Week 36: Lana Del Rey - Born To Die (2012)

“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.

Week 31: Screaming Females - Ugly (2012)

“Have you ever seen a human heart?! It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood.”

-          Larry, Closer

When art had its first golden age, ugliness would have been unthinkable. Classical artists sought to replicate the perfect nature that they believed in; their goal was to inspire a sense of grace and glory in their audience, to evoke God by perfectly portraying his Creation. To put flaws into the pictures, or worse, to make outright ugly images, would be spitting in the face of nature and, by extension, God.

I’m not enough of an art historian to say when, exactly, that began to change, but that opinions shifted is inarguable. Postmodernism takes error and ugliness as its main subject, with artists deliberately breaking the rules of their craft in an effort to explore its limits and make them obvious to the audience. This can be taken to unnecessary extremes, and even verge on self-parody in some cases, but it can also offer pieces of genuine interest. The key is that the artist can both prove that they’re breaking the rules knowingly and that they’re competent enough to be able to shed those rules.

Those rules of aesthetics are, often, where the beauty of an art piece comes from. When I use the word ‘craft’ I’m doing so to refer to artists attempting to give their audience a piece of perfection, a slice of Heaven. Such rules are tied to the classical tradition of giving an audience grace by offering them beauty, and by following such rules artists are attempting to do the same, though not necessarily with classical subjects. Pop music, for example, uses craft in an effort to inspire bliss in the listener, but it’s rarely tied to any kind of natural imagery. Instead, most pop relies solely upon the craft itself, using common, lovely chord progressions to augment the content of their choice.

Even the ugliest, rawest of subjects can be rendered graceful and lovely with the right degree of craft. A talented application of aesthetic principles can make even a child starving and sobbing in the streets appear beautiful, dulling the natural sympathy an audience has with a sense of elevated beauty. Such images are easier to digest than the reality of someone slowly dying in misery, and the ability to produce them is valued by charities and political groups all over the world.

Week 30: Frank Ocean - Channel Orange (2012)

“My TV ain’t HD, that’s too real"

     -    Frank Ocean, “Sweet Life”

Unlike his fellows in Odd Future, Frank Ocean seems to have no interest in sounding young. Like Prince, Laura Marling, or Jack White (all artists who started in their early-20s or younger), Ocean falls into the middle period of adolescence better than he does the categories of vapid youth or confident adult.

What makes Ocean and those artists more adolescent than, say, an album like Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream is their indecision and lack of clear focus. The fatal flaw in Perry’s album is that no teenager would be able to narrow their fantasies down to someone as clearly defined as Katy Perry’s sugarplum-fairy-in-a-bikini image; indeed, most adolescents would be hard-pressed to narrow their fantasies down at all. It’s an era where, for the first time, we are forced to grapple with the fact that we can even have fantasies and dreams; childhood is an era in which everything we want seems readily available, and it ends as soon we realize how wrong we are.

The dreams of your average teenager more closely resemble the tenuously themed mixtapes or playlists they create or the television they watch, and both of those images are cornerstones of Ocean’s presentation. Nostalgia, Ultra was patterned after the former, complete with tape clicking noises and, at one point, a girlfriend’s insulting critique (“What’s a Radiohead anyway?”). This all fits with the literal mixtape presentation of the album; in recent years that term has taken on the meaning of a rapper’s self-released tape that uses wholesale sampling in lieu of professional production.

What truly unified Nostalgia, Ultra, aside from its presentation as a self-made mixtape, was how outwardly focused Ocean was in all of the songs. When Ocean does figure into the lyrics of the songs it’s only as part of some relationship that determines his actions. Much like a classic mixtape, all of the songs on the album are devoted to others, focused on relationships and people either real or imagined.

Week 27: Dr. Dog - Be The Void (2012)

“I was never that young/I was born old and grey/Alone and in shambles/It’s alright, it's ok”

-          Dr. Dog, “Get Away”

What place does the topic of age deserve in discussions about music? One of the most basic ways to dismiss something, from a critical perspective, is to label it as ‘immature’ or ‘childish’, a criticism that I’ve used on this very blog. I stand by my usage of those terms, mainly because such things don’t generally hold up under an analytic lens.

Poptimism, the critical perspective that pop music should not be criticized in the manner I described above, runs into this problem constantly. Artists like Beyonce may be making music that is brilliantly put together, but the accomplished whole doesn’t appear to me to have any real content. Most everything about pop music is put clearly on the surface level, without any need to dig deep for meaning, a pop song can only generate interest in itself by making sure the music is intricately arranged and, at best, offers some kind of interesting composition.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that approach to music. Entire books have been written on The Beatles, including their poppiest songs along with the ones that came closest to blues or folk music. Oftentimes it’s those intricate pop songs that attract the most critical attention, thanks to how readily they offer themselves to music majors with heads teeming with Italian words and a lot of free time. In a more general sense, pop songs are often the songs large groups unite around when they need something to fill the dead air between conversations. Taking examples from my own blog, I love “The Radicalization Of D” by Gareth Liddiard, but if I were to throw a party I’d be more likely to reach for Holy Ghost. Similarly, if I were to play some Kanye I’d have to cherry-pick from 808s quite a bit (“Heartless” would be a good choice; leave it to Kanye to make crippling depression danceable).

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make pleasant music, which is the only thing that truly unites all pop musicians. I hate modern pop for its constant, almost desperate attempts to eliminate all traces of humanity from their music, simply because doing so transforms pop into uncanny electronica. Making the human voice into an instrument has a long proud tradition in music all around the world and visa versa, but attempts to manipulate the voice in post as if it were a guitar string to be fretted gives me the oogies. How can you have joyful, happy music if the humanity has been clinically removed? It’s like marrying a Stepford Wife.

Week 24: The Walkmen - Heaven (2012)

Pop’s getting old. The basic styles and tropes of Western pop music, depending on how you define their origin, are around 50 years old, and unlike other artistic mediums we’ve done little to reinvent the wheel. Even Michael Jackson, the last true watershed artist for the pop world, had his grounding in the harmony-rich, rhythmically driven music of classic R&B, as did Madonna, his close successor.

As such, modern-day pop music tends to build itself as lavishly as possible, creating gothic facades over mundane, sometimes rickety foundations. Layers upon layers of synths, guitars, vocal overdubs, and general effects are used to create songs that were technologically impossible even 5 years ago. Invention over innovation; new tools created simply to be looked at and gushed over.

Not the other road of resistance is much better. Rather than paint oneself up with makeup and fancy dress, some artists chose to strip themselves down to the bones. Modern punks and the basest of garage rock revivalists revel in their ability to become walking skeletons, refusing to innovate or even invent ways to make things sound new.

Week 20: Jack White - Blunderbuss (2012)

“A concert is not a live rendition of [an] album. It's a theatrical event.”

“I'm so powerful on stage that I seem to have created a monster. When I'm performing I'm an extrovert, yet inside I'm a completely different man.”

-          Freddie Mercury, of Queen

Presentation of personality has been integral to music from the beginning of pop. Managing that presentation is fundamental to most musicians for two reasons: the fact that people tend to believe what people are saying, even if the words have a melody to them; and the origin of pop music in opera and musical theater. Unless one makes things very explicit indeed, people assume that a singer is their character, whether that character is a sexual misanthrope, misogynist, or sadsack suicide risk; the song is projected back onto the singer, often without a second-thought.

Starting with the second reason, the skeleton of musical theatre and Broadway is still front-and-center in pop music’s closet: one need look no further than Lady Gaga’s long-form music videos and play-like stage presentation to find evidence of this. Pop music is all about carefully developing and maintaining a public image through meticulously edited interviews, stage performances, as well as the modern-day tools of the music video and Twitter feed.

Social media, like Twitter, has made that kind of image maintenance much more labor intensive (I’m sure Lady Gaga’s PR people get paid very well), as well as far more pervasive. These artists rarely, if ever, appear to the public out-of-character; hell, I doubt most of Lady Gaga’s fans even know her real name. The image, the facsimile, has superseded the actual person it was based upon; simulacra over simulation. The pop star is loved (sometimes to frightening extremes) but the people who love them know little except for the tidbits that careful producers throw into the water like chum for the sharks.

What gives those tidbits power and flavor is the fact that they’re presented as quotes; small offerings from someone that fans view as far above them. Kanye West’s Twitter feed doesn’t get attention because of any kind of cleverness, sincerity, or articulateness; people only read it because they can perceive it as a connection to that guy who did “Jesus Walks” and “Power”.