“What’s the film
about? What’s it really about? What genre does it take? Not boy-meets-girl,
that kind of shit. Fuck boy-meets-girl, fuck motorcycle movies, no. What is
really being said? That’s what you’re talking about. The whole idea is
subversion. You want subversion on a massive level.”
-
Sid, Sleep
With Me (1994)
“Oh well, there goes
the fairy tale/Lord, ain't it a shame/In all this comfort, I can't take the
strain”
-
Maria
McKee – “If Love Is A Red Dress (Then Hang Me In Rags)”
If you want a model
for Lana Del Rey, look no further than the Barbie doll. The first Barbie doll
was developed as the first American “adult” doll, moving away from the infant
dolls of the period into something more mature. The doll itself was based on a
German toy called Bild Lilli, itself based on a popular newspaper cartoon
character who acted like a prototypical Joan Holloway; a blonde bombshell who
used her sexuality to get her way. Not a particularly positive role model,
granted, but an undoubtedly adult one.
When Barbie
premiered in 1959, she was marketed as a “teen-age fashion model” and dressed
in a one-piece swimsuit. Its remarkable how quickly the character was de-aged;
while the original, ‘vintage’ model had a moderately adult face, the Malibu Barbie
that premiered in 1971 infantilized that to the current Clueless type
face. Soon, the “fashion model” of her description was dropped, and Barbie
became simply a girl next door, with a permanent expression of slightly dazed
delight etched onto her face.
Patronization is a
powerful tool; Ronald Reagan used it to become President and Mattel used it to
transform a fairly neutral (by virtue of it being explicitly idealized) female
image into an explicitly neutral one. I’m not going to claim that shift was
some act of gender warfare as I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but that
change in portrayal is significant. Barbie went from being a possible adult
future to a teenage present; a model for teenage girls to behave like rather
than aspire toward. That’s a dangerous thing for a figure as heavily sexualized
as Barbie.
Much like the Barbie
doll, there is no future in Born To Die. The character of Lana Del Rey
lives only in the present and in the past, and both are experienced either in
love or in lust. The entire philosophy of the album is summed up in the title;
when Lana talks about the future, it’s either a bleak endpoint or something
that will never come. If death is the finish line then why even race?
The album plays as a
bitter, crasser, half-speed version of Frank Sinatra’s classic sad bastard
period (exemplified by In The Wee Small Hours, one of Tom Waits’
favorite albums), with string sections enhanced by hip-hop drums and vocal
samples. Del Rey’s vocals are similar to classic vocal jazz ingénues like Julie
London, but she occasionally goes into a higher register that almost seems like
a parody of modern pixie-voiced pop singers like Ellie Goulding. When she
chirps lines like “Keep me forever, tell me you own me” on “Off To The Races”,
it’s obvious that we shouldn’t take it at face value. The higher register, for
Del Rey, is her Lolita voice; even if the lyrics are straight confessions, they
shouldn’t be taken seriously when delivered at that pitch.
As I suggested
above, the album is dedicated to Del Rey’s sexuality, both how it gets her the
life she wants (“American dreams came true somehow” (“Radio”)) and how empty it
ends up leaving her (“I swore I’d chase ‘em till I was dead” (the very next
line of “Radio”)). There isn’t even a hint of victory to the album, which
either showcases Del Rey in the midst of heartbreak or in empty, frivolous
relationships. Depending on how far you want to read into the album, you can
posit the former as a cause of the latter; I somehow doubt that the same vocal
sample being used in three different songs (“Blue Jeans”, “Dark Paradise”, and,
very dimly, in “Million Dollar Man”) was the result of laziness, for example.
That vocal sample (an
unidentifiable male yell) first shows up (going by track listing) in “Blue
Jeans”, otherwise notable for the fact that it doesn’t glorify money, instead
outright dismissing it (“Big dreams, gangsta/Said you had to leave to start
your life over/I was like - no please, stay here, we don't need no money/We can
make it all work”). The love interest appears to die over the course of the
song, and gets remember in “Dark Paradise”, one of the most straight-forward
and sincere songs on the album. It’s probably the only song here (lyrics wise,
at least) that wouldn’t feel out of place on a torch song compilation, along
with “Video Games” if you’re willing to stretch a bit. The sample, already
fairly dim on “Dark Paradise” is a barely discernable echo on “Million Dollar
Man”, where Del Rey hooks up with a “dangerous, tainted and flawed” rich boy, only
to find that it’s not enough.
That dissatisfaction with one of
the biggest dreams sold to girls generations past informs the entire album, and
if you don’t think bleak nostalgia is a theme of the album then you should look
at the cover one more time. Del Rey is linking the idea of settling down as a housewife
to a nice rich boy to the supposedly more rebellious idea of fucking a
dangerous outsider. It’s the same thing with a different goal, and that link is
present both in the lyrics and in the Spector-pop-meets-Timbaland production.
Another link is through the
repetition of the phrase “red dress”. That line shows up in two of the bleakest
songs on the album, the Lolita-echoing “Off To The Races” and the borderline
streetwalker-anthem “Carmen”, and on the farewell song “Summertime Sadness”,
which seems to be about the thrill found in brief little flings. Those brief,
seemingly harmless flings are being presented as being quite bleak indeed, and
hint at a more worrisome reading for lyrics like “Honey I'm on fire, I feel it
everywhere/Nothin' scares me anymore”. “Summertime Sadness” isn’t much
different, lyrically speaking, from the love-as-intoxication songs that have
flooded modern pop music for over a decade, but that implicit “red dress” link,
as well as the pounding, militaristic beat, give a darker undertone to the
song, one that I think is quite deliberate.
Even if you don’t agree with my
deeper readings, it’s obvious that Born To Die isn’t exactly keen on
relationships. There’s no hint anywhere on the album that love, lust, or sex
can ever be truly satisfying. The only truly nostalgic song is “This Is What
Makes Us Girls”, which buries its message of finding happiness with friends in a
song about sixteen year olds who think they can gain power by making men want
to sleep with them. Anytime you try to gain power through the feelings of
others you’re only making yourself their slave. That kind of mockery of the
Barbie-girl life isn’t a new idea, but the way that it’s presented here
certainly is.
In fact, based on the critical
dismissal of the album as pop artifice and empty style, that idea seems almost
dangerous these days. Even though TV shows like Mad Men thrive on taking
apart the fantasies we’re presented with from childhood on, pop music still
takes and sells many of those fantasies at face value. Alternatives to some of
those fantasies occasionally get presented (the members of En Vogue and
Beyoncé, for example, are both fair examples of strong female figures) but
subversion rarely, if ever, happens. I may be giving pop music short shrift on
this front (I plan on binging on Beyoncé albums sometime in the next few weeks
to see if her music deserves closer analysis) but Del Rey is one of the rare
artists I’m aware of that isn’t simply presenting an alternative fantasy.
In essence, I think the fact that
Born To Die is a takedown of a fantasy rather than a presentation of a
different one is why the album ping-ponged between getting attacked and being
ignored. There’s little room of subtlety in pop, and if taken at face value
this album could very easily fall short of one’s expectations. Critics
commented that the album was “unintentionally depressing” and conjectured at
whether “one of her videos is going to have a happy ending”. Both
trains of thought hilariously miss the point; I think the album’s mere title
renders the first critique absurd and answers the second.
Ultimately, I think Born
To Die touched a nerve in the critical community. It’s the only explanation
I can think of for the way the album, and Lana Del Rey herself, was dismissed
with barely any consideration; something in this album threatened the average
critic on a subconscious level, so they dismissed it and its singer as “fake”,
“unreal”, and “inauthentic”. When those descriptors get lobbed against a pop
star you’re either dealing with a sixteen year-old hipster with an axe to grind
or a critic backpedaling so fast they’ve dispensed with all logic. Calling a
pop star fake is redundant. Besides, even if you think I’m crazy to conjecture at
underlying messages in the album, criticisms like that are simply absurd.
The degree to which
Elizabeth Grant’s life resembled that of the songs on Born To Die is
irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether the songs sound and feel
authentic; whether the production, music, lyrics, and vocal delivery all work
together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. I could care less
whether or not Grant really went through the terrible, damaging relationships
her songs are about, all that matters is whether or not I can believe that she
did. That I can, and that she clearly has a point to her stories about heartbreak and empty love, is what makes
this album great.
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