As one of the most controversial characters in music at the moment, it is difficult to approach Lana Del Rey’s debut album without some sort of formulated presumption about her. For those of you who have been living in a cupboard for the past few months, Del Rey shot to Internet fame early last year with a DIY video to single “Video Games” uploaded onto YouTube (link). The song was an instant hit that had teenagers worldwide attempting to reenact it in their bedrooms. Flash forward to 2012 and Del Rey has become a divisive figure; criticised by everyone from Juliette Lewis to Brian Williams and defended by everyone from Daniel Radcliffe to Kristen Wiig (after her appearance on Saturday Night Live – QRO Indie On Late Night TV). It would appear that everyone has something to say about Miss Lana Del Rey.
This chaos surrounding the 25-year-old singer songwriter seems to have been caused by a series of less than scandalous revelations. Her real name is Elizabeth Grant (shock horror, a singer not using their birth name!), and instead of coming from an impoverished background like all other successful musicians are morally bound to do these days, her father was some rich dude funding her career. Furthermore, her unsigned indie image was one that had been manufactured by her record label, which led people to question how much of this apparent raw, unadulterated act was actually Del Rey, and how much of it had been orchestrated as a marketing ploy. Even the authenticity of those pouty lips came into question. Elizabeth Grant is the living embodiment of the fickleness of fame, and the unforgiving cruelty of the Internet.
The actual problem with Lana Del Rey, or indeed her debut album Born to Die, isn’t her past, or her manufactured image, but the tracks themselves: they just aren’t that great. The production side of the album is tolerable: fifteen catchy, albeit similar songs (either melancholy beats with gloomy vocals or upbeat rhythms with more gloomy vocals), but it is the lyrics that let the album down. Refrains of repetitive clichés litter every song: “I will love you till the end of time” / “Holding me tight in our final hour” / “Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain”; trivial phrases that leave you urging her to just write a song about popping down to the corner shop in sweatpants to buy milk without falling irrevocably in love or facing imminent death. Born to Die is formulaic, an album that no doubt will have unconstrained success within the manufactured mainstream industry, (indeed it has already gone straight to #1 in the U.K. album charts and predicted to hit #2 in the U.S.) but for the hipster snobs of the interwebs, it just won’t cut it.
