I would have fucking loved Lana Del Rey when I was 15, and I half-love her today, but her album hates my guts. There, it’s out. Fuck you, fuck me, fuck her, fuck them, fuck everything.
(Underneath a cut for those sick of reading about her and/or who don’t want to read about my grappling with musical objections. I wasn’t planning on writing about this, but somehow, a few points managed to go unmentioned. Rrrgh.)
I don’t want to talk about Lana right now. Let’s please talk about something else. Let’s talk about Twilight. I have read zero out of four Twilight books and watched zero out of I don’t even know how many movies. (I’ve read Cleolinda’s recaps, which half-counts.) In college, a clique I desperately wanted to be part of started reading the books, only possibly ironically; they’d stay up late to have Twilight parties and organize outings to the movies, complete with costume parties and matchy-matchy, glitterfied Team Edward and Team Lestat shirts (see: “only possibly”). They even invited me to those, and I still refused.
I refused because even though I could and did regurgitate every spot-on feminist and aesthetic argument against the series, which I knew was poorly written, reactionary shit, I was scared that I’d love it anyway, because I knew I’d have loved it when I was 15. The protagonist is a high schooler who’s special merely for reading books sometimes yet mysteriously alluring enough to attract friends and admirers, including a mature guy whose love is more timeless than the snot-nosed kids and who wants to sublimate sex into lying in meadows and staring at cliffsides. Meanwhile, my favorite song was Sarah Brightman’s “Only an Ocean Away,” and on my personal-computer cloud (Isabel’s words) there’s a MS Paint cartoon I drew of myself looking out into the distance on a dock waiting for someone that’s fucking called lovestruck.png. If I’d grown up five years later, I would have fallen for the series. It’s not a question.
What I would’ve loved most was the earnestness. Stephenie Meyer neither likes irony nor, arguably, understands it, and to buy into Twilight is to completely buy into her idea of doomed-yet-pure love, of total devotion hopefully rewarded with like. This is a huge part of the backlash — it’s alluring anti-feminism with no chaser — and why even the snarkiest recappers will grudgingly admit to being OK with Jacob, the only major character to care about irony. (Which is why he doesn’t get the girl.) The series is full of Mary Sues and gender cluelessness and conservatism and icky imprinting crap, but it’s all meant for a reader to take to heart. Now imagine Twilight if it actively mocked its reader, and you’ve got Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die.
Born to Die is not great. It isn’t even bad. Unlike Twilight, I have heard the album in full, several times. It’s not an experience I recommend, but not for the reason you’re thinking. See, I’d been consciously avoiding almost every track from Lana since “Video Games,” for the same reason above: I was afraid I’d like it. I know what I like and dislike, and I know what aesthetics I’m personally susceptible to. Swooning escapism over drum loops and strings got me into music fandom, and I haven’t forgotten. So when I couldn’t avoid listening to Born to Die anymore, two horrible things happened. One, I didn’t hate it; two, I couldn’t like it. The reaction was almost visceral — a grimace, a sneer, a retch, a shield of snark. I couldn’t justify any of this. There is not a single objection I have to Born to Die that I haven’t happily discarded for others. For a while I told myself the album was a watered-down version of music I love, but “watered-down” is the last phrase you’d use for an album that’s almost entirely bombast. So what’s my problem?
My theory, which might be my final way of covering my ass: Born to Die is so indistinguishable from trolling that you might as well assume it is. Lana and her team are smart. They undoubtedly have infinite decimal points of barometric data on every wave of backlash. And like any good 2012 trollgazers, they know that they’d be equally successful rushing a provocative album as a good one. The kind of provocation is no more remarkable than copypasta; what’s remarkable is how exhaustive the album is — how many people are being successfully trolled in how many ways.
Allow me to be a case study. I’m squarely in Lana’s demographic, as a former 15-year-old girl drawn to overblown music and in thrall to a crush on someone Not Good For My Personal Development, who hasn’t really gotten over either. I’m also a music critic, a feminist, and someone who actively despises almost all Lana’s aesthetic choices. Born to Die panders to both of these at once, and each interferes with the other. The combination’s absolutely infuriating. So how have I been trolled today? Let me count the ways. Let me rant. It’s what she wants, after all.
The album cover. No, seriously, look at this fucking album cover. This is the 2010s equivalent of boy-band art. The fucking Impacty all-caps, stretched-out sans-serif typeface that’s on everything, the American Gothic pose, the too-prim, too-H&M vintagey shirt that’s too fucking see-through with a red bra underneath, the dispassionate stare, the makeup: it’s just infuriatingly on-point. It is designed to madden all of the following: design nerds (THE FUCKING FONT.), feminists (THE BRA. THE MAKEUP.), anti-feminists (THE BRA. THE MAKEUP.), hipsters (THE AESTHETIC.), hipster-haters (THE AESTHETIC.) and anyone who thought that Lana and her team might have maybe been earnest. It is flamboyantly embarrassing to have up on your screen or on your iPod, because it tries so hard. I can’t even look at it without instinctively scrolling down or closing tab; it’s that visceral, an poorly-aging, 1000x magnified, Impact-font FUCK YOU of a cover. It isn’t even prettily trendy, like the Instagrammed-and-painting-filtered “Video Games” cover; it’s just garish. And there’s no way the designer didn’t know this.
The music. Almost every review has compared Born to Die’s loops and strings to trip-hop or lounge music, either as an outlier or the slick start of a resurgence. It’s accurate, but only just. The trip-hop revival is already here. Forget 808s and Heartbreaks; the Weeknd and Drake’s music can be traced directly back to Dummy and Mezzanine. (The fact that nobody has covered “Inertia Creeps” lately is merely an accident.) Massive Attack’s had a comeback themselves; so has Portishead. Chillwave, meanwhile, can be traced directly back to trip-hop’s lighter albums — you know, the ones that’d be called chill-out music a decade ago. It’s the exact same thing. Even Air has a track right now with the fucking vocalist of Beach House.
Nobody quite wants to admit it’s happening, though, because trip-hop isn’t cool yet. It’s coffee-shop music, lounge music, soft-porn music, louche and dated. And when musical preferences are as much about declaring you’re an acceptable person with acceptable taste as what sounds please you, trip-hop is only OK to admit likingif you prefer a very specific subset. Portishead’s fine. Massive Attack is OK, but ideally as close as possible to Blue Lines and definitely not after 3D started sulking over everything. Almost anything else is hopelessly uncool.
Born to Die tends toward hopelessly uncool, which is a big fuck-you to everyone who fell for “Video Games.” I’ve got four uncool tracks in my library that sound exactly like this album: Martina Topley-Bird’s “Baby Blue” (off The Blue God, which nobody had much use for; the song, incidentally, contains the lyric “baby blue, I never really knew I belong to you”), Tori Amos’s “That Guy” (nobody’s favorite from Abnormally Attracted to Sin; incidentally, this is the one Tori track that sounds anything like Lana, because Tori’s playing a character), Enigma’s “Gravity of Love” (this speaks for itself), Sarah Brightman’s “Eden” (an extra-glum cover of Hooverphonic) and Katy Perry’s “E.T.,” which I’ll return to later.
Her beats drip with reverb and echo but still sound like presets; her string arrangements are just a little too tinny, too canned. They’re not even stylistically coherent. At least three tracks could be produced by Ryan Tedder; one, “Radio,” practically dares Clear Channel to notice and only truly works if you imagine Lana taunting you in between Guetta and Adele: I’m on the radio, fuckers, how do you like me now? ”Dark Paradise” might be the least cool of all; it’s pure emo, Deadjournal shit, reading and sounding like nothing so much as H.I.M.’s “Join Me” (in death, as in a suicide pact) interpreted by Frank Peterson. The only people who’d possibly like this would be horrified by everything else. I can’t imagine anybody whose musical tastes allow her to like the album straight through.
Most maddeningly of all, the best-sounding tracks are the most irritating. Much of Born to Die was produced by Emile Haynie, whose Lil Wayne connections have been written dead. (The album sounds nothing like hip-hop, anywhere; the confusion’s entirely due to beatmakers’ recent crush on dream-pop and writers mistaking speaking for rapping.) But it’s also got respected producers, and they’re trolling more than anyone. ”Off to the Races,” the second-most annoying track on Born to Die, is produced by Patrik Berger, whose credits include, in increasing order of acclaim: Tove Styrke, Icona Pop, Charli XCX, and motherfucking “Dancing On My Own.” Maybe that’s why it ends in a one-minute violin-and-soprano swoon (a good soprano, even) that’s probably going to be among 2012’s most gorgeous stretches of music; unfortunately, this is attached to an obnoxious clusterfuck of described sexyface, “light of my life, fire of my loins,” speaking in tongueing, and lilac and cognac and scarlet harlots and forced rhymes delivered like a Lyttle Lytton winner, maybe “poetic Paris, with its pâtés and beaujolais, tiramisu and au jus.” It is statistically impossible to be OK with both parts. Meanwhile, the most annoying track, “Lolita,” is produced by Sneaker Pimps’ Liam Howe, who is responsible for one of my favorite albums and other decent-to-solid work. There is no way he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing when, after you think the kiddie voice and playground chanting on a track called “Lolita,” the clueless “boys fall like dominoes” quote, the churning melodrama and, oh, the premise itself had thoroughly trolled you, he throws in the drums from “Be My Baby.” It’s too perfectly infuriating to be anything but deliberate. Jeff fucking Bhasker — 808s and Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, 4… — turns in “Diet Mountain Dew,” a phenomenal instrumental, ruined by Lana’s presence and the words, that just had to be someone else’s demo; and “Carmen,” beautifully hyped up nonsense.
Remember “E.T.”? I love that track. What I mean, though, is I love how it sounds, but I can’t listen to it because it makes me physically angry. With Katy Perry, the reason’s simple: “E.T.” is racist, sexist, rapey bullshit. With Lana, though….
The lyrics. These troll two different sorts of people in two different ways, and both in a third:
1. Lana Del Rey is a chronic meta-enabler. This started with “Video Games,” which is called “Video Games” to entice people drawn by quirky titles and gamers. (It’s mind-boggling how many gamers still haven’t realized Lana was mocking them.) Born to Die does the same, making lists of signifiers like Livejournal users make lists of interests and never following up on anything: “Diet Mountain Dew, baby, New York City,” both non-sequiturs to each other and to the rest of the track. “Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice,” which is not actually a thing. James Dean, which for all Lana elaborates might actually be James Deen. She does it with other people’s (better) lyrics, too: “heaven is a place on earth,” “nothing compares to you,” “boys fall like dominoes,” “Livin’ on a Prayer,” Amazing Grace.
You could argue that this is exactly how teens learn who they are, by letting books and songs and likes steep together until an actual identity begins to grow between the spaces, but Lana’s signifiers are a little too apt, a little too focus-grouped. It comes off less as self-discovery than keyword stuffing. And when this coexists with perfectly earnest melodrama about falling in love, wanting to die and feeling lonely, the effect’s jarring.
2. Lana Del Rey likes to adopt the very pop tropes people make fun of, whether it’s thoroughly ripping off Lady Gaga’s The Fame for “National Anthem” or spelling out words like Fergie. Her use of slang like “fresh to death” has the swag of a grandfather listening to the radio asking what party rock means. Every attempt at rap is thoroughly embarrassing. If someone was so inclined, possibly after Saturday Night Live, to write her off as Yet Another Manufactured Pop Star, Born to Die makes it temptingly easy.
3. The lyrics are lazy. She constantly references Las Vegas, which is the same as L.A., which is the same as Brooklyn, which is the same as Coney Island. She throws in gratuitous French on “Carmen,” which is about someone with a gratuitously Spanish name. (It isn’t even the first track about a troubled teen named Carmen, not that that’s anything but trivia.) “Million Dollar Man” makes its “broke” pun and says nothing for the entire surrounding song. She references her own songs — “take that body downtown,” for instance, appears outside “Video Games” — and you suspect it’s not for continuity but for lack of new words.
The voice. Lana has three. First, a mannered, coquettish soprano, the musical equivalent of squinching her voice into the cadences of a four-year-old to sound sexy. (That’s a line from a Class Actress review; you could criticize her the same way, but somehow nobody is.) Second, sorority-girl rap, which sounds exactly like it always does. Third, a boozy, dull alto; to borrow another Jukebox line, specifically Michaela Drapes’ description of Zola Jesus’ voice, it’s a cross between a bored lounge singer and “that annoying girl who spends lunch hours in the junior high choir room bleating along tunelessly to Tori Amos, headphones stuffed in her ears, oblivious to the world around her.” None of these three voices are bad; technically, they’re all pretty good. They merely beg the trolled listeners to deploy three very gendered insults: simpering, ditziness and moaning. And Lana has a trick of deploying each of these just when you think anything could be worse than the one currently in use. This brings me to….
The feminism, or lack thereof. Nobody would call Born to Die a feminist album, for reasons well stated elsewhere. But neither is it particularly anti-feminist. Specifically, it’s not conservative — like, at all. That one comment on New York Magazine comparing her to Zarah Leander is full of shit. I grew up in the Bible Belt and recognize conservative femininity when I see it, but Born to Die doesn’t give five fucks about church or Bible study or purity. The only times it invokes religion is to toss its head saucily at the mere mention of Jesus, who appears only in dashboard form, or one mention of the Lord in an absolutely incoherent bridge. If you want to talk conservative femininity, do it about someone who’s baiting Georgia, not Williamsburg. Even Taylor Swift would be a less reductive comparison.
Twilight’s more apt, too, if stripped of the supernatural; classical music and Hollywood are apt, if a little more grounded. But we’ve got an archetype for this already. What Lana Del Rey reminds me of, more than anything, is Emma Bovary: thoroughly soaked in romantic scenes from what was then pop culture, and relentlessly swooning and self-destructive for it. I’m not the first to make these two connections, but together, they’re telling. Listening to Born to Die, I can’t help but think of the scene in Little Children where Sarah — who’s got an affair’s worth of ulterior motives, but nevertheless — has to stop everyone from calling Emma a slut, or pathetic and self-degrading, or anything without a scrap of empathy. It’s the same feeling I get when reading anti-Twilight screeds that reserve the most vitriol for “weak” or “dumb” or “pathetic” Bella, who acts essentially like a moody 15-year-old girl raised on true love stories and who exists in a series where even the good guys are rapists, pedophiles, manipulative assholes, stalkers or some combination of the above. You can’t help but wonder whether their priorities are misplaced.
Now read the reviews of Born to Die, and notice which phrases and ideas recur. Lindsay Zoladz at Pitchfork compared the album to a faked orgasm, a putdown you’d never use for a man’s album and not a particularly empathetic one. Twice she’s been compared to a “drunk chick,” especially one trying to pick up a man at the bar, which is particularly silly when you consider that a tenth of recorded music is explicitly about drunk guys trying to pick up girls and that nobody’s particularly cared to point this out. Everyone comments on her hair or her plastic surgery with a fervor reserved for no one else. The reviews stop resembling reviews of Born to Die so much as reviews of Lana Del Rey, an Unacceptable Sort of Girl.
Jessica Hopper called this aesthetic slut-shaming, which is almost apt but not quite. Nobody’s really calling her slutty. They’re calling her desperate, which is even more damning. Just compare the stereotypes. Sluts get laid; pathetic drunk chicks go home alone. Sluts are attractive; desperate women get that way because they’re not. (Nobody’s criticizing her plastic surgery because they think it looks good.) And the stereotypical “slut” probably wouldn’t dwell this much on love and devotion; the stereotypical desperate person, however, would do it to excess. And there lies the criticism. Slut-shaming fucking sucks in almost every way, but at least someone’s trying to reclaim it. Nobody is ever going to reclaim desperation.
This would all go down so much easier if Lana came off sympathetic, but she’s scrupulous not to. It’s not even for anti-feminism; I’m fine with lots of opera, assorted Katy Perry songs and a Ruth-Ann Boyle track called “I’d Die For You.” It’s for deliberate, knowing anti-feminism. ”Blue Jeans” contains the line “love you more than those bitches before.” “This Is What Makes Us Girls” has an outro specifically designed to infuriate further everyone who thought “Run the World (Girls)” was too retrograde. “National Anthem” is primo gender trolling (plus, again, The Fame.) For every moony teenage line about love that lasts forever, there’s one posed for the male gaze, and they’re nearly impossible to tell apart. That’s the difference between Twilight (built on the female gaze) and Madame Bovary (generally empathetic, at least when I read it; n.b. I was 17) and Born to Die, and what makes the latter a feminist nightmare: she practically dares the listener to be sexist, and from the response so far, she’s succeeding wildly. Hell, I’m probably doing it; I’m uncomfortable with how much of this album I’ve blamed on Lana, when it’s equally likely to be her producers’ fault. Funny how that works.
The intangibles: Every track has some of these. “Born to Die,” the lead track, is a ballad — you never play a ballad first! It’s also got what I’m pretty sure is supposed to be a blues guy and an utterly gratuitous “who, me?” which had I not known better I’d think Lana sampled from her own Shit Lana Del Rey Says video. The harmonies on “Off to the Races” are deliberately dissonant; multiple tracks have a really grating distorted guitar sample. “Blue Jeans” has a sample where the producers left the clipping in and a melody where I still can’t pin down what it ripped off. “Dark Paradise” says “lying in the ocean, singing your song,” which is probably supposed to be Pre-Raphaelite but genuinely doesn’t seem to know that Ophelia drowned herself in a river. Every spoken-word bit is designed to taunt you. This is where I used to have a track-by-track section, until I realized every song would merit 500 words of annoying details, that probably aren’t even the ones that annoy you. Either I’m more picky and resistant than I thought, or Born to Die was recorded in bad faith. And after days of grimacing listening, of listening to its closest analogues without grimacing, and reading reviews and feeling increasingly provoked, I’m fairly sure Lana and her team were right: it’s all for us, everything she does. She’s told us all the time. And when we’re all thoroughly pissed off, it’s better than they ever knew.
