I saw Lana Del Rey perform one of the worst concerts I’ve ever experience at Irving Plaza back in 2012. This is what I wrote: “I am not a Lana hater, I loved “Video Games” and I thought she was OK on SNL and I thought the album was really fabulous, But taking center stage on a flower strewn stage, to backing tapes, she performed a deadly ten song set culled from the album and without a surprise in sight, despite pretty good vocals, was skin crawlingly dire.” Read it here.
So two years later I don’t know if she has improved live but I do know that the two songs I’ve heard off her upcoming album Ultraviolence are terrific and “West Coast” is one of the best songs of the year. So when Fader sat down to interview for NINETY MINUTES we were right there reading it. And when it came time to dissect it and take out the best quotes we were proud to let Gigwise do the heavy lifting:
“For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities. Whenever people bring up feminism, I’m like, god. I’m just not really that interested.”
“My idea of a true feminist is a woman who feels free enough to do whatever she wants.”
When asked about early criticism that she faced when ‘Video Games’ first emerged, Del Rey spoke out about the claims that she was contrived constructed and fake.
“I was, you know, a mess,” she said. “I totally wanted to kill myself every day.”
Oh OK, here is The Fader interview. And a quote from the writer, Duncan Cooper, who I am surely is a lovely fellow but… “As she moves from one character to another in her music videos, and from one type of man to another, from one recording alias to another, Lana Del Rey performs not just existential crisis but the power to blindly push through it.” That’s an interesting, albeit boring as fuck, concept. It’s a shame he didn’t ask her about it.
One more quote: “My career is a reflection of journalism, current-day journalism. My public persona and career has nothing to do with my internal process or my personal life. It is actually just a reflection on writers’ creative processes and where they’re at in 2014. Literally has nothing to do with me. Most of anything you’ve ever read is not true.”
Sure, that’s what it is. Why not?
