CULTURE  |  MUSIC

Lana Del Rey

What do you think about Lana Del Rey?

Fairly or not, our perception of most art is bound up in our perception of its creator. And since Del Rey has become one of the more polarizing artists in recent memory, it’s become pure folly to go about evaluating Born to Die in a vacuum. But we’ll go ahead and try, just for a minute.

First, Born to Die sounds really, really good. Del Rey is, on record at least, a captivating vocal shape-shifter. Her first gear is Cat Power-dusky and she up-shifts into a breathy, coquettish high register, sometimes so quickly that the effect is like musical theater. Leaving aside any of the album’s rather ambitious conceits for a moment, she’s singing over mostly radio-ready pop songs—there’s even one called “Radio”—that sound vaguely trip-hoppy thanks to Emile Haynie’s production. Of anyone, Haynie probably stands to gain the most from Born to Die. The arrangements are the largely the same sorta-epic, sorta-spooky blends of stratospheric strings and next-room-over drums he used on Kid Cudi’s Man on the Moon 2, but they lend themselves far better to Del Rey’s dramatic crooning than Cudi’s flow-deprived raps.

Second, Born to Die is patently ridiculous. “Lynchian” is an adjective that’s been thrown around a lot to describe the album, maybe because of the vaguely ominous spaghetti-western guitars that pop up here and there, but there’s actually very little mystery to Born to Die. Listening to it is a bit like watching a movie about a trailer park where everyone is very beautiful and doomed; think of a more intimate and stylish version of the Killer’s hilariously overblown but still kind-of-awesome Day & Age. And most of the time, Del Rey is dealing in the same overreaching, impressionistic lyrical nonsense as Brandon Flowers. Go ahead and try to keep a straight face during “This Is What Makes Us Girls,” when she whispers, “Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice.” She’s not comfortable going past I-love-you-you’re-handsome platitudes, and when she does, well, that’s when something like “National Anthem” happens.

This is where things get complicated. Born to Die is juvenile, absurd, and more than occasionally beautiful: in short, it’s a record that manages to be almost as divisive as Del Rey herself. Imagine for a second that Lana Del Rey had never gone by Lizzie Grant, that she’d never made a record produced by the guy from Sugar Ray or gone on Saturday Night Live and drawn Brian Williams’ ire. Imagine that she just emerged out of the e-ether, fully formed and sans major label marketing, with Born to Die. Alternatively, imagine that Abel Tesfaye had dabbled in some kind of Auto-tuned Jason DeRulo dreck before reemerging under Interscope’s wing as The Weeknd.

The point here isn’t to humanize Del Rey, who has done everything she could to appear larger than, or at least apart from, real life. It’s simply to illustrate the importance of identity as a framing effect for art. It’s far from a great record, but the revelation of the artifice behind Born to Die threatens to obscure the fact that, hey, it isn’t that bad, either.

—Ross Green

Discussion

Share and discuss “Lana Del Rey” on social media.