s just say I was very concerned with authenticity.
Not anymore. “Born to Die” is a bewitching mistress of an album, regardless of who made it that way.
Who is Lana Del Rey? I don’t really care.
