There’s probably about a million Lana Del Rey interviews out there, I understand, she is releasing a new album and everybody is interested by her Ultraviolence and boredom with feminism, but I continue to be rather indifferent to her persona. No matter what she says, I get the impression she is desperately trying to get the attention. She had another interview with the Guardian two days ago, whose title, ‘I wish I was dead already’, tells already everything you need to know about Lana Del Rey. Probably some people are gonna hate me for saying this, but I have never seen such a fiction piece passed for an interview.
When talking about her heroes (Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain) she says to the interviewer, ‘I wish I was dead already,’… ‘I don’t know. Ummm, yeah’ she added when the journalist pointed out that they were both dead.
‘I do! I don’t want to have to keep doing this. But I am.’
‘Do what? Make music?’
‘Everything. That’s just how I feel. If it wasn’t that way, then I wouldn’t say it. I would be scared if I knew [death] was coming, but …’
This way to never finish her sentences is getting a bit annoying, it is so evasive, so vague, she wants to pass for that melancholic fatal ingénue ready to pass out at any moment, this tragic pop star who is so unhappy, as she adds later:
‘Family members will come on the road with me and say: ‘Wow, your life is just like a movie!’ And I’m like: ‘Yeah, a really fucked-up movie.’
Right away, this seems so staged, I imagine her eyes looking in the vague when asked about the success of Video Games’, and she answers, ‘I never felt any of the enjoyment, It was all bad, all of it.’
When she was asked about a follow-up of her ‘Born to Die’ album, she dismissed the idea before saying she had ‘already said everything I wanted to say’, but there is a new album, so why is it the case Lana?
‘I mean, I still feel that way. But with this album I felt less like I had to chronicle my journeys and more like I could just recount snippets in my recent past that felt exhilarating to me.’ Err? And the third album (because there will be a third) will be justified how exactly?
When asked about the inspiration behind her songs like ‘Sad Girl’, she answers, ‘I had different relationships with men, with people, where they were sort of wrong relationships, but still beautiful to me.’
Note that Lana has relationship with men… and people! And of course they were all bad, wrong, as she was ‘the other woman’. However a boyfriend is mentioned during the interview, so does he count for nothing?
About the song ‘Money, Power, Glory’, she explains, ‘I was in more of a sardonic mood. Like, if all that I was actually going to be allowed to have by the media was money, loads of money, then fuck it … What I actually wanted was something quiet and simple: a writer’s community and respect.’
Lana wants to live in a artistic community, wants recognition and not the one built by the media that ‘always puts an adjective in front of my name, and never a good one’. Poor little girl. Another big revelation, ‘Brooklyn Baby’ was written with Lou Reed in mind. Yes, Lana probably thinks he is one of his peers, and she adds that Lou wanted to work with her so she flew to New York: ‘I took the red eye, touched down at 7am … and two minutes later he died,’ she says. Okay,I am not saying she is completely making this up, but yes, she is making this up, right? The death timing sounds so convenient.
We also learn that her personal computer was hacked in 2012 and ‘pictures, financial details, health records, not to mention her songs’ appeared online. ‘All 211 of them. Just one more element of the unknown in my daily life’.
She talks a little bit about her disinterest about feminism ‘I just can’t catch that feminist angle’, and she doesn’t consider herself as a provocateur like Miley Cyrus, Lorde, Lily Allen, Lady Gaga, Sinéad O’Connor, ‘I don’t think there’s any shock value in my stuff – well, maybe the odd disconcerting lyric – but I think other people probably deserve the criticism, because they’re eliciting it.’
What else, oh yeah her video for ‘Ride’, part tragic Pretty Woman, part Easy Rider, reflected 100% her actual life: ‘It was about my feelings on free love and what the effect of meeting strangers can bring into your life: how it can make you unhinged in the right way and free you from the social obligations I hope we’re growing out of in 2014.’
So she was a Hollywood whore involved with a biker gang, then a free-loving hippie? I just wonder why she didn’t get in trouble when she was wearing this Native American headdress. I can’t take any of this seriously. She is working very hard at creating her mythology, and this may be a little too obvious. Is she even saying the truth when she says she ‘didn’t have a home, didn’t know my social security number’ and ‘wasn’t in contact with her parents for about six years’?
The internet has always claimed her dad was wealthy and had even funded her career, but she denies it again ‘We never had more money than anyone we ever knew in town. My dad was a well-loved entrepreneur – he was interested in the early dawning of the internet in 1994 – but it wasn’t anything that ever translated financially.’
And she goes on: ‘she’d often spend her nights wandering around New York – “West Side Highway, Lower East Side, parts of Brooklyn” – meeting strangers and seeing where the night took them. “I was inspired by Dylan’s stories of meeting people and making music after you met them. I met a lot of singers, painters, bikers passing through. They were friends, or sometimes more. All people I was really interested in on impact.’
Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Lana drops a celebrity name after another, she hangs out with street people but miraculously never gets an STD or a good beating. And She even pretends to still be doing this street wandering. Let’s sum up her myth so far, she has been homeless, alcoholic, she still sleeps with strangers she meets in the streets and she is so unhappy she wants to die. She confirms the homeless/alcoholic part in the interview:
‘I live in Koreatown on the edge of Hancock Park [in LA], so I do different things where and when I can. It’s not just people with mental illness on the streets, but also people who, throughout the years, have lost identification information, that sort of thing. And I know what to do, I know how I can help, because I was that person.’
And a last reflection about her composition if anyone cares:
‘A lot of my songs are not just simple verse-chorus pop songs – they’re more psychological. When I played [the label] West Coast they were really not happy that it slipped into an even slower BPM for the chorus. They were like: ‘None of these songs are good for radio and now you’re slowing them down when they should be speeded up.’ But for me, my life was feeling murky, and that sense of disconnectedness from the streets is part of that.’
Of course, it’s all you Lana, I just wonder how many persons are behind a Lana Del Rey album? Ten? Twenty? Of course she says all this while smoking a cigarette, because Lana is a Hollywood star, an icon, at least she is really working hard at it. I have seen people who have been homeless and alcoholic and they look nothing like Lana,… a bit more roughness in the face and less Botox in the lips would help for the credibility, but at this point, Lana doesn’t care anymore about her credibility, she has enough people believing in her and buying this series of poses as a real interview. And this I-want-to-die shtick has to stop, people who are really depressed and have a death wish don’t say it in interviews! Her character appears very pretentious, affected and self-centered, no, she is not the new Nico, and someone has to tell her to rewrite her screenplay because it doesn’t entertain me anymore.
did homer write the odyssey or was he just a sailor ?.
…………and jack Kerouac always went back to his mum or aunt or whoever washed his socks and lent him some pocket money……….lou worked in his dads office and was married…………….la la land