Del Rey brings electricity to the Picnic
Lana Del Rey is an intriguing original who sings from a dark place all her own, writes Barry Egan, about the controversial artist who is set to headline this year’s Electric Picnic
SOME people appear to have a particularly angry bee in their bonnet about Lana Del Rey — who headlines the Electric Picnic festival in five weeks.
The actress Eliza Dushku tweeted of Lana’s controversial performance on Saturday Night Live in January, 2012: “Who is this wack-a-doodle chick performing on ‘SNL’? Whaaa?” Juliette Lewis weighed in with: “Wow watching this ‘singer’ on SNL is like watching a 12 year-old [sic] in their bedroom when they’re pretending to sing and perform #signofourtimes.” One critic claimed that “a collective ‘WTF?’ went up across the land”.
Her song National Anthem — complete with its lyrics: ‘Money is the reason we exist/Everybody knows it, it’s a fact/Kiss kiss’ — drew this tirade upon Ms Del Rey. “Is this a Swiftian satire of pop culture in the Real Housewives era, or is Del Rey actually embracing a Randian view of existential capitalism? Does it even matter? A bad song is a bad song, no matter its intentions,” huffed Stephen Deusner of Salon.com.
Her 2012 debut album Born To Die had much poison spat in Del Rey’s direction. “The album equivalent of a faked orgasm,” scowled one review, while another seethed, “not just irritating but almost morally objectionable.” Others merely hated on her because Lana Del Rey (born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant on June 21, 1986, in New York before moving to Lake Placid) simply seemed so wilfully affected, like the tale, according to the New York Times Style magazine, that she keeps an unspecified Tennessee Williams paperback in her snake-skin purse.
I rather like her. She’s different. Which is always a plus. Artists with a spark of individuality should be lionised not lambasted.
I like her dark edge. On Cruel World from her ultra-brilliant album from 2014 Ultraviolence, she sings of sharing ‘my body and my mind with you/That’s all over now’; and then on the somewhat David Lynch-esque Sad Girl, she was cooing forlornly of a relationship, which she described as like “being a mistress on the side/ It might not appeal to fools like you/ Creeping around on the side”. Lana is an intriguing original who sings from a dark place all her own. She once said that when she was younger she “felt lonely. I had the constant feeling that I thought differently to everyone around me. So, I suppose I felt lonely for a home. I didn’t know where I wanted to be, but I knew I wasn’t there yet. I think that this loneliness set a dark undertone for things to come.”
Lana also once said in an interview that when she “was a kid playing in bars, after every show somebody would come up to me and be like ‘You must be a David Lynch fan!’. At the time I wasn’t up on ‘all things cool’, but I looked into Lynch and quickly became a fan. Although I think the themes he explores are a step further into the extreme than I’m prepared to go.”
Yet more intriguingly on her 2015 album Honeymoon, she is singing on God Knows I Tried about: ‘On Monday they destroyed me but by Friday I’m revived… I’ve got nothing much to live for ever since I found my fame.’ You wonder (at least I do) what goes on inside a head to write such words (and sing them so beautifully).
She told NME that “there were unusual situations I found myself in that I didn’t know how to extract myself from, situations that needed more attention than me or the people around me knew how to handle at first. I think that song was a reminder to myself that if you don’t want the problems that come with being in the spotlight the best thing you can do is try and take yourself out of the spotlight. My family was traditional, and some of my extended family used to say a gentleman is only in the paper two times in his life: when he’s born and when he dies. Obviously — it’s a little too late for me.”