Lana stays on her own 24-7 Sylvia Plath path
“STAY on your path/Sylvia Plath.” Thus goes the line on Bare Feet On Linoleum, from Lana Del Rey’s new spoken-word release, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. (On last year’s Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman like Me to Have, But I Have It — from the Norman F**king Rockwell album — Lana sang about “tearing around in my f **king nightgown /A 24-7 Sylvia Plath”.) Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is Lana very much staying on her own path, which has always been an intriguing path.
Not that you would expect much else from a singer who in her earliest incarnation as Lizzy Grant & The Phenomena wrote on her MySpace that she was once a trapeze artist in Alabama, or who told The New York Times that she kept an unspecified Tennessee Williams paperback in her snake-skin purse at all times. The same singer who years later, as Lana Del Rey, Rolling Stone magazine would dub “more Kurt Cobain than Rihanna or Katy Perry”, while Pitchfork anointed her the poet laureate “of a world on fire”.
She caused a bit of a fire-storm with her comments in a 2014 interview: “I wish I was dead already. I don’t want to have to keep doing this.”
“I was always an unusual girl,” she once said. “My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality, just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.”
Born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant on June 21, 1986, in New York, Lana went to see a clairvoyant in 2013. She was told to write down four questions and reflect on them. “Am I meant for this world?” was the first question.
She was clearly a complex and fascinating woman. Her reaction to criticism was to refer to Carl Jung saying that inevitably what other people think of you “becomes a small facet of your psyche, whether you want it to or not”.
What brought this on was things like the actress Juliette Lewis tweeting of Lana’s performance on Saturday Night Live in January 2012: “Wow watching this ‘singer’ on SNL is like watching a 12-yearold in their bedroom when they’re pretending to sing and perform”; and Eliza Dushku adding, just as unfairly: “Who is this wack-a-doodle chick performing on SNL? Whaaa?”.
Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass will not be to everyone’s tastes; Yara Rodrigues Fowler in The Guardian wrote: “Give me Lana bangers over Lana poetry every time”.
Still, there is much to enjoy here.
Happy has the image of “the radio was so loud that we couldn’t hear the words/ So we became the music”. On Paradise Is Very Fragile, Lana says: “My friends tell me to stop calling 911 on the culture but it’s either that or 5150 myself ”. (5150 is a reference to the “involuntary psychiatric hold” in the California Welfare and Institutions Code.)
‘My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass, no fixed personality...’
She talks over the ambient-ish music provided by Jack Antonoff (her writing and producing partner on Norman F**king Rockwell) and it is an absorbing listen — especially since, as critic Martin Chilton pointed out, “Reading your own poetry aloud is a tricky business. Philip Larkin came across as morose and Ezra Pound sounded demented... and few can match the theatrical tones of Dylan Thomas... but Del Rey’s fast-paced delivery and expressive, lilting voice suits the anguish of the words”.
A 24-7 Sylvia Plath trapeze artist.