After , we delve into the singer’s strange and sometimes off-putting persona.
By Eric Lubbers
If you find yourself turned off by , chances are you’re taking her too seriously.
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they encounter Lana Del Rey is not understanding that she’s as much of a constructed character as Ziggy Stardust or Superman.
The character of “Lana Del Rey” is just as outlandish and heavily costumed as any member of KISS, but with a much more subtle makeup. Itap easy to mistake for arrogance or ignorance.
There is a rich history of thoughtful people using fiction as a coping mechanism. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were two skinny punk kids from Cleveland who created a “super man” who was everything they weren’t: Tall, strong, handsome, bulletproof and popular. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley wanted to impress girls, so The Demon and The Starchild were born.
But no one wrote long essays or scoffed at KISS for the same reasons they go after Lana. “Who do they think they are with those costumes?” was never uttered at a KISS show. Fans suspend their disbelief and enjoy the show, like any art, good or bad.
The core of the Lana Del Rey character is a painfully shy but abundantly passionate person. That tension led to the creation of a character that overcompensates in all the ways that the creator saw as valuable after a young lifetime of escape through old movies and hip-hop. In this case, sex, beauty, money, drugs, men (not boys), mixed with a double shot of old-school capital-G Glamour.
Lana Del Rey aka Elizabeth Grant aka May Jailer started her creative career as a screenwriter, which should be evident on your first viewing (and even more evident on your 10th) of the video for “Ride,” which she wrote the script for.
It becomes clear that her greatest creation will never be any piece of film or single song, but the character that she’s getting more comfortable with on each album.
So harp on her “authenticity” all you want. She’s exactly as “authentic” as any Personification of Pure Female Ego & Id can or should be.
Is she the best singer? No, especially live (see the “painfully shy” note earlier). Can this last forever? Probably not. From what I’ve heard from her upcoming “Ultraviolence” album (the really transcendent “West Coast” excluded), there are a lot of old themes being played out again, which could point to her struggling to evolve.
But Lana Del Rey as writer is still one of the most intriguing artists working today. She’s a master of self-parody (), an excellent satirist skewering the very capitalism-and-image-obsessed culture that has allowed her success () and a poet succinctly tackling the existential terror and self-doubt of being in your twenties ().
If you’ve dismissed her in the past, sit down with a good pair of headphones and the videos I’ve linked above and give her another try. If you see something moving, feel it. If you see something beautiful, appreciate it. If you see something outlandish, laugh at it. Thatap what she made them for.
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Eric Lubbers is the mobile editor at the Denver Post and a contributor to Reverb.
