This 2012 piece I did on Lana Del Rey (and our atemporal times) for Spin is overtly oriented around the retro-as-entropy / vintage aesthetics angle (it was the lead story of a special themed issue on Retro Activity) but looking at it again, leitmotifs to do with glamour, illusion, fame, the artifice of persona, and a chronic hyper-visuality stick out as strongly. (Retropastiche is itself a subset of glam, of course, something it arguably pioneered)
“Watch out Adele! There’s another soul lady
coming up behind you and her name is Lana Del Rey.” So said a Top 40 radio
deejay last month, transitioning between “Rolling In the Deep” and “Video Games”. This piece of patter wasn’t
just a smart way to introduce an unfamiliar, relatively edgy song to mainstream
listeners, it was a rather astute bit of music criticism. Think about it: Adele
and Lana Del Rey are young women who’ve had their hearts broken and who sing
about it in musical idioms that are overtly non-contemporary: Etta James-style Sixties soul, with Adele,
and in Lana Del Rey’s case, something less tightly anchored to specific sources
but equally old-timey in its evocations of the Fifties and early Sixties. The question both singers raise is “why do these
otherwise thoroughly modern women express first-hand feeling s in such
second-hand imagery? Why coat something raw and real in this vintage veneer?”
Lana
Del Rey arrived on the scene too recently to make it into my book Retromania,
but—like Adele—she is an absolute gift when it comes to talking it up: “look,
see, that
’s what I’m on about!” . That said,
they represent different kinds of retro-pop. Adele’s is unselfconscious, just an artist who’s
embraced a decidedly old-fashioned style and reiterates it without adding much
to it. Escort, the New York disco troupe featured in this special issue of
Spin, are another example. The hallmark of unselfconscious retro is not
dressing the part, not looking like you’ve time-travelled from the era in which the music is sourced.
Lana
Del Rey is much closer to the hyper-conscious retro that’s endemic in indie/
underground music, where clothes and artwork reference a bygone era, while the
lyrics and the music itself often teem with crafty allusions. Frankie Rose & the Outs, also featured in
this issue, are prime exponents, from
their Sixties girl group sound to songs
like “Thee Only One” (the “thee” probably nodding to various bands led by
Sixties-revivalism-pioneer Billy Childish, but traceable even further back to a
fad among Sixties garage bands like Thee Midnighters) to the cover of the
7-inch single version of that song, which Rose wanted to “look like a cross
between a Blue Note album cover and an old French pop 45.”
Retro
of this kind, where a group’s sound-and-visuals incorporate citations and where
spotting them is an integral part of the fan’s enjoyment, is not a new thing.
It’s been part of indie almost from the beginning (The Smiths’s iconographic record-sleeves,
Jesus & Mary Chain or Butthole Surfers “sampling” riffs or backing vocal
refrains from Sixties and Seventies rock legends). It can be traced back
further still, through glam rock’s Fifties echoes to The Beatles’s Chuck Berry
pastiche “Back In the U.S.S.R.” and Zappa’s doowop album (both 1968). At the
same time, there’s no doubt that this
kind of conscious retro-activity has intensified in the 21st
Century, partly as a result of just how extensive the archive of pop history is
now (five or six decades) and partly because the broadband era has made
accessing that history so damn easy. YouTube, in particular, is a vast,
evergrowing repository of promo and music-on-TV clips along with every other
kind of pop (and unpop) culture. And
YouTube is as much as audio library as a video archive. You can school yourself
there, free of charge.
Which
brings us back to Lana Del Rey. Her rocket-like ascent was propelled by videos she
put on YouTube made out of footage she’d found on Youtube. “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans” put History in
shuffle mode: a miasma of Americana that
drifts back and forth across the decades
but is unified by its sustained
elegiac mood of not-now-ness. Amid the
appropriated home movie footage of swimming pools and skateboarders and kids on
mopeds, specific allusions pop up: the
Hollywood sign, Chateau Marmont, Lana in Lolita sunglasses from Kubrick’s
movie, Lana in a racing driver jacket that suggests Evil Knievel or maybe the 70s road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, Lana in a
white leather fringe jacket that echoes Easy Rider or maybe Elvis in Las
Vegas.
According
to Del Rey, though, the recurrent invocations of places like Vegas and LA in
her videos (and also her lyrics) aren’t really references so much as mood-tints.
“The thing that fascinates me about all
of them is the colors of the places,”
she says on the phone, in transit to another mythic-Americana landscape she
adores, Coney Island. “The muted blues
and greens in California, the bright lights of Vegas... People ask me about what the Fifties imagery
from California represents to me, but actually I’m mainly just a visual
person. Sometimes when my producer and
I talk about songs, we talk about them in terms of colors. In a way the album was visually driven. “
Part
of the nostalgia effect of the found footage in
Del Rey’s videos derives from the properties of the different kinds of
film stock, including the specific way that it ages and decays. The bleached and blotchy textures trigger a
poignant sense of time’s passage, an inkling that even your most halcyon
memories will fade to nothingness. “Blue
Jeans” explicitly forefronts the idea of “dead media” and antiquated formats
with its opening footage of a hand grabbing a pack of Eastman Ektrachrome Super
8 film.
Lana
Del Rey may, in fact, be about to become the first Hipstamatic pop star. Photo apps like Hipstamatic, Instagram, and
ShakeIt!, or Fuuvi’s new faux-Super8 device the Bee, offer a digital simulation
of an analogue past. Something similar is going on with Lana Del Rey’s music :
old-timey instruments like mandolins, strings, harps and twangy surf guitar make
up much of its texture, but there’s also
unidentifiable sounds flying about that are clearly sampled and
processed, while the beats on Born To Die
are boombastic, hip hop in impact if not
actual feel. The result: the RZA meets Lee Hazelwood. Factor in Del
Rey’s choices
in clothes, hair, accessories and make-up, and it’s clear she’s the perfect pop
star for the era of vintage chic. Not that she’s only artist around with
sound-and-visuals that are pre-faded and artificially distressed. Take Perfume
Genius, also featured in this issue: there’s a similar “warm”, softened-by-age sound, and a video, for
“Lookout, Lookout”, set in a quaint motel, complete with rotary phone.
It’s
not just the stylized form of Lana Del Ray’s songs that feels out-of-time, it’s the emotional
content too: a language of romantic excess
that harks back to Roy Orbison’s most over-the-top ballads or Skeeter Davis’s
“The End of the World”. Love as malady and madness, delirium and delusion... and at the ultimate degree, death. “Dark
Paradise” is a song of morbid fidelity, an abandoned or bereaved lover who
prefers to keep the company of ghosts: “There’s no remedy for memory... I wish I was dead.” Elsewhere, Lana sings “I’m
not afraid to say that I’d die without him.”
“I
don’t really condone relying on another person to the point where you’re going
to die without them,” says Del Rey. “Something
I never really expected was to have gotten into a relationship that ended up
being very tumultuous. But I had met
someone who was so magnetic and made me feel differently from the way that I
felt for so long, which was sort of confused and bored... and because in the end we couldn’t be together,
it ended up having a do-or-die element
to it. That was an experience that
struck me and I kept on falling back to that place in terms of inspiration for
the songs.”
Born To Die goes beyond
retro-romance, though, to retro-sexuality, retro-gender. All those yielding, doe-eyed ballads of
abject devotion... seem to look back in
languor to a time when men were men and women were thankful. A pre-feminist
world, or more precisely, America before Betty Friedman’s The Feminine Mystique was
published (1963). So in “Without You”,
Del Rey coos “I can be your china doll if you want to see me fall”, while “This
Is What Makes Us Girls” seems to define femininity as being a fool for love: “We all look for heaven and we put love first/Don’t
you know we’d die for it?/ It’s a curse.” At the other extreme, there are songs about
women who uses wiles to get what they want. “Off to The Races” recalls Ginger,
the Casino character played by Sharon
Stone, except if Ginger actually enjoyed being a kept woman and was as docile
and adoring as DeNiro’s Sam Rothstein hoped.
She’s a moll, wasting a rich man’s money (“give me them coins”),
breaking into a Betty Boo squeak for the lines “I’m your little harlot,
starlet” and purring “Tell me you own me”.
“I’m an interesting mix of person,” says Del
Rey defensively, with just a hint of annoyance. “I am a modern day woman. I’m self-supporting. I went to college. I
studied philosophy. I write my own music. But at the same I also very
appreciate being in the arms of a man and finding support that way. That feeling influences the kind of melodies I
choose and how romantic I make the song. Maybe it ends up giving it a slightly
unbalanced feeling.” Asked about the
references in other songs on Born To Die
about good-girls-gone-bad (“degenerate
beauty queens” is one memorable lyric), she points to David Lynch’s movie Wild At Heart as not so much an
inspiration as a parallel with phases
in her life. “The way I ended up having
relationships and living life, it sometimes mimics those more wild
relationships. Wild At Heart was an influence – in terms of the way it was shot,
but also the love story.”
Right
from the off, commentators have talked
of Lana Del Rey in terms of David Lynch’s
dark dreamworlds. They’ve also mentioned singers linked to his work such as Chris “Wicked Game” Isaak and Julee “Falling”
Cruise, whose songs evoke a bygone era
when the brokenhearted died inside but did it in style. The Lynch connection highlights a curious
quality of Lana Del Rey’s whole shtick: not only does it hark back to the
Fifties and early Sixties, it inevitably also recalls the Eighties’s own echoes
of that time. Movies like Lynch’s Blue
Velvet, Jarmusch’s Strangers in
Paradise and Mystery Train, the
S.E. Hinton adaptations Rumblefish and
The Outsiders. Musicians as various
as Tom Waits, Alan Vega, Mazzy
Star.
This
Sixties-via-Eighties syndrome isn’t
unique to del Rey by any means. As
much as R&B originals like Etta, Adele recalls forgotten Brit soul
revivalists like Alison Moyet, Carmel and
Mari Wilson. The scene that Frankie Rose belongs to—Dum Dum Girls,
Vivian Girls—reaches Spector’s wall of sound and the Sixties girl group’s via Jesus
and Mary Chain and the “C86” movement of bands like The Shop Assistants. Then
there’s The Men, as featured in this issue, who draw from the harder side of
mid-Eighties British psych-revivalism. On their song “( )” they filch not just
the riff from Spacemen 3’s “Revolution” but a chunk of the lyric (“And I
suggest to you/That it takes/Just five seconds”) along with lines from another
Spacemen song “Take Me To the Other Side”.
If
retro culture has reached the point where we’re seeing revivals of revivals,
citations of citations (Spacemen 3 remade Stooges songs while “Revolution” itself
is an already-somewhat-hokey homage to MC5), what are the implications for
music going forward? As time goes on, signs are becoming more and more detached
from their historical referents, hollowed out.
All these sounds, gestures, time-honored phrases, are entering into a
freefloating half-life, or afterlife, where all they are is pure style.
This
appears to be the ghosty place where Lana Del Ray comes from. In “Without You”, she sings “but burned into
my brain all these stolen images” and I
can’t help thinking of Blade Runner
and the android replicants who are given transplanted memories. Her lyrics are full of sampled clichés (“
walk on the wild side”, “white lightning”, “feet don’t fail me”) or references
to iconic brand-names (“white Pontiac heaven”,
“Bugatti Veyron”). But she says
that the Pontiac allusion isn’t for its pop-cultural associations (Two Lane Blacktop and other 70s movies,
songs by Tom Waits and Jan & Dean) so much as “just the sound” of the word.
Likewise, the name “Lana Del Rey” was chosen for its lilting loveliness, rather
than its rippling resonances (a Hollywood movie idol with platinum blonde hair
and a turbulent private life, a California beach town, a make of 1950s
Chevrolet). It was “a big risk” renaming herself, she says, “but my music was
always beautiful and I wanted a name that was beautiful too.”
“Beautiful”
is a word that crops up repeatedly in Del Rey’s conversation, as it does in her
lyrics. She seems to be intensely susceptible to the splendor of appearances,
to the point of vulnerability. “You look like a million dollar man/ so why is
my heart broke?”, she beseeches plaintively in “Million Dollar Man”. In “National Anthem”, she sings about “blurring
the lines between real and the fake.” The gap between image and reality is an
obsession. So is fame, portrayed as the dangerous desire to lose oneself by
merging into a glamorous facade. “I even think I found god in the flashbulbs of
your pretty cameras,” she sings in “Without You”, while the words “Movie Star
Without a Cause” flash up in the video for “Blue Jeans”.
Then
there’s “Carmen”, seemingly a song about a 17-year-old starlet who’s dying
inside and only comes alive when “the camera’s on”, but really more like a perturbing
self-portrait. “‘Carmen’ is probably the song closest to my heart,” says Del
Rey, who seems vaguely put-out that I’ve heard it. “’Famous and dumb in an
early age’—that’s fame in a different way, in different circles, for different
reasons. Not really for being a pop star. It’s sort of like, my life”. Once
again, you have to wonder about an artistic imagination so colonized by old
movies and old songs that it can only express things that really happened in a
real life through this “cinematic” prism. Is this a distancing mechanism, a buffer to
manage the emotion? Or was the actual love affair itself contaminated by
fantasy and role-play?
^^^^^^
What
we have with Lana Del Rey is the problem of the undeniable talent who is also a
throwback, and who therefore sets back the cause of musical modernism. (See
also: The White Stripes). She’s not a straightforward revivalist: the music and the
presentation are diversely sourced and the end result is a sophisticated
concoction (in that respect, she’s closer to The White Stripes than Adele). But
it still falls, ultimately, within the domain of pastiche, memorably defined as
“speech in a dead language”. Given her
passive persona, it’s tempting to say that the ghosts of pop culture’s
collective unconscious speak through her.
Born To Die, haunted by
lost lovers, the spectre of Spector stalking indie-land... it’s all somewhat
gloomy and airless. Are there upsides to the contemporary condition that some
call “atemporality”, where past, present and future are blurred and the entire
history of music is at your clicking fingertips?
Definitely. You can travel to time-zones that
no one else has, as Destroyer did with
Kaputt, on which he visited regions of 1980s pop (Prefab Sprout, Blue Nile) that neither synthpoppers like La Roux nor chillwavers
like Neon Indian cared to. You can create “superhybrids” that draw on disparate
sources from far-flung eras and locations, as artists as wildly dissimilar as
Vampire Weekend, Grimes, and Rustie have done.
You can become mesmerized by “lost futures” of 70s
synth music and attempt to start again where they left off, as with Emeralds,
that band’s spun-off solo careers such
as Steve Hauchildt and his brilliant Tragedy
& Geometry LP, and the group’s
allies on the Spectrum Spools label. Or
with the similar moves made off the back of 80s electro-funk and New Age made
by Oneohtrix Point Never and Ford & Lopatin.
The archive can be a radical
resource, so long as the immense array of musical precedents it contains are
used as launching pads into the unknown, rather than touchstones to recreate.
The challenge is daunting but not impossible: to make music that doesn’t remind you of X or Y, but prominds you of something yet to come.
^^^^^^^^^
further reading on Lana Del Rey from Lucas Fagen at Hyperallergic
