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(The other two are Carole King’s Tapestry and Adele’s 21.) When Born to Die finally came out on January 27, 2012, after months of beyond-tiresome discourse about name changes and plastic surgery and nefarious industry connections and the merit of the phrase “gangster Nancy Sinatra,” it felt far more like the end of something than the beginning of anything, let alone a sustainable career. On Friday, Del Rey will release her fifth album for Interscope, the fantastically titled Norman Fucking Rockwell, whose delicate and fantastic pre-release singles have ranged from “Fuck It, I Love You” to “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have - but I Have It” to an endearingly earnest cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time.” She is thriving, and mutating, and improving such that the spotty but occasionally excellent Born to Die is probably, in retrospect, her worst album.īut it is also, as a new Billboard cover story reminds us, a nearly unprecedented success, one of only three albums by a female artist to spend 300 weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart. One of the precious few people who are arguably better off now, in fact, is Lana Del Rey herself.
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That was internet discourse in 2012, which could be every bit as terrible as you remember, and looks better in retrospect only if you compare it with, yes, internet discourse here in good old 2019, where even the refrain “Go play your video game” lands quite differently. I’m totally gonna sleep with you now,” she replies. “Lana, just so you know, I stood up for you, and I think you’re great,” he tells her.
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Three weeks after that alleged catastrophe, who should show up to chat with Seth Meyers on “Weekend Update” but Kristen Wiig, in full LDR getup, her duck lips comically pursed as she apologizes to America for the war crime of shakily singing two of her songs: “Based on the public’s response, I must have instead clubbed a baby seal while singing the Taliban national anthem.” Kristen-as-Lana owns up to not meeting the high SNL musical-guest bar set by Bubba Sparxxx, the Baha Men, and Shaggy, and caps it off by bantering with Meyers in a harsh parody of the frothing internet discourse Del Rey had long inspired.
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Rude, everyone.įor the longest time nobody quite knew what to do with, or for that matter how to talk about, Lana Del Rey, but even Saturday Night Live took a shot at it. It certainly did not seem to deserve the gleeful Twitter-shame roundups or the melodramatic derision of, say, NBC anchor Brian Williams, who told Gawker boss Nick Denton, in a private email Gawker immediately published, that “Brooklyn hippster Lana Del Rey had one of the worst outings in SNL history last night-booked on the strength of her TWO SONG web EP, the least-experienced musical guest in the show’s history, for starters.” Rude, Brian. But especially back then, almost every artist on SNL sounded lousy for one reason or another, and Del Rey’s turn in the barrel is not the tuneless catastrophe you might remember. Her second tune, “Blue Jeans,” is a much less mesmerizing ballad delivered in an even drowsier manner. Even if you’d spent the past half-year or so doing nothing but incessantly arguing about this person on the internet, it was a surreal and profoundly unsettling experience. (By the last chorus you’ve learned to brace for the wobbly ascent of the line “I heard that you like the bad girls / Honey, is that true?”) She takes a full twirl after each chorus, a campy gesture in super slo-mo she is both the deer and the headlights. She looks dazed and stiff and extravagantly uncomfortable, which is partly a shrewd embodiment of the song itself and partly your garden-variety dazed, uncomfortable stiffness her voice is deep and rich and booming and tragic, with perilous swoops into her upper register that radiate her discomfort outward. Del Rey is moaning the startlingly morose “Video Games,” a gorgeous and narcotized torch-song power ballad for the iPhone Virtual Lighter app era, and still one of the best debut breakout singles of this decade.
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I will not argue otherwise I am not a performance artist.
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