Born To Die
More college dropout than beautiful dark twisted fantasy
Celina Murphy, 09 Feb 2012
What can I say about Lana Del Rey that hasn’t already been said? After six remarkable months of assorted rises and falls, the 25 year-old New Yorker has become the most talked about woman on the planet, inciting a full-blown pop culture upheaval along the way.
People respond to Lana Del Rey like no other artist in history. As well as being queen of trashy chic, she’s queen of the knee-jerk reaction, arousing hatred and adulation in equal measures, often based on as little as a photograph.
Whether she’s hailed as a divine pop starlet or dismissed as a kissy-faced phony, at least, one can argue, she provokes.
Del Rey likes to tell the story of her first gig in a rock bar in Williamsburg.
“Everybody stopped,” she recalls, “…the whole room stopped fighting and just went silent. They didn’t even clap at the end. It stayed quiet.”
It almost suggests a musical superpower; the ability to stop people in their tracks. At least, that’s what Del Rey will have you believe. The other explanation calls for a far more cynical mind. It’s 2012; attention spans are short and information is infinite, yet there are all these pesky Twitter and Facebook accounts demanding to be updated with hilarious and outrageous hypotheses. It was only a matter of time before having an opinion became more important than opinion itself, and Lana Del Rey, a singer with a loose grasp of her own voice, who looks more like a movie star than any actress currently appearing on the big screen, was just the artist to justify it.
But if Del Rey’s success is merely a case of right place, right time, how do you explain the 100,000 people who bought her debut album Born To Die on its first week of release?
It’s as simple as this; Born To Die contains some truly brilliant songs. There’s ‘Diet Mountain Dew’, a candy-coated, Dolly Parton-level ditty set over an addictive hip hop beat; the adorable and foolhardy ‘Summertime Sadness’, which makes clever use of a distorted refrain; ‘Radio’, a truly catchy alloy of stark synth beats and gentle, cooing melody and the genuinely heartbreaking ‘Video Games’.
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