Lana Del Rey

[ScarlettLux]

My current musical obsession. Yes, she is a bit "fake" and manufactured to appear more indie than she is, but the sad beauty of her songs can not be denied. Sigh. This is so my mood right now -









Wow. So I just watched it myself and she seems to be very devaluing ... talking so much about choosing clips for her video only because of aesthetics.. no meaning behind anything, etc. Just beauty, how colours look.. SEI seems too simple of a typing though. She actually doesn't appear to show too much in my opinion.

Her lyrics are very straight forward. Almost too much so. Gamma/Delta? SLI?

It's you, it's you, it's all for you
Everything I do
I tell you all the time
Heaven is a place on earth with you
Tell me all the things you want to do
I heard that you like the bad girls
Honey, is that true?
It's better than I ever even knew
They say that the world was built for two
Only worth living if somebody is loving you
Baby now you do

You were full of punk rock
I grew up on hip hop
You fit me better than my favourite sweater
And I know that love is mean, and love hurts
But I still remember that day we met in December
Oh baby

I will love you till the end of time
I would wait a million years
Promise you'll remember that you're mine
Baby can't you see through the tears

Lana's quotes:

"I was always an unusual girl. My mother told me that I had a chameleon soul. No moral compass pointing me due north, no fixed personality. Just an inner indecisiviness that was as wide as wavering as the ocean. And if I said that I didn’t plan for it to turn out this way I’d be lying- because I was born to be the other woman. I belonged to no one- who belonged to everyone, who had nothing- who wanted everything with a fire for every experience and an obssesion for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn’t even talk about- and pushed me to a nomadic point of madness that both dazzlez and dizzied me. Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people- and finally I did- on the open road. We have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore- except to make our lives into a work of art."

"When I was young I felt really overwhelmed and confused by the desire not to end up in an office, doing something I didn't believe in."

"Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books, pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it."

"I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world."

"I have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I've had and also the people I've had around me. I want to stay hopeful, even though I get scared about why we're even alive at all."

"I didn't live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don't know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things."

"I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It's all authentic."

"I don't know that much about who directs what movies, but I'm definitely inspired by the look of old movies; I find them to be really beautiful."

"Distance sometimes lets you know who is worth keeping, and who is worth letting go."

Twitter: "I think we're losing what we used to have, you know?"
"I always fall for the wrong guy. Things that are bad always taste nice."
"My boyfriend’s really cool, but he’s not as cool as me."
"You're boring me to death and I'm already dead."
"I am my Soulmate."
"Now my life is sweet like cinnamon, like a fucking dream I'm living in."
'You're a hard man to love and I'm a hard woman to keep track of."
"Heaven is a place on earth with you, tell me all the things you wanna do."
"Is he mine? Not quite yet, but I'm gonna get him."

"When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal."

"I once had a dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events some of those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken. But I didn't really mind, because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted, and then losing it to know what true freedom is."

[Birdie]

I like her song about fucking. Very catchy.

[gooey]

i think iei

[Creepy-Snaps]

i think iei

I'll agree with that. She seems to exude Ni when she says "you do get inspired when you're on the road" in a 'it just happens that way' fashion, and talking about the 50s and 60s era. Seems Se-valuing when she mentions 'it depends on what capture me visually'. And her constant variation of her voice is easy to point at Fe-creative. Good call gooey!

[gooey]

thanks!

[Ver]

I love her music too . I cannot stop listening to Video Games and also believe she's Ni in ego.

[ScarlettLux]

Really? How are you seeing IEI? I don't feel like she has any Fe creative at all. She is very deadpan in her interviews and song performances. Her voice barely changes, and her live shows are pretty dead in atmosphere. Yes, she's nervous but... IEIs have more flair than that, no?

I don't think when she was describing her music that it sounded Ni at all either. She doesn't seem to know what to say, what to answer. I feel like IEIs are more eloquent and mystical than her.

[Beautiful sky]

I see SEE

[Aquagraph]

I see SEE

You do that a lot. Really.

She is pretty submissive in her first album.

I'm not much of a typer, but bump.

[Korpsy Knievel]

You do that a lot. Really.

I'm curious what she charges to impart the technique to discovering so many SEEs.

[Aquagraph]

On another thread I counted her typings of forum members and SEEs covered approximately 20% to 25% of it.

[Korpsy Knievel]

On another thread I counted her typings of forum members and SEEs covered approximately 20% to 25% of it.

Ah, it's like a world built with me in mind.

[sarinana]

ISxj

[Galen]

Some sort of boring IXFp, no hard conclusions on her at this point

You watch too much of Alanah Rae.

So do you

[ClownsandEntropy]

Seems more IEI-y than SEI-y. Less concrete and aware of herself and the world.
I don't want her in my quadra either, ew.
Reminds me of my IEI friend (though that's now assuming that my typing of my friend is correct).

[IBTL]

Seems more IEI-y than SEI-y. Less concrete and aware of herself and the world.
I don't want her in my quadra either, ew.
Reminds me of my IEI friend (though that's now assuming that my typing of my friend is correct).

Wow! So painful... IEI's will throw LII's a bone when no one else is willing to put up with them. Give us some props...

[Hitta]

She kind of seems like a humble person or something that has kind of built herself into the human personification of a blow job under the desk to deal with the complexities of the world and acquire fame. I feel as if she doesn't know how to be herself, like she kind of seems like an innocent child to me or something that's trying so hard to be an adult... but probably repeatedly gets taken advantage of.

[jessica129]

She kind of seems like a humble person or something that has kind of built herself into the human personification of a blow job under the desk to deal with the complexities of the world and acquire fame.

Your analogies never cease to amuse me.

I feel as if she doesn't know how to be herself, like she kind of seems like an innocent child to me or something that's trying so hard to be an adult... but probably repeatedly gets taken advantage of.

I get the same vibe from her, too. Which is the same vibe I seem to always get from IEI's. Didn't she claim she was an alcoholic by the age of 11 or something? That might explain the stunted growth.

[Limitless]

She may have intentionally presented herself as a complete failure for a couple of different reasons. The fact that she gained success through her dark persona supports this idea...

She uses unconventionally off-putting body language in all these pictures which were published shortly before she "bombed" her SNL performance. Check it out:

lana-del-rey-video-games-remixes.jpg (One crossed arm = nervous)
e0f050fe35003f1f3d86042506c3d2da.jpg (Head tilted downwards = disapproving. Glasses = discomfort. Hands behind back = secret dominance.)
lana-del-rey-by-terry-richardson-for-magazine-body-1558373045.jpg (American specific signs of rebellion.)
lanadelrey-1024x682.jpg (Mocking Marilyn Monroe's classic submissive pose with a disgusted face.)

I do not know the significance of this, but in the majority of her portraits, she also faces outwards with her chest facing to the viewer's right.

lana_del_rey_vogue_march_2012.jpegLana-Del-Rey-In-Denim-Shorts-For-Wonderland-Magazine-ph-AJ-Numan.jpg lana_del_rey_2014_p.jpg

However, she always wears white, which suggests she is attempting to create an image of innocence and purity that many teens would relate to in the midst of suddenly feeling apprehensive, rebellious, and bored.

lanadelrey-290x290.png

Just like she wanted to exude a dark, vindictious vibe from body language, she also may have injected her lips then lied about it for the same effect.

lana-del-rey-video-games-video-escena.jpg

Apparently some of you failed to grow up. (This has me wondering whether some of you were projecting by calling her autistic or low IQ.)

[HERO]

“ . . . . They say I'm too young to love you / They say I'm too dumb to see / They judge me like a picture book by the colors like they forgot to read / I think we're like fire and water / I think we're like the wind and sea / You're burning up, I'm cooling down / You're up, I'm down / You're blind, I see / But I'm free / I'm free / Well, my boyfriend's in a band / He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed / I've got feathers in my hair / I get down to Beat poetry / And my jazz collection's rare / I can play most anything / I'm a Brooklyn baby . . . I'm talking about my generation / Talking about that newer nation / And if you don't like it you can [ban me] / [Block me, Teddy/Davy] / You never liked the way I said it / If you don't get it, then forget [about] (it) / ‘Cause I don't have to fucking explain it . . . .”









- from Rollingstone magazine (Issue 1214) [July 31, 2014]; p. 46 [“Vamp of Constant Sorrow” by Brian Hiatt]:

Del Rey’s co-manager, Ben Mawson, warned her that she’d have to answer for some of the new album’s lyrics, particularly the title track, which quotes the old girl-group line “He hit me and it felt like a kiss,” then adds, “He hurt me but it felt like true love,” just in case she hadn’t made her point. She’s vague on whether this theme might be autobiographical: “I guess I would say, like I’m definitely drawn to people with a strong physicality,” she says with a shrug, “with more of a dominant personality.”

She’s not worried about any message those lines might send. “It’s not meant to be popular,” she says, sitting in the backyard of the town house, which opens onto a shared garden, where Dylan had angered his neighbors decades ago by trying to put up a fence. She’s sipping hot coffee through a straw, a long-standing habit she acknowledges is both “weird” and “nerdy.” “It’s not pop music,” she says. “The only thing I have to do is whatever I want, and I want to write whatever I want. I just hope people don’t ask me about it. So I don’t feel a responsibility at all. I mean, I just don’t. I feel responsible in other ways, communitywise—to be a good citizen, abide by the law.”


- p. 46: Even as a small child, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was, by her own recollection, “obstinate, contrary.” She was born in Manhattan to parents who both worked Mad Men-style jobs at the advertising giant Grey, but when she was one year old, they gave up those careers and moved to sleepy, upstate Lake Placid. Her dad would go on to start his own furniture company, get into real estate and then become a successful early investor in Web domain names. But Lizzy just wished they had stayed in the city. “It was really, really quiet,” says Del Rey, who has compared the town to Twin Peaks. “I was always waiting to get back to New York City. School was hard. The traditional educational system was not really working for me.”


- p. 46-47: Her parents . . . wanted her to become a nurse.

Losing patience with her partying, they sent her away to Connecticut’s Kent School. The move failed to curtail her drinking, and she was miserable. Her father’s apparent success aside, she says she was on financial aid. “I was very quiet,” she says, “just figuring things out. I didn’t relate well with what was going on culturally.” She wasn’t into mean girls. “The ways people treated other people, I thought was kind of cruel. The high school mentality I didn’t really understand. I wasn’t really, like, snarky or bitchy.” In an early song called “Boarding School,” she mentions being part of a “pro-ana nation,” referring to anorexia, and sings, “Had to do drugs to stop the food cravings.” But she insists that’s fiction: “The mentality of the pro-ana community was just something that was interesting to me.”

A young English instructor introduced her to Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and Vladimir Nabokov (she has tattoos of the latter two names on her forearm), plus Tupac, the Notorious B.I.G. and old movies like The Big Sleep. Lines in “Boarding School” and another unreleased track, “Prom Song,” led fans to question the precise nature of this relationship, but Del Rey says it was nothing inappropriate: “He was just my friend.”



- p. 47: She had gotten into SUNY Geneseo, a college in New York’s state-university system, but decided not to go. She took the year off, heading to her aunt and uncle’s house on Long Island. She worked as a waitress, just as she’d done over various summers. “I loved it,” she says, though her mom told one of her label execs that she had been a truly awful waitress.


Her uncle taught her some guitar chords, and she started playing open mics in the city. Somewhere around that time, she read Anthony Scaduto’s pioneering Bob Dylan biography, which she saw as a “road map” toward becoming an artist.


The next fall, she enrolled at Fordham University in the Bronx, where she majored in philosophy but otherwise hardly participated in student life. She lived with boyfriends, crashed on couches. “I was writing, writing for years,” she says. “Trying to figure out what I really wanted to say and why I was consumed with this passion for writing, where it came from. It kept me up all night. So I was waiting to see why. That was a really whole separate world.”

She’d ride the subway late at night, composing lyrics in her head. “There were these nights that I enjoyed so much, just staying up and writing songs.” She cites a sparse, Cat Power-ish tune called “Disco” (“I am my only god now,” she sings, cheerily) and “Trash Magic” (sample lyric: “Boy, you want to come to the motel, honey / Boy, ya wanna hold me down, tell me that you love me?”): “I felt I was really capturing my life in song form, and it was such a pleasure. And that being my whole life, you know? And really being happy, because I was doing exactly what I loved.”


- p. 76: I ask her about “Ride,” a song where she sings about feeling “fucking crazy—not an isolated sentiment in her catalog. “Well, I feel fucking crazy,” she says. “But I don’t think I am. People make me feel crazy.” We talk a little about the “I wish I were dead” thing, which she blames on leading questions. “I find that most people I meet figure I kind of want to kill myself anyway,” she says. “So, it comes up every time.”

Then, really without warning, her mood shifts. It’s a powerful thing, palpable in the room, like a sudden mass of threatening clouds. Her eyes seem to turn a shade darker: Trust no one. I ask, perversely, about “Fucked My Way Up to the Top,” one of Ultraviolence’s best songs, which attacks an unnamed imitator who didn’t have to go through the gauntlet Del Rey did. It may be about Lorde, who criticized Del Rey’s lyrics but has a not-dissimilar vocal style.

She just released the song yesterday, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. “Now you are annoying me,” she says, half-trying to sound like she’s kidding. She lights a cigarette, looking miserable.

We begin an agonizing, endless meta-conversation about our interview and her relationship with the press. “I find the nature of the questions difficult,” she says. “ ’Cause it’s not like I’m a rock band and you’re asking how everything got made and what it’s like touring in arenas and what are the girls like. It’s about my father. It’s about my mental health. It’s fucking personal. And these questions all have negative inferences: It’s just like, ‘SNL. Do you actually want to kill yourself?’ . . . Maybe I’m sensitive. Do you think?”

That’s when she says she doesn’t want to be on the cover of ROLLING STONE anymore. She also says, “What you write won’t matter”—meaning that nothing will change her detractors’ minds about her.

It goes on and on. “You hit all my more sensitive weaknesses, all my Achilles’ heels. You’re asking all the right questions. I just really don’t want to answer them.”

Every attempt to talk her off this rhetorical ledge seems to make it worse. Del Rey stands up, in a distinct “time to go” gesture.

“I definitely presented myself well, and that’s all I’ve ever done,” she says, walking me downstairs. “And that’s never really gotten me anywhere. I’m just uncomfortable, and it has nothing to do with you.”

Stepping out, I try to convince her that her crisis of confidence over the interview is no big deal. It is, again, the wrong thing to say.

“It’s not a crisis of confidence, it’s not,” she says, standing in the doorway. “I am confident.” Her eyes are ablaze with hurt and pride. “I am.” She says goodbye, and shuts the door.


http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/0...ultraviolence/

by Sasha Geffen

on June 16, 2014, 9:02pm

Ten years ago, I hung a poster on my wall that read, “Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultraviolence and Beethoven.” It was a replica of a vintage ad for the film A Clockwork Orange, purchased in a plastic laminate from my local punk supply store. Kubrick’s adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel goes like this: A 15-year-old serial robber and rapist named Alex murders a woman, then opts for psychological rehabilitation over prison time. The rehab accidentally conditions him to hate his favorite music, destroying even the innocent parts of his identity. The story concludes that in order to be fully human, men must be free to choose to murder. Never mind the collateral damage of, say, dead women. You can’t prevent criminals; you can only punish them.

Lana Del Rey appears at her most complicated on her second album, Ultraviolence. On the title song, she sings from the throes of a physically abusive relationship. She repeats the title of “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)”, a song written in 1962 by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, recorded by The Crystals and Phil Spector, and later disowned by King. Del Rey sings about a man who nicknames her “poison” and “deadly nightshade,” then hits her in a way that makes her suspect it’s a sign of true love. She hears sirens, either the kind that signify emergency or the kind that lure you to be dashed against the shore. She hears violins and violence in the same word. “I could have died right then ’cause he was right beside me,” she sings, her voice multi-tracked over itself. Died of love, or died of him? Is there a difference?

Aided by the production talent of The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, Ultraviolence presents an endlessly fascinating cornucopia of dysfunction. Del Rey’s voice flourishes. Inside the album’s big, vintage swing, she sings herself into places that Born to Die, with its pop veneer, couldn’t touch. Her lyrics supply a wonderful foil to The Black Keys’ most recent outing, Turn Blue, which ended on the conclusion that “all the good women are gone.” Damn right, Del Rey seems to sneer. Here’s a gallery of the bad ones.

Both Del Rey and Auerbach draw upon signifiers of 20th century culture, but their motivations for looking back seem miles apart. The Black Keys find comfort in the 1970s. They’ve adopted a mode of playing and writing that’s well-trod and easy to recall fondly. Ultraviolence, meanwhile, sounds nostalgic. It doesn’t loop back through the roles played by last century’s women singers, though Del Rey wields classic femininity as an aesthetic weapon. Here, she dons a genre that once framed an idealized vision of female longing and fills it with all those other women: the women implied by the songs that men were singing about, the women that served as fodder for generations of male heartbreak.

Shedding the tight choruses and hip-hop samples that propelled her debut, Del Rey now plunges fully into the 21st century impulse to fetishize 20th century culture. “They say I’m too young to love you,” she simpers on “Brooklyn Baby”. At first it sounds like she’s talking about an older man, but it turns out she’s talking about a whole bunch of them: Lou Reed, the Beats, the first generation of jazz musicians, and so on. The song’s not about Brooklyn 30 years ago, that long-gone, ideal Brooklyn where artists lived fast and cheap. No, it’s about Brooklyn now, a confused, living museum that honors its own geographical memory through a bizarre cultural cannibalism. “I’m a Brooklyn baby,” she sings. “If you don’t get it, then forget it.” This is by far the most millennial song ever written.

Throughout Ultraviolence, marks of old culture surface and then disappear. Chevy Malibus course down the California coast, women wear pearl necklaces and curlers in their hair, and even Hemingway shows up briefly alongside Burgess. Del Rey controls their orbit like she’s injecting herself into all the art that she consumed long after it had faded from the zeitgeist. And she is. Her re-imagining of the past with her at its center comes out of necessity, not comfort. All those women that rock stars sang about? They were real people, and we never heard their side of the story. Del Rey sings in that void. Thanks to her words, her voice, and her inscrutable presence, she gives those women inner life.

“I’m fucking crazy,” she insists on “Cruel World”. “I want your money, power, and glory,” she demands on “Money Power Glory”. “I fucked my way up to the top,” she brags on a song titled, naturally, “Fucked My Way Up to the Top”. “This is my show.” In a series of delightfully Kanye-reminiscent maneuvers, she preempts the worst of her critics.

Del Rey braves huge and often absurd gestures, but my God, does she sound like she means them. The chorus of “Money Power Glory” arcs with her most triumphant melody yet, while “Shades of Cool” and “West Coast” shiver with heartbroken soprano. She’s never sung like this before. The characters and artifacts that surround these songs feel artificial, like stock props, but the music that Del Rey pulls them through splits them open, shakes them to life. She walks that tough line of high melodrama, demanding emotional investment in stories that nakedly display their own falseness. The way she sings, you start to guess that there’s real love somewhere inside all that gloss.

That love seeps hardest from one of the trickiest songs to scan, the slow-burning, string-laden “Old Money”. The second-to-last track on the album, it hits the same sweet pathos of “Young and Beautiful”, Del Rey’s recent contribution to the soundtrack for Baz Lurhmann’s [film] The Great Gatsby. Maybe “Old Money” takes place inside the same fiction. The way it places wealth next to loss, material possession next to emotional lack, I think it might. It sounds like it’s sung through Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby’s lost love whose story was only ever told by the men around her. In a way, Del Rey lends even more life to that character than Carey Mulligan did on camera. “I’ll run to you, I’ll run to you/ I’ll run, run, run,” she sings in a timbre that by itself crystallizes Daisy’s paradoxical desire and warm, subtle sadness, a sadness that F. Scott Fitzgerald used to symbolize an American betrayal that’s still going on.

I keep looking deeper into Ultraviolence because I want to understand what Del Rey is trying to understand. I want to know why the culture around me keeps grasping at past emblems — why advertising for 40-year-old movies still decorates college dorm rooms, why I can make my iPhone look like a Polaroid, why 90,000 people sing along to roots rock at Bonnaroo. I want to know why we reuse these tropes uncritically, reaching for analog without asking what gives it power. Lana Del Rey looks at the imagery we keep and tries to find what’s missing in it. What do we avoid looking at when we buy pictures of Marilyn Monroe, not thinking of why Norma Jeane Mortenson died so young? Whose stories do we allow to remain subdued? Ultraviolence rages to fill the vacancies behind the icons, to imagine the sorrow and desperation and flat-out anger of the women still cast in men’s spotlights.

A Clockwork Orange used the word “ultraviolence” to refer to gang beatings that lately seem to count as just regular violence. I’m not sure that’s what Del Rey is referring to here. She uses the word to sing about physical aggression, but the ultimate violence seems like it would be erasure, silencing, negation, the stuff you don’t hear about because it’s an absence by nature. You can see it if you read On the Road or listen to Berlin and try to imagine the inner lives of women who are mentioned in passing, who exist only to sculpt the stories of men.

That negative space is its own kind of violence. Lana Del Rey steps into the shadows it leaves. She has power there, whispering old secrets, giving voice to characters who never got to speak for themselves. She counters a world in which “rape” is not even considered in the same category as “ultraviolence” by dragging up the second word and blaring it in capital letters below a photo of herself gazing enigmatically at the camera. She does her violence to the last century’s culture as we’ve rendered it in pixels the second time around. She is exactly the villain our history needs.


http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/0...-and-thats-ok/

Lana Del Rey Is More Interested In Space Than Feminism And That’s OK

by Sasha Geffen

on June 05, 2014

‘It’s become the litmus test for famous young women, and yesterday, Lana Del Rey became the latest to fail. Or succeed, if you’re one of the publications who splattered her answer into a quick news byte. A young female celebrity’s answer to the question “are you a feminist?”, whether it’s a yes or a no, draws buzz, clicks, and controversy. Say yes and she risks angering the humanist-not-feminist crowd or alienating those who try to keep their culture clean of politics. If she says no, she draws the ire of activists, who’ll dismiss her as a bad role model.

The question’s a lose-lose, and journalists keep forcing it on young women who are on the cusp of releasing a major artistic project. Twenty-two-year-old actress Shailene Woody, a new face in the forthcoming film The Fault in Our Stars, answered negatively when TIME asked last month if she identified as a feminist. Weeks before the release of her second album, Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey faced the same question from The Fader’s Duncan Cooper. “For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept,” she replied.

I saw the quote ricochet across Twitter, prompting disappointed remarks from artists and journalists whose work I deeply respect. “I really just don’t get why a supremely famous woman would publicly denounce feminism,” tweeted Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee. I know what she means. Every time a major figure self-identifies as not-feminist, it saps a modicum of credibility from the movement. It’s so easy to preempt the needling: If Lana Del Rey doesn’t need feminism, why would you?

Back in December, Beyoncé made it easy for us. She not only released an album as a publicly identified feminist, but she sampled Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk on feminism in “Flawless”, letting the speaker define the term for her. “Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” Hard to argue with that language, so why, Beyoncé seemed to ask, do so many pop figures shy away from the word?

Though I identify personally as feminist, I understand why many women struggle with the label. Feminism is not yet a cohesive force aimed at the equality of all women. Many factions deliberately exclude trans women and women of color, while even the safer pockets can feel hostile to newcomers who trip up on their politics. And I get why even Lana Del Rey, who has the status and the resources to be welcomed as a feminist pioneer, shrugs off invitations to speak positively about the movement.

Since rocketing to YouTube success on her single “Video Games”, Del Rey has more or less baffled everyone. Her doe-eyed gaze and the sickly-smooth quality of her voice simultaneously beckoned and repelled her listeners. Her almost instantaneous jump to performing as the featured artist on Saturday Night Live first inspired confusion, then disappointment and revulsion. Who was this woman, and why was she singing so limply? Why didn’t she seem to care about being on one of the most important stages on TV?

I dismissed her then, too, because in my mind a good singer was an authentic singer, a singer who could cough up her soul every night for a crowd of strangers. If you sang something without meaning it, I wanted nothing to do with you. But “Video Games” grew on me. It stuck in my head because of its menace, its fake innocence, the poison under its sweetness. It was a pop ballad, but it was complicated. I started to feel things deeply inside of it. I had never considered that something could be both artificial and authentic at the same time.

If there’s a key to Del Rey’s affect, maybe that’s it. She’s blank, but she’s secretive; sunny, but dark. We know nothing about her, but we grab hold of the emotion she drips into her songs. We don’t even know if it’s hers. On a pop rubric that tends to judge women artists by how much of their suffering they share, Del Rey glitches off the charts. She delivers real emotion through a false vessel, or maybe it’s the other way around. Who knows?

That strangeness and confusion read more feminist to me than simply slapping on the label would. I’m far more concerned with feminism as an action than feminism as a buzzword. The rules that govern women in highly exposed positions are strict, but Del Rey slips between the bars with ease. She confounds the expectation that we need access to women’s inner lives in order to be moved by their art. In the face of resistance to her complexity, she’s achieved massive success. Lana Del Rey is an enigma to be reckoned with—one that doesn’t need to identify as a feminist to do feminist work.

Go back to her words for a minute: Lana Del Rey didn’t say she’s not a feminist. She didn’t quite denounce feminism. She said she’s not interested in talking about it. Her quote continues: “I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities.” Intergalactic possibilities? Have we considered that this is a woman who knows exactly what to say to reporters to keep them guessing, and guessing, and guessing?’



http://prettymuchamazing.com/reviews...-ultraviolence

Millions and Millions of Lana Del Rey Fans Can’t Be Wrong

June 19, 2014

opinion by PETER TABAKIS

Negative reviews are really fun to write. It isn’t often when someone with low status (yours truly) is free to draw a little blood from those with high status (a popular artist or band) and still retain an air of dignity. After all, the stakes are ridiculously low for the writer. I might anger some fans and suffer a beating on social media. But the net effect on my personal life is close to zero. Like anyone who regularly evaluates the work of famous entertainers, I can be gleefully cavalier (if not sloppy) with my takedowns. Perhaps even more so when I know my words will be widely read. Take, for example, my reviews of Lana Del Rey’s breakthrough album Born to Die and her subsequent EP Paradise. Did my tone have to be so caustic and patronizing to communicate my dislike for both releases? Probably not. Should I have shown Del Rey more generosity, since she was still an inexperienced artist at the time? Yes, of course. Do I feel like a complete idiot for dismissing her outright, now that I find myself writing a glowing review of her new record Ultraviolence? Boy, do I ever.

Try as you might, it’s hard not to be swept away by Ultraviolence’s gorgeous 70 mm sonic vistas.

To paraphrase an Elvis album title, millions and millions of Lana Del Rey fans can’t be wrong. Say what you will about Born to Die, which made her the object of swooning affection and a true cultural phenomenon. (I continue to despise it.) But Del Rey has proved to be a singular figure on the pop landscape, our most intriguing since Lady Gaga sprung fully formed from the clubs last decade. Both artists proudly flout “authenticity,” the central tenet of rockist dogma, though in different ways. Where Gaga wears her falsehood like haute couture armor, Del Rey takes her cues from a young Robert Zimmerman. Elizabeth Grant fashioned a brand new persona – equal parts Beverly Hills and Skid Row – and has yet to break character. Tales of homelessness and biker gangs and death wishes and abusive gurus all blur into a smoky haze. Lana Del Rey’s façade remains confounding and, also, utterly compelling.

Ultraviolence, a collection of mid-century ballads spiked with blues-rock, is a stunning accomplishment. Its eleven songs whimper and howl, soothe and taunt, hypnotize and thrill. Born to Die’s worst features – basically anything that labored to make it sound “current” – have been thrown into the ash heap. Del Rey and the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach (the album’s main producer) complete the logical trajectory laid out by “Video Games,” “Ride,” and “Young and Beautiful” and mercifully ignore everything in between. “Video Games” endures as Del Rey’s signature tune, but “Young and Beautiful” marks her creative inflection point. That song, with its lavish orchestral execution and ironically naïve viewpoint, might as well be Ultraviolence’s overture.

Lana Del Rey has long been obsessed with icons, especially Hollywood’s. Her short film Tropico included representations of Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, and Elvis (along with Mary, Eve, Adam and Jesus) in its tortured, Edenic opening tableau. But Del Rey is no longer satisfied with merely nodding at cinema in her music. She instead presents Ultraviolence as a soundtrack to a Douglas Sirk melodrama, scored by Ennio Morricone (minus the trumpets). Free to widen her lyrical scope beyond the stuff of schlock art, Del Rey’s references are somewhat less obvious and now include Anthony Burgess, Al Jolson, the Crystals, Charles Manson, Marianne Faithfull, Ernest Hemingway, the Who, and the Book of Revelation. Good news for those of us who like to feel smart while listening to pop music.

Try as you might, it’s hard not to be swept away by Ultraviolence’s gorgeous 70 mm sonic vistas. Unlike Born to Die, the album doesn’t contain a single pedestrian song. At worst, they’re just pretty good (“Sad Girl,” “Pretty When You Cry,” “The Other Woman”). At best, they can be superlative (“West Coast,” “Ultraviolence,” “Brooklyn Baby”). The album’s wonderful opener “Cruel World” sets the outline for the rest of Del Rey’s new material: it’s ethereal, sprawling, and unhurried. Unadorned verses crescendo into massive, exultant choruses. Reverb is often applied to her vocals, sometimes a bit too liberally. Del Rey sings mostly in her middle range, and never in the cloying babyish coo that marred much of Born to Die. When she reaches into her upper register, it is as arresting as ever, a reminder of what made “Video Games” so intoxicating.

Lana Del Rey has been honing her craft in the public eye, with every misstep ruthlessly pilloried by people like me.

Given Ultraviolence’s thematic and musical unity, a heavy burden is placed on the little moments that keep it from becoming a fifty-one-minute slog. This is how the album (and Auerbach’s production) succeeds the most. A simple guitar embellishment on “Brooklyn Baby,” or the slowed-down chorus on “West Coast,” might seem like minor touches on their own. But Ultraviolence brims with such rich and satisfying details, which can pass without notice if you’re not paying close attention.

Ultraviolence doesn’t arrive out of a void. Lana Del Rey has been honing her craft in the public eye, with every misstep ruthlessly pilloried by people like me. Despite the onslaught, she’s emerged triumphant. Del Rey takes the well-deserved opportunity to strike back at her detractors on “Brooklyn Baby” and “Money Power Glory” (maybe my two favorite songs of the bunch). A great album, however, is the best revenge. A-


https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/mus...VdO/story.html

By James Reed

Globe Staff June 16, 2014

Now it all makes sense: She simply needed time to develop, time for the music to catch up with her vision. When Lana Del Rey catapulted to pop stardom in the summer of 2011 with the song “Video Games,” her debut, “Born to Die,” arrived six months later in a blaze of buzz, but ended up sounding rushed and unfocused.

At least that was the criticism from those who loved the idea of Lana Del Rey (this critic included) but had higher hopes for her first full-length. It’s gratifying, then, to discover that “Ultraviolence,” her new sophomore album, is a staggering improvement over that initial release. Slavishly downbeat, it burrows even deeper into Del Rey’s torchy sensibility and rarely breaks its spell.

Working mostly with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach as producer, Del Rey imbues this record with a narcotic resonance that gives the singer and her songs room to exhale, to swell and swirl into the stratosphere. “West Coast” has a noirish sensuality, which opens into a chorus that mimicks the heady rush of a first toke.

Elsewhere, Del Rey relishes her role as the patron saint of the broken-hearted (“Pretty When You Cry,” “Sad Girl”). She even pokes fun at her detractors, keeping her tongue firmly in cheek on “[F***ed] My Way Up to the Top,” while “Money Power Glory” lampoons the perception that that’s all she wants.

As an opener, “Cruel World” is the album in miniature: a 6½-minute spiral into the ornate, emotional decay where Del Rey seems to thrive. It unfolds in slow motion — that way, every joy, every sorrow is even more intense. -- JAMES REED





http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/6...Ultraviolence/

Review by Brendan Schroer

June 18th, 2014

Review Summary: Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh

On a surface level, Lana Del Rey may seem to many like a living musical contradiction. Her attempts to bring back the old-fashioned style of the old greats such as Nancy Sinatra or Leonard Cohen have been known to clash with overly melodramatic modern "bad girl" lyricism that many consider vapid. Also, there's the fact that she hasn't always delivered very solid live shows when compared to her studio performances, as well as the way her baroque pop stylings get mixed in with modern hip-hop-influenced beats. But really, these contradictions bring out many of Lana's best qualities... I've always seen her work, primarily lyrically, as a commentary or possibly critique of the negative aspects of today's society and media. And yes, the lyrics do indeed become really clichéd and recycled after a certain point (proving to be one of Born to Die's biggest flaws); however, one can't deny that her overall style - and mix of styles - is pretty damn unique. This mix of seduction, apathy, aforementioned "bad girl" attitude, as well as happiness based around the little things in life, may seem disjointed but it works startlingly well when combined with such varied (if a little samey atmosphere-wise) music. And on that note, once Born to Die and the Paradise EP came and went, many of us were more than a little curious to see how she would expand upon their successes. The result? Reflection.

Ultraviolence is lush, dreamy, dreary, and ultimately a perfect way to combat the more hollow aspects of its predecessors. If Born to Die was a bold love letter to 60s Americana music and Hollywood-style cinematic orchestration, this record is the scaled-back reflection that follows it. Ultraviolence has been widely considered a dream pop record, and with good reason. Gone is much of the excess and "decadent glamor" of previous works in favor of a more entrancing piece of slow pop bliss; half of the melodies sound as though they could have made it onto a Radiohead or Porcupine Tree record due to their heavily melancholic and layered attributes. Lana herself sounds as beautifully seductive and slow as ever, her vocals washed out in heavy reverb and what sounds like vintage 50s production techniques. The whole thing feels more timeless and less gimmicky than Born to Die, filled to the brim with depressive elegance and thankfully devoid of many of the hip-hop elements that dragged the aforementioned album down. What's so impressive, though, is that most of this album's songs are in extremely slow droning tempos, but rarely get boring because of everything going on above the beats. Sure, a song like "West Coast" switches tempos around for the chorus to presumably give it a dreamier effect (which does work), but the majority of this release is exceptionally slow and somber in execution.

However, I'd like to argue that the repetitive tempos aren't really the point of this record. It's all about the dynamics, the vocals, the layers of sound... basically, everything built around the beats. Hell, "Old Money" doesn't even use any beats at all! The best thing about this entire record, the reason why the instrumentation and overall vibe work so well, is because everything is so intimate and reflective. As the closing R&B-influenced tune "The Other Woman" closes the experience out, there's a genuine feeling of finality and beauty that stems from Lana's emotive crooning; it's the kind of sound that influences someone to spin the record for a second time right after it ends. Ultraviolence is so multifaceted and genuinely beautiful that its replay value is simply extraordinary. For instance, you might initially be hooked by "Brooklyn Baby"'s calm and subtle guitar chords and how they combine with Lana's vocals, only to return and hear the little dynamic changes here and there when aided by the underlying synthesizer work. And of course there's that wonderful guitar reverb in the oddly hopeful-sounding opener "Cruel World," which needs to be heard to be believed.

Ultraviolence does have a tendency to get a bit repetitive because of its incessant use of really slow tempos and just how somber the experience gets, but don't give up if you don't get hooked on the first listen or two. It's the very definition of a grower, and this record has something Born to Die never had: more reflection. It comes across as personal. It comes across as purely genuine. And most of all, it comes across as Lana fitting more snugly into this identity she's been carving out for herself. Adele - as well as you other retro soul/pop revivals out there - you could learn some things from this woman.



http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/For...ML/212884.html

BackToEarth: “She reminds me Fiona Apple in terms of deep despair & romantic inclination.”












- from Rollingstone magazine (Issue 1214) [July 31, 2014]; p. 46 [“Vamp of Constant Sorrow” by Brian Hiatt]:

Del Rey’s co-manager, Ben Mawson, warned her that she’d have to answer for some of the new album’s lyrics, particularly the title track, which quotes the old girl-group line “He hit me and it felt like a kiss,” then adds, “He hurt me but it felt like true love,” just in case she hadn’t made her point. She’s vague on whether this theme might be autobiographical: “I guess I would say, like I’m definitely drawn to people with a strong physicality,” she says with a shrug, “with more of a dominant personality.”

She’s not worried about any message those lines might send. “It’s not meant to be popular,” she says, sitting in the backyard of the town house, which opens onto a shared garden, where Dylan had angered his neighbors decades ago by trying to put up a fence. She’s sipping hot coffee through a straw, a long-standing habit she acknowledges is both “weird” and “nerdy.” “It’s not pop music,” she says. “The only thing I have to do is whatever I want, and I want to write whatever I want. I just hope people don’t ask me about it. So I don’t feel a responsibility at all. I mean, I just don’t. I feel responsible in other ways, communitywise—to be a good citizen, abide by the law.”


- p. 46: Even as a small child, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was, by her own recollection, “obstinate, contrary.” She was born in Manhattan to parents who both worked Mad Men-style jobs at the advertising giant Grey, but when she was one year old, they gave up those careers and moved to sleepy, upstate Lake Placid. Her dad would go on to start his own furniture company, get into real estate and then become a successful early investor in Web domain names. But Lizzy just wished they had stayed in the city. “It was really, really quiet,” says Del Rey, who has compared the town to Twin Peaks. “I was always waiting to get back to New York City. School was hard. The traditional educational system was not really working for me.”


- p. 46-47: Her parents . . . wanted her to become a nurse.

Losing patience with her partying, they sent her away to Connecticut’s Kent School. The move failed to curtail her drinking, and she was miserable. Her father’s apparent success aside, she says she was on financial aid. “I was very quiet,” she says, “just figuring things out. I didn’t relate well with what was going on culturally.” She wasn’t into mean girls. “The ways people treated other people, I thought was kind of cruel. The high school mentality I didn’t really understand. I wasn’t really, like, snarky or bitchy.” In an early song called “Boarding School,” she mentions being part of a “pro-ana nation,” referring to anorexia, and sings, “Had to do drugs to stop the food cravings.” But she insists that’s fiction: “The mentality of the pro-ana community was just something that was interesting to me.”

A young English instructor introduced her to Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and Vladimir Nabokov (she has tattoos of the latter two names on her forearm), plus Tupac, the Notorious B.I.G. and old movies like The Big Sleep. Lines in “Boarding School” and another unreleased track, “Prom Song,” led fans to question the precise nature of this relationship, but Del Rey says it was nothing inappropriate: “He was just my friend.”



- p. 47: She had gotten into SUNY Geneseo, a college in New York’s state-university system, but decided not to go. She took the year off, heading to her aunt and uncle’s house on Long Island. She worked as a waitress, just as she’d done over various summers. “I loved it,” she says, though her mom told one of her label execs that she had been a truly awful waitress.


Her uncle taught her some guitar chords, and she started playing open mics in the city. Somewhere around that time, she read Anthony Scaduto’s pioneering Bob Dylan biography, which she saw as a “road map” toward becoming an artist.


The next fall, she enrolled at Fordham University in the Bronx, where she majored in philosophy but otherwise hardly participated in student life. She lived with boyfriends, crashed on couches. “I was writing, writing for years,” she says. “Trying to figure out what I really wanted to say and why I was consumed with this passion for writing, where it came from. It kept me up all night. So I was waiting to see why. That was a really whole separate world.”

She’d ride the subway late at night, composing lyrics in her head. “There were these nights that I enjoyed so much, just staying up and writing songs.” She cites a sparse, Cat Power-ish tune called “Disco” (“I am my only god now,” she sings, cheerily) and “Trash Magic” (sample lyric: “Boy, you want to come to the motel, honey / Boy, ya wanna hold me down, tell me that you love me?”): “I felt I was really capturing my life in song form, and it was such a pleasure. And that being my whole life, you know? And really being happy, because I was doing exactly what I loved.”


- p. 76: I ask her about “Ride,” a song where she sings about feeling “fucking crazy—not an isolated sentiment in her catalog. “Well, I feel fucking crazy,” she says. “But I don’t think I am. People make me feel crazy.” We talk a little about the “I wish I were dead” thing, which she blames on leading questions. “I find that most people I meet figure I kind of want to kill myself anyway,” she says. “So, it comes up every time.”

Then, really without warning, her mood shifts. It’s a powerful thing, palpable in the room, like a sudden mass of threatening clouds. Her eyes seem to turn a shade darker: Trust no one. I ask, perversely, about “Fucked My Way Up to the Top,” one of Ultraviolence’s best songs, which attacks an unnamed imitator who didn’t have to go through the gauntlet Del Rey did. It may be about Lorde, who criticized Del Rey’s lyrics but has a not-dissimilar vocal style.

She just released the song yesterday, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. “Now you are annoying me,” she says, half-trying to sound like she’s kidding. She lights a cigarette, looking miserable.

We begin an agonizing, endless meta-conversation about our interview and her relationship with the press. “I find the nature of the questions difficult,” she says. “ ’Cause it’s not like I’m a rock band and you’re asking how everything got made and what it’s like touring in arenas and what are the girls like. It’s about my father. It’s about my mental health. It’s fucking personal. And these questions all have negative inferences: It’s just like, ‘SNL. Do you actually want to kill yourself?’ . . . Maybe I’m sensitive. Do you think?”

That’s when she says she doesn’t want to be on the cover of ROLLING STONE anymore. She also says, “What you write won’t matter”—meaning that nothing will change her detractors’ minds about her.

It goes on and on. “You hit all my more sensitive weaknesses, all my Achilles’ heels. You’re asking all the right questions. I just really don’t want to answer them.”

Every attempt to talk her off this rhetorical ledge seems to make it worse. Del Rey stands up, in a distinct “time to go” gesture.

“I definitely presented myself well, and that’s all I’ve ever done,” she says, walking me downstairs. “And that’s never really gotten me anywhere. I’m just uncomfortable, and it has nothing to do with you.”

Stepping out, I try to convince her that her crisis of confidence over the interview is no big deal. It is, again, the wrong thing to say.

“It’s not a crisis of confidence, it’s not,” she says, standing in the doorway. “I am confident.” Her eyes are ablaze with hurt and pride. “I am.” She says goodbye, and shuts the door.


http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/0...ultraviolence/

by Sasha Geffen

on June 16, 2014, 9:02pm

Ten years ago, I hung a poster on my wall that read, “Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultraviolence and Beethoven.” It was a replica of a vintage ad for the film A Clockwork Orange, purchased in a plastic laminate from my local punk supply store. Kubrick’s adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel goes like this: A 15-year-old serial robber and rapist named Alex murders a woman, then opts for psychological rehabilitation over prison time. The rehab accidentally conditions him to hate his favorite music, destroying even the innocent parts of his identity. The story concludes that in order to be fully human, men must be free to choose to murder. Never mind the collateral damage of, say, dead women. You can’t prevent criminals; you can only punish them.

Lana Del Rey appears at her most complicated on her second album, Ultraviolence. On the title song, she sings from the throes of a physically abusive relationship. She repeats the title of “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)”, a song written in 1962 by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, recorded by The Crystals and Phil Spector, and later disowned by King. Del Rey sings about a man who nicknames her “poison” and “deadly nightshade,” then hits her in a way that makes her suspect it’s a sign of true love. She hears sirens, either the kind that signify emergency or the kind that lure you to be dashed against the shore. She hears violins and violence in the same word. “I could have died right then ’cause he was right beside me,” she sings, her voice multi-tracked over itself. Died of love, or died of him? Is there a difference?

Aided by the production talent of The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, Ultraviolence presents an endlessly fascinating cornucopia of dysfunction. Del Rey’s voice flourishes. Inside the album’s big, vintage swing, she sings herself into places that Born to Die, with its pop veneer, couldn’t touch. Her lyrics supply a wonderful foil to The Black Keys’ most recent outing, Turn Blue, which ended on the conclusion that “all the good women are gone.” Damn right, Del Rey seems to sneer. Here’s a gallery of the bad ones.

Both Del Rey and Auerbach draw upon signifiers of 20th century culture, but their motivations for looking back seem miles apart. The Black Keys find comfort in the 1970s. They’ve adopted a mode of playing and writing that’s well-trod and easy to recall fondly. Ultraviolence, meanwhile, sounds nostalgic. It doesn’t loop back through the roles played by last century’s women singers, though Del Rey wields classic femininity as an aesthetic weapon. Here, she dons a genre that once framed an idealized vision of female longing and fills it with all those other women: the women implied by the songs that men were singing about, the women that served as fodder for generations of male heartbreak.

Shedding the tight choruses and hip-hop samples that propelled her debut, Del Rey now plunges fully into the 21st century impulse to fetishize 20th century culture. “They say I’m too young to love you,” she simpers on “Brooklyn Baby”. At first it sounds like she’s talking about an older man, but it turns out she’s talking about a whole bunch of them: Lou Reed, the Beats, the first generation of jazz musicians, and so on. The song’s not about Brooklyn 30 years ago, that long-gone, ideal Brooklyn where artists lived fast and cheap. No, it’s about Brooklyn now, a confused, living museum that honors its own geographical memory through a bizarre cultural cannibalism. “I’m a Brooklyn baby,” she sings. “If you don’t get it, then forget it.” This is by far the most millennial song ever written.

Throughout Ultraviolence, marks of old culture surface and then disappear. Chevy Malibus course down the California coast, women wear pearl necklaces and curlers in their hair, and even Hemingway shows up briefly alongside Burgess. Del Rey controls their orbit like she’s injecting herself into all the art that she consumed long after it had faded from the zeitgeist. And she is. Her re-imagining of the past with her at its center comes out of necessity, not comfort. All those women that rock stars sang about? They were real people, and we never heard their side of the story. Del Rey sings in that void. Thanks to her words, her voice, and her inscrutable presence, she gives those women inner life.

“I’m fucking crazy,” she insists on “Cruel World”. “I want your money, power, and glory,” she demands on “Money Power Glory”. “I fucked my way up to the top,” she brags on a song titled, naturally, “Fucked My Way Up to the Top”. “This is my show.” In a series of delightfully Kanye-reminiscent maneuvers, she preempts the worst of her critics.

Del Rey braves huge and often absurd gestures, but my God, does she sound like she means them. The chorus of “Money Power Glory” arcs with her most triumphant melody yet, while “Shades of Cool” and “West Coast” shiver with heartbroken soprano. She’s never sung like this before. The characters and artifacts that surround these songs feel artificial, like stock props, but the music that Del Rey pulls them through splits them open, shakes them to life. She walks that tough line of high melodrama, demanding emotional investment in stories that nakedly display their own falseness. The way she sings, you start to guess that there’s real love somewhere inside all that gloss.

That love seeps hardest from one of the trickiest songs to scan, the slow-burning, string-laden “Old Money”. The second-to-last track on the album, it hits the same sweet pathos of “Young and Beautiful”, Del Rey’s recent contribution to the soundtrack for Baz Lurhmann’s [film] The Great Gatsby. Maybe “Old Money” takes place inside the same fiction. The way it places wealth next to loss, material possession next to emotional lack, I think it might. It sounds like it’s sung through Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby’s lost love whose story was only ever told by the men around her. In a way, Del Rey lends even more life to that character than Carey Mulligan did on camera. “I’ll run to you, I’ll run to you/ I’ll run, run, run,” she sings in a timbre that by itself crystallizes Daisy’s paradoxical desire and warm, subtle sadness, a sadness that F. Scott Fitzgerald used to symbolize an American betrayal that’s still going on.

I keep looking deeper into Ultraviolence because I want to understand what Del Rey is trying to understand. I want to know why the culture around me keeps grasping at past emblems — why advertising for 40-year-old movies still decorates college dorm rooms, why I can make my iPhone look like a Polaroid, why 90,000 people sing along to roots rock at Bonnaroo. I want to know why we reuse these tropes uncritically, reaching for analog without asking what gives it power. Lana Del Rey looks at the imagery we keep and tries to find what’s missing in it. What do we avoid looking at when we buy pictures of Marilyn Monroe, not thinking of why Norma Jeane Mortenson died so young? Whose stories do we allow to remain subdued? Ultraviolence rages to fill the vacancies behind the icons, to imagine the sorrow and desperation and flat-out anger of the women still cast in men’s spotlights.

A Clockwork Orange used the word “ultraviolence” to refer to gang beatings that lately seem to count as just regular violence. I’m not sure that’s what Del Rey is referring to here. She uses the word to sing about physical aggression, but the ultimate violence seems like it would be erasure, silencing, negation, the stuff you don’t hear about because it’s an absence by nature. You can see it if you read On the Road or listen to Berlin and try to imagine the inner lives of women who are mentioned in passing, who exist only to sculpt the stories of men.

That negative space is its own kind of violence. Lana Del Rey steps into the shadows it leaves. She has power there, whispering old secrets, giving voice to characters who never got to speak for themselves. She counters a world in which “rape” is not even considered in the same category as “ultraviolence” by dragging up the second word and blaring it in capital letters below a photo of herself gazing enigmatically at the camera. She does her violence to the last century’s culture as we’ve rendered it in pixels the second time around. She is exactly the villain our history needs.


http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/0...-and-thats-ok/

Lana Del Rey Is More Interested In Space Than Feminism And That’s OK

by Sasha Geffen

on June 05, 2014

‘It’s become the litmus test for famous young women, and yesterday, Lana Del Rey became the latest to fail. Or succeed, if you’re one of the publications who splattered her answer into a quick news byte. A young female celebrity’s answer to the question “are you a feminist?”, whether it’s a yes or a no, draws buzz, clicks, and controversy. Say yes and she risks angering the humanist-not-feminist crowd or alienating those who try to keep their culture clean of politics. If she says no, she draws the ire of activists, who’ll dismiss her as a bad role model.

The question’s a lose-lose, and journalists keep forcing it on young women who are on the cusp of releasing a major artistic project. Twenty-two-year-old actress Shailene Woody, a new face in the forthcoming film The Fault in Our Stars, answered negatively when TIME asked last month if she identified as a feminist. Weeks before the release of her second album, Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey faced the same question from The Fader’s Duncan Cooper. “For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept,” she replied.

I saw the quote ricochet across Twitter, prompting disappointed remarks from artists and journalists whose work I deeply respect. “I really just don’t get why a supremely famous woman would publicly denounce feminism,” tweeted Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee. I know what she means. Every time a major figure self-identifies as not-feminist, it saps a modicum of credibility from the movement. It’s so easy to preempt the needling: If Lana Del Rey doesn’t need feminism, why would you?

Back in December, Beyoncé made it easy for us. She not only released an album as a publicly identified feminist, but she sampled Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk on feminism in “Flawless”, letting the speaker define the term for her. “Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” Hard to argue with that language, so why, Beyoncé seemed to ask, do so many pop figures shy away from the word?

Though I identify personally as feminist, I understand why many women struggle with the label. Feminism is not yet a cohesive force aimed at the equality of all women. Many factions deliberately exclude trans women and women of color, while even the safer pockets can feel hostile to newcomers who trip up on their politics. And I get why even Lana Del Rey, who has the status and the resources to be welcomed as a feminist pioneer, shrugs off invitations to speak positively about the movement.

Since rocketing to YouTube success on her single “Video Games”, Del Rey has more or less baffled everyone. Her doe-eyed gaze and the sickly-smooth quality of her voice simultaneously beckoned and repelled her listeners. Her almost instantaneous jump to performing as the featured artist on Saturday Night Live first inspired confusion, then disappointment and revulsion. Who was this woman, and why was she singing so limply? Why didn’t she seem to care about being on one of the most important stages on TV?

I dismissed her then, too, because in my mind a good singer was an authentic singer, a singer who could cough up her soul every night for a crowd of strangers. If you sang something without meaning it, I wanted nothing to do with you. But “Video Games” grew on me. It stuck in my head because of its menace, its fake innocence, the poison under its sweetness. It was a pop ballad, but it was complicated. I started to feel things deeply inside of it. I had never considered that something could be both artificial and authentic at the same time.

If there’s a key to Del Rey’s affect, maybe that’s it. She’s blank, but she’s secretive; sunny, but dark. We know nothing about her, but we grab hold of the emotion she drips into her songs. We don’t even know if it’s hers. On a pop rubric that tends to judge women artists by how much of their suffering they share, Del Rey glitches off the charts. She delivers real emotion through a false vessel, or maybe it’s the other way around. Who knows?

That strangeness and confusion read more feminist to me than simply slapping on the label would. I’m far more concerned with feminism as an action than feminism as a buzzword. The rules that govern women in highly exposed positions are strict, but Del Rey slips between the bars with ease. She confounds the expectation that we need access to women’s inner lives in order to be moved by their art. In the face of resistance to her complexity, she’s achieved massive success. Lana Del Rey is an enigma to be reckoned with—one that doesn’t need to identify as a feminist to do feminist work.

Go back to her words for a minute: Lana Del Rey didn’t say she’s not a feminist. She didn’t quite denounce feminism. She said she’s not interested in talking about it. Her quote continues: “I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities.” Intergalactic possibilities? Have we considered that this is a woman who knows exactly what to say to reporters to keep them guessing, and guessing, and guessing?’



http://prettymuchamazing.com/reviews...-ultraviolence

Millions and Millions of Lana Del Rey Fans Can’t Be Wrong

June 19, 2014

opinion by PETER TABAKIS

Negative reviews are really fun to write. It isn’t often when someone with low status (yours truly) is free to draw a little blood from those with high status (a popular artist or band) and still retain an air of dignity. After all, the stakes are ridiculously low for the writer. I might anger some fans and suffer a beating on social media. But the net effect on my personal life is close to zero. Like anyone who regularly evaluates the work of famous entertainers, I can be gleefully cavalier (if not sloppy) with my takedowns. Perhaps even more so when I know my words will be widely read. Take, for example, my reviews of Lana Del Rey’s breakthrough album Born to Die and her subsequent EP Paradise. Did my tone have to be so caustic and patronizing to communicate my dislike for both releases? Probably not. Should I have shown Del Rey more generosity, since she was still an inexperienced artist at the time? Yes, of course. Do I feel like a complete idiot for dismissing her outright, now that I find myself writing a glowing review of her new record Ultraviolence? Boy, do I ever.

Try as you might, it’s hard not to be swept away by Ultraviolence’s gorgeous 70 mm sonic vistas.

To paraphrase an Elvis album title, millions and millions of Lana Del Rey fans can’t be wrong. Say what you will about Born to Die, which made her the object of swooning affection and a true cultural phenomenon. (I continue to despise it.) But Del Rey has proved to be a singular figure on the pop landscape, our most intriguing since Lady Gaga sprung fully formed from the clubs last decade. Both artists proudly flout “authenticity,” the central tenet of rockist dogma, though in different ways. Where Gaga wears her falsehood like haute couture armor, Del Rey takes her cues from a young Robert Zimmerman. Elizabeth Grant fashioned a brand new persona – equal parts Beverly Hills and Skid Row – and has yet to break character. Tales of homelessness and biker gangs and death wishes and abusive gurus all blur into a smoky haze. Lana Del Rey’s façade remains confounding and, also, utterly compelling.

Ultraviolence, a collection of mid-century ballads spiked with blues-rock, is a stunning accomplishment. Its eleven songs whimper and howl, soothe and taunt, hypnotize and thrill. Born to Die’s worst features – basically anything that labored to make it sound “current” – have been thrown into the ash heap. Del Rey and the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach (the album’s main producer) complete the logical trajectory laid out by “Video Games,” “Ride,” and “Young and Beautiful” and mercifully ignore everything in between. “Video Games” endures as Del Rey’s signature tune, but “Young and Beautiful” marks her creative inflection point. That song, with its lavish orchestral execution and ironically naïve viewpoint, might as well be Ultraviolence’s overture.

Lana Del Rey has long been obsessed with icons, especially Hollywood’s. Her short film Tropico included representations of Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, and Elvis (along with Mary, Eve, Adam and Jesus) in its tortured, Edenic opening tableau. But Del Rey is no longer satisfied with merely nodding at cinema in her music. She instead presents Ultraviolence as a soundtrack to a Douglas Sirk melodrama, scored by Ennio Morricone (minus the trumpets). Free to widen her lyrical scope beyond the stuff of schlock art, Del Rey’s references are somewhat less obvious and now include Anthony Burgess, Al Jolson, the Crystals, Charles Manson, Marianne Faithfull, Ernest Hemingway, the Who, and the Book of Revelation. Good news for those of us who like to feel smart while listening to pop music.

Try as you might, it’s hard not to be swept away by Ultraviolence’s gorgeous 70 mm sonic vistas. Unlike Born to Die, the album doesn’t contain a single pedestrian song. At worst, they’re just pretty good (“Sad Girl,” “Pretty When You Cry,” “The Other Woman”). At best, they can be superlative (“West Coast,” “Ultraviolence,” “Brooklyn Baby”). The album’s wonderful opener “Cruel World” sets the outline for the rest of Del Rey’s new material: it’s ethereal, sprawling, and unhurried. Unadorned verses crescendo into massive, exultant choruses. Reverb is often applied to her vocals, sometimes a bit too liberally. Del Rey sings mostly in her middle range, and never in the cloying babyish coo that marred much of Born to Die. When she reaches into her upper register, it is as arresting as ever, a reminder of what made “Video Games” so intoxicating.

Lana Del Rey has been honing her craft in the public eye, with every misstep ruthlessly pilloried by people like me.

Given Ultraviolence’s thematic and musical unity, a heavy burden is placed on the little moments that keep it from becoming a fifty-one-minute slog. This is how the album (and Auerbach’s production) succeeds the most. A simple guitar embellishment on “Brooklyn Baby,” or the slowed-down chorus on “West Coast,” might seem like minor touches on their own. But Ultraviolence brims with such rich and satisfying details, which can pass without notice if you’re not paying close attention.

Ultraviolence doesn’t arrive out of a void. Lana Del Rey has been honing her craft in the public eye, with every misstep ruthlessly pilloried by people like me. Despite the onslaught, she’s emerged triumphant. Del Rey takes the well-deserved opportunity to strike back at her detractors on “Brooklyn Baby” and “Money Power Glory” (maybe my two favorite songs of the bunch). A great album, however, is the best revenge. A-


https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/mus...VdO/story.html

By James Reed

Globe Staff June 16, 2014

Now it all makes sense: She simply needed time to develop, time for the music to catch up with her vision. When Lana Del Rey catapulted to pop stardom in the summer of 2011 with the song “Video Games,” her debut, “Born to Die,” arrived six months later in a blaze of buzz, but ended up sounding rushed and unfocused.

At least that was the criticism from those who loved the idea of Lana Del Rey (this critic included) but had higher hopes for her first full-length. It’s gratifying, then, to discover that “Ultraviolence,” her new sophomore album, is a staggering improvement over that initial release. Slavishly downbeat, it burrows even deeper into Del Rey’s torchy sensibility and rarely breaks its spell.

Working mostly with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach as producer, Del Rey imbues this record with a narcotic resonance that gives the singer and her songs room to exhale, to swell and swirl into the stratosphere. “West Coast” has a noirish sensuality, which opens into a chorus that mimicks the heady rush of a first toke.

Elsewhere, Del Rey relishes her role as the patron saint of the broken-hearted (“Pretty When You Cry,” “Sad Girl”). She even pokes fun at her detractors, keeping her tongue firmly in cheek on “[F***ed] My Way Up to the Top,” while “Money Power Glory” lampoons the perception that that’s all she wants.

As an opener, “Cruel World” is the album in miniature: a 6½-minute spiral into the ornate, emotional decay where Del Rey seems to thrive. It unfolds in slow motion — that way, every joy, every sorrow is even more intense. -- JAMES REED





http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/6...Ultraviolence/

Review by Brendan Schroer

June 18th, 2014

Review Summary: Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh

On a surface level, Lana Del Rey may seem to many like a living musical contradiction. Her attempts to bring back the old-fashioned style of the old greats such as Nancy Sinatra or Leonard Cohen have been known to clash with overly melodramatic modern "bad girl" lyricism that many consider vapid. Also, there's the fact that she hasn't always delivered very solid live shows when compared to her studio performances, as well as the way her baroque pop stylings get mixed in with modern hip-hop-influenced beats. But really, these contradictions bring out many of Lana's best qualities... I've always seen her work, primarily lyrically, as a commentary or possibly critique of the negative aspects of today's society and media. And yes, the lyrics do indeed become really clichéd and recycled after a certain point (proving to be one of Born to Die's biggest flaws); however, one can't deny that her overall style - and mix of styles - is pretty damn unique. This mix of seduction, apathy, aforementioned "bad girl" attitude, as well as happiness based around the little things in life, may seem disjointed but it works startlingly well when combined with such varied (if a little samey atmosphere-wise) music. And on that note, once Born to Die and the Paradise EP came and went, many of us were more than a little curious to see how she would expand upon their successes. The result? Reflection.

Ultraviolence is lush, dreamy, dreary, and ultimately a perfect way to combat the more hollow aspects of its predecessors. If Born to Die was a bold love letter to 60s Americana music and Hollywood-style cinematic orchestration, this record is the scaled-back reflection that follows it. Ultraviolence has been widely considered a dream pop record, and with good reason. Gone is much of the excess and "decadent glamor" of previous works in favor of a more entrancing piece of slow pop bliss; half of the melodies sound as though they could have made it onto a Radiohead or Porcupine Tree record due to their heavily melancholic and layered attributes. Lana herself sounds as beautifully seductive and slow as ever, her vocals washed out in heavy reverb and what sounds like vintage 50s production techniques. The whole thing feels more timeless and less gimmicky than Born to Die, filled to the brim with depressive elegance and thankfully devoid of many of the hip-hop elements that dragged the aforementioned album down. What's so impressive, though, is that most of this album's songs are in extremely slow droning tempos, but rarely get boring because of everything going on above the beats. Sure, a song like "West Coast" switches tempos around for the chorus to presumably give it a dreamier effect (which does work), but the majority of this release is exceptionally slow and somber in execution.

However, I'd like to argue that the repetitive tempos aren't really the point of this record. It's all about the dynamics, the vocals, the layers of sound... basically, everything built around the beats. Hell, "Old Money" doesn't even use any beats at all! The best thing about this entire record, the reason why the instrumentation and overall vibe work so well, is because everything is so intimate and reflective. As the closing R&B-influenced tune "The Other Woman" closes the experience out, there's a genuine feeling of finality and beauty that stems from Lana's emotive crooning; it's the kind of sound that influences someone to spin the record for a second time right after it ends. Ultraviolence is so multifaceted and genuinely beautiful that its replay value is simply extraordinary. For instance, you might initially be hooked by "Brooklyn Baby"'s calm and subtle guitar chords and how they combine with Lana's vocals, only to return and hear the little dynamic changes here and there when aided by the underlying synthesizer work. And of course there's that wonderful guitar reverb in the oddly hopeful-sounding opener "Cruel World," which needs to be heard to be believed.

Ultraviolence does have a tendency to get a bit repetitive because of its incessant use of really slow tempos and just how somber the experience gets, but don't give up if you don't get hooked on the first listen or two. It's the very definition of a grower, and this record has something Born to Die never had: more reflection. It comes across as personal. It comes across as purely genuine. And most of all, it comes across as Lana fitting more snugly into this identity she's been carving out for herself. Adele - as well as you other retro soul/pop revivals out there - you could learn some things from this woman.



http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/For...ML/212884.html

BackToEarth: “She reminds me Fiona Apple in terms of deep despair & romantic inclination.”


Robert Christgau:

http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_a...e=Lana+Del+Rey

Paradise [Interscope, 2012]
Continues to project a hedonistic lassitude and desperate edge you wish you could warn your buddy off ("American," "Body Electric") **

[Kill4Me]

INFj 3w4 sx/sp

What would you say to your fans?

Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books. Pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.

That's the observe and mimick cognition of EII...and also the way to tell apart EII and IEI.

[HERO]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r80n4goqwDQ

Lana Del Rey (Elizabeth Woolridge Grant): IEI-Fe? or IEI-Ni? (Creative? subtype)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKdJnnPdFww









We both know the history of violence that surrounds you, but I’m not scared; there’s nothing to lose now that I've found you

- The only Lana Del Rey album that Robert Christgau likes is Honeymoon:

http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_a...e=lana+del+rey

Honeymoon [Polydor/Interscope, 2015]
Presumably anybody who thinks her shtick has stagnated is too embarrassed to pay attention, because without doubt it's evolved. Subtly, OK, but the slowing tempos at least are hard to miss, and they go with the subtle part: the changing ways she's portrayed both herself and the objects of her affection over the past four years. Initially she enacted rockish boy-toy masochism--a pretty girl who got wet for an entire casting call of rough trade sugar daddies. But the third album of her tuneful, bonus-studded catalogue stars the torchy femme fatale who always lurked underneath, and by now half the objects of her exploitation are pretty clearly jerks. Born-to-lie Mr. Born to Lose is a game to her--she never bought into his bullshit. "Salvatore," who could be based on her real-life Italian boyfriend for all I know, is auto-crooned so close to the edge of parody I wish she'd figured out how to sneak in the moon hitting her eye like a big pizza pie. But the biggest breakthrough is Lana herself on "God Knows I Tried," where the artist born Lizzy Grant cops to her real-life fame and interrupts the come-ons to swear, "I feel free when I see no one." You never know--this dame might write a love song we can believe in someday. . . . A-

[ashlesha]

just want to point out the fenryrr resemblance again.

[Sol]

ISFP(?)

Seems more IEI-y than SEI-y. Less concrete and aware of herself and the world.

she looks too primitive for INFP

[ashlesha]

Primitive?

[InvisibleJim]

The plot thickens.

I always thought ESI was appropriate, but sure, why not SEE?

[Introspector]

EP>IJ temperament imo

[InvisibleJim]

i agree She's like Fi oozing out the ass. i cant even pick up on anything else.

EP>IJ temperament imo

For science!

[Introspector]

For science!

1st was a respond to the interviews

2nd from vids i posted

[MrMoney]

She's a chameleon. A poser. A lump of clay. Typing her is a waste of time. You will only be able to type whatever persona Big $ (unfortunately not me in this case) has suggested that she projects for maximum profit.

[bolong]

Every kinda quite female is NOT A GODDAMN IEI

[some chair]

Yeah, to be an IEI you have to have a distant look in your eyes and elaborate makeup.



Stars are a bonus and clear indicator.

[HERO]

ISFP(?)



she looks too primitive for INFP

Primitive?

- “Primitive melodies” like my Aunt once wrote.



‘Remember how we used to party up all night/Sneaking out, looking for a taste of real life/Drinking in the small town firelight/(Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice)/Sweet 16[types] and we had arrived/Walking down the streets as they whistle, “Hi, hi!"/Stealin' police cars with the senior guys/Teachers said we'd never make it out alive/There [he] was my new best friend . . . swayin' in the wind/While [he] starts to cry, [crocodile tears fallin' from his] Bambi eyes: "[HERO], how I hate those guys."/This is what makes us [homosexuals]/We [don't] look for heaven and we put love first/Somethin' that we'd die for, it's our curse/Don't cry about it, don't cry about it/This is what makes us [gays]/We don't stick together 'cause we put love first/Don't cry about him, don't cry about him/It's all gonna happen/And that's where the beginning of the end begun/Everybody knew that we had too much fun/We were skippin' school and drinkin' on the job (With the boss)/Sweet 16[types] and we had arrived/Baby's table dancin' at the local dive/Cheerin’ our names in the pink spotlight/Drinkin' cherry schnapps in the velvet night/Yo we used to go break in/To the hotel, glimmer and we’d swim/Runnin' from the cops . . . Screaming, "Get us while we're hot. [Ban] us while we're hot." (Come on take a shot)/This is what makes us [beta f*****s]/We all look for heaven and we put love first/Somethin' that we'd die for, it's our curse/Don't cry about it, don't cry about it/This is what makes us [freaks]/We don't stick together 'cause [we’re fucking weak]/Don't cry about him, don't cry about him/It's all gonna happen/The prettiest in crowd that you had ever seen/Ribbons in our hair and our eyes gleamed mean/A freshmen generation of degenerate [creepy] beauty queens/And you know something?/They were [not] the only friends I ever had/We got into trouble and when stuff got bad/I got sent away, I was waving on the train platform/Crying 'cause I know I'm never comin' back./This is what makes us [narcissistic, selfish, hypocritical, and self-centered]/We all look for heaven and we put [our] love first/Somethin' that we'd die for, it's our curse/Don't cry about it, don't cry about it/This is what makes us [self-defeating sociopaths]/We don't stick together 'cause we put love first/Don't cry about him, don't cry about him/It's all gonna happen . . .’



“ . . . I love you forever, not maybe/You are my one true love . . .”



“Kiss me hard before you go/Summertime sadness/I just wanted you to know/That, baby, you're the best . . . Oh, my God, I feel it in the air/Telephone wires above are sizzling like a snare/Honey, I'm on fire, I feel it everywhere/Nothing scares me anymore . . . I've got that summertime, summertime sadness . . . I'm feelin' electric tonight/Cruising down the coast goin' 'bout 99/Got my bad baby by my heavenly side/I know if I go, I'll die happy tonight . . . I think I'll miss you forever/Like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky . . .”



[Music video spoken introduction:]

I was in the winter of my life, and the men I met along the road were my only summer.

At night I fell asleep with visions of myself, dancing and laughing and crying with them.

Three years down the line of being on an endless world tour, and my memories of them were the only things that

sustained me, and my only real happy times.

I was a singer—not a very popular one,

I once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed

and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken.

But I didn't really mind because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted, and then losing it to know

what true freedom is.

When the people I used to know found out what I had been doing, how I'd been living, they asked me why—but

there's no use in talking to people who have a home.

They have no idea what it's like to seek safety in other people—for home to be wherever you lie your head.

I was always an unusual girl.

My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality; just an inner

indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean...

And if I said I didn't plan for it to turn out this way I'd be lying...

Because I was born to be the other woman.

Who belonged to no one, who belonged to everyone.

Who had nothing, who wanted everything, with a fire for every experience and an obsession for freedom that

terrified me to the point that I couldn't even talk about it, and pushed me to a nomadic point of madness that both

dazzled and dizzied me.


I've been out on that open road
You can be my full time daddy,
White and gold
Singing blues has been getting old
You can be my full time baby,
Hot or cold

Don't break me down
I've been travellin' too long
I've been trying too hard
With one pretty song

I hear the birds on the summer breeze,
I drive fast, I am alone in the night
Been tryin' hard not to get into trouble,
but I, I've got a war in my mind
So, I just ride, just ride,
I just ride, just ride

Dying young and playing hard
That's the way my father made his life an art
Drink all day and we talk 'til dark
That's the way the road dogs do it – ride 'til dark.

Don't leave me now
Don't say good bye
Don't turn around
Leave me high and dry

I hear the birds on the summer breeze,
I drive fast, I am alone at midnight
Been tryin' hard not to get into trouble,
but I, I've got a war in my mind
I just ride, just ride,
I just ride, just ride

I'm tired of feeling like I'm fucking crazy
I'm tired of driving 'til I see stars in my eyes
It's all I've got to keep myself sane, baby
So I just ride, I just ride

I hear the birds on the summer breeze,
I drive fast, I am alone in the night
Been tryin' hard not to get into trouble,
but I, I've got a war in my mind
I just ride, just ride,
I just ride, I just ride

[Music video spoken ending:]
Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people, and finally I did on the open road.
We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art.
Live fast. Die young. Be wild. And have fun.
I believe in the country America used to be.
I believe in the person I want to become.
I believe in the freedom of the open road.
And my motto is the same as ever:
"I believe in the kindness of strangers. And when I’m at war with myself I ride, I just ride."
Who are you?


- Robert Christgau:

Born to Die [Polydor, 2012]
Convincing and occasionally compelling proof that money can't buy happiness ("Video Games," "This Is What Makes Us Girls") *

You know, I hadn't considered ILI but it actually makes a lot of sense... (I was seeing Ni-IEI) before, but there's a certain... "blankness" from her that I haven't been able to put my finger on. (And I say that from an Fe-person perspective and not at all as a value judgement.)

This was my first thread on the 16types (regarding my sociotype/VI/pictures):

http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...ciotype-thanks

Here’s how some people responded:

Fe PoLR? idk really though, just guessing since you've got like one facial expression for everything.

I was thinking that too.

I'd say: SLI

I get devalued Si and weak ethics.
ILI maybe.

Maybe ILI.

I guessed ILI before checking what others said, so that seems about right.

XXTj would be my guess but i really don't know

Yeah Fe polr seems obvious here. No chance of SLI, just not in the body language. So ILI it is.

I call SLI as well. (mayyybe ILI). I almost said IEE though so i'm leaning SLI.

You might coincidentally be MBTI ISTP and socionics ISTp, nothing out of the question there. . .The two typing systems dont depend on each other.

Yes, you are NOT ILI; I'm thinking either LSE or SLI; how do you maintain and manage your living environment?

I'm w works: I think you look SLI, maybe ILI.

I vote SLI, though, for two reasons: 1 - the phrasing of your thread title reminds me of something an SLI friend of mine would have written, and 2 - your username is "lazybones"

ILI > SLI

You don't have the physically relaxed vibe that SLIs have. The way you stand is a bit awkward and unnatural.

ILI or more distantly, LII.

ILI, logical subtype.

Dude looks as fuck. And Introverted. Likely ISXp, with a slim possibility of INXj. I'd look more, but it was too much for me.

ILI is also my impression, you give off that deeply introspective, detached Ni matched with Fe PoLR type of demeanor

I really doubt you're ILI. You look too much like your username, aka some beast.

- originally posted by “he died with a felafel”: I think Ni-base. I thought Ip temperament in general is kinda perceived as "lazy", although that's not the way i'd put it - energy-conserving seems a better phrase (as i think it's been used in temperament descriptions too). cheers

Oh yes, I agree that IP temperament generally comes off in this way. But INXps never immediately strike me in this way personally (even when its someone who I know is lazy). Because in spite of being 'energy-conserving' types (I also prefer this phrase), they nevertheless exude particular qualities inherent to all Decisive quadra types.

Right now I lean SLI > SEI for you. If SEI turns out later to be the case, I won't be surprised.

You know what, now that I think about it you do remind me of a friend of mine who I think is Si valuing. All slovenly, and like oh oh I am so comfortable wah wah. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER LEBOWSKI!

The sheer degree of doubt in your comments makes me think of ILI.

lazybones - I'd say you are ISTp, not E.

Introvert, primary involved function. SEI or SLI would be my first guesses.

I took a re-look at the pics -- i totally forgot i posted in this thread -- and with my newly acquired understanding of VI in the past 2 months as i continually refine knowledge of socionics, I retract my previous typing of SLI. You have a perfect example of a dynamic Ni gaze. So yeah, ILI or IEI. I still think you look sort of Fe-POLR-ish though, so i'm leaning ILI.

as far as you saying you have doubts about being in an Fi-valuing quadra... What is your understanding of Fi vs Fe? I know it took me a while to really understand it.

So if seventeen people, at one point in time, thought I might be Fe-PoLR and/or Si-valuing and/or a Thinking type based on the way I look(ed) . . . then I honestly don’t think we should jump to conclusions regarding Lana Del Rey’s type based solely on her appearance, facial expressions, the way she looks, etc.

I’ve once read that IEI’s often and/or sometimes have a stoned or drugged appearance/expression. And there are Beta NF’s (especially IEI’s, yet also EIE-Ni’s as well) that hardly ever smile. [On a somewhat unrelated note, the last time I tried marijuana (smoked pot) was on July, 2012.]

I’m not sure how relevant this is, but it’s also something to consider:

http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...248-on-beta-Fe

I think it may be a characteristic of the Beta quadra - even the ethical types - to focus on, or value, their Ti so much that they don't really identify with Fe. Perhaps because Fe is described too often in an Alpha, "touchy-feely", way that they don't see in themselves. In a broad-brush way, Alpha's Fe helps them to "reflect and delight in", Beta's Fe helps them "to conquer".

essentially the key point here is that these beta NFs ARE exhibiting Fe, but in a passive, Ni-oriented sense rather than in an alpha sense.

Here’s more of my mentally/socially challenged raving lunacy from my original thread:

http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...ciotype-thanks

I should probably add that I recently finished reading Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, and I ended up liking it more than I thought I would. Of course the subject matter is in many ways disturbing/pathological; yet at the same time the heart of the story--the emotions, the humanity, and all the other elements that make it an interesting tragicomic work of art/literature--possesses a universal resonance, or at least one that certain types or people might be more likely to be affected by.

That just sounded like something vaguely along the lines that strrrng would say lol. But you don't know him yet.

Well I'd see types like Eminem and Marilyn Manson (perhaps not as much now) as revealing/exposing the shadow (negative side) of our society ["The Sibling Society"]: consumerism, power (hence no love), magical thinking, racism/prejudice, emotional blindness, emotional self-alienation [dissociation], hypocrisy, etc.

I'm really impressed with your post.

[bolong]

Yeah, to be an IEI you have to have a distant look in your eyes and elaborate makeup.



Stars are a bonus and clear indicator.

No. That's fi subculture chicks.

[Jack Oliver Aaron]

She's an ESI. She's more interested in the beauty of the music than any lofty message. She is Fe-ignoring... smiles out of politeness but her eyes show a more severe (Se) personal affect of Fi, this disjoint between the eyes and the smile is characteristic of Fi Ego types.

I've heard people say ILI but when she is with her fans she is genuinely warm, simply suggesting that Fe is strong when allowed by leading Fi.

[Zero11]

She executes mobilizing cuteness (like Kendra Wilkinson "SLE" or Katie Banks "ILE) which creates a faked impression.

Her nervous face is also an Indicator for leading Intuition.

my guess is ENTp / ILE ()

my guess? Dafuq I am totally sure she is Fe is defenitely in her Super-Id Block and it is more prevalent as in Betsy Brandt who is LII with Suggestive Fe.

[Jack Oliver Aaron]

She executes mobilizing cuteness (like Kendra Wilkinson "SLE" or Katie Banks "ILE) which creates a faked impression.

Her nervous face is also an Indicator for leading Intuition.

my guess is ENTp / ILE ()

my guess? Dafuq I am totally sure she is Fe is defenitely in her Super-Id Block and it is more prevalent as in Betsy Brandt who is LII with Suggestive Fe.

Fe mobilising really doesn't come off that way.... for SLEs and ILEs it's more that they try to pass on big/happy emotions to others in without the finesse of an EIE or ESE (with risk of it backfiring).

This is an ILE engaging in his Mobilisng Fe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ImSbixBsOk He couldn't be more different from Lana who responds terribly to similar attempts by the interviewer in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHnNIgDWxx8
I would not say that Lana is trying to increase the positive emotivity and failing, rather is begrudgingly conforming to it. I also wouldn't put her as nervous in these videos, just restrained and a bit stiff. The interviewing situations clearly clash with her overtly Gamma values and that is what is showing in her disapproving Fi eyes.

Since when is a nervous face indicative of leading Intuition? Introverted Intution can give the person a sense of doubt but it doesn't cause a nervous face. 4D Ni, when Ni is very strong and Se very weak, as seen with any type that is Introverted and Intuitive, leads to Delicate movement which makes them physically nervous (not quite able to confront the forceful, physical world) but I wouldn't say Lana even has that. Her manner of sitting and the movement of her body shows a certain amount of physical security albeit Controlled and restrained... 4D Si and IJ temperament (seen in LSIs and ESIs).

[Zero11]

Fe mobilising really doesn't come off that way.... for SLEs and ILEs it's more that they try to pass on big/happy emotions to others in without the finesse of an EIE or ESE (with risk of it backfiring).

This is an ILE engaging in his Mobilisng Fe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ImSbixBsOk

That IEI who holds a comedic monologue yeah sure your mobilizing Fe is just an assumption.

I would not say that Lana is trying to increase the positive emotivity and failing, rather is begrudgingly conforming to it. I also wouldn't put her as nervous in these videos, just restrained and a bit stiff.

Thats what I meant kind of_ the wording doesn´t really matter

The interviewing situations clearly clash with her overtly Gamma values and that is what is showing in her disapproving Fi eyes.

Disapproving Eyes? What Disapproving Eyes?

Since when is a nervous face indicative of leading Intuition?

That is a compensation for suggestive Sensation.

Introverted Intution can give the person a sense of doubt but it doesn't cause a nervous face.

As written above

4D Ni, when Ni is very strong and Se very weak, as seen with any type that is Introverted and Intuitive, leads to Delicate movement which makes them physically nervous but I wouldn't say Lana even does that. Her manner of sitting and the movement of her body shows a certain amount of physical security albeit Controlled and restrained... 4D Si and IJ temperament (seen in LSIs and ESIs).

Or just simple Extraversion

[Jack Oliver Aaron]

That IEI who holds a comedic monologue yeah sure your mobilizing Fe is just an assumption.



Thats what I meant kind of_ the wording doesn´t really matter



Disapproving Eyes? What Disapproving Eyes?



That is a compensation for suggestive Sensation.



As written above



Or just simple Extraversion

Andy Samberg is an ILE, a proper ILE... here's another ILE using mobilising Fe... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcJohfS4vTQ


If that's what you meant then you wouldn't be putting Fe in the Super Id but the Id.

If you look at the eyes, you'll see a disjoint between the emotions she is feeling and the emotions she is displaying. It's not a lack of emotion but an emotion that is different to the one being portrayed. In the case of the video I posted, she is feeling a negative emotion but displaying a positive one.. that is the cause of this feeling of fakeness. It's half-hearted Id Block Fe.

Suggestive Introverted Sensation? That leads to Clumsiness, not nervousness. The ILE can be too bold at times without the self-control to prevent mistakes from being made.

No, Extroversion does not lead to nervousness or physical security (that's a pretty counter-intuitive assertion). Extroversion leads to an expansive mindset, a willingness to take on more, even biting off more than a person can chew.

[Zero11]

Andy Samberg is an ILE, a proper ILE... here's another ILE using mobilising Fe... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcJohfS4vTQ

A proper Typed non-read ILE maybe. Stereotypical, Frameworktypical an ILE but when you put a Type onto a person and search for commonalities you automatically skew your analysis.

If that's what you meant then you wouldn't be putting Fe in the Super Id but the Id.

No it would give off a more ugly quality than or it would completely fade away.

If you look at the eyes, you'll see a disjoint between the emotions she is feeling and the emotions she is displaying. It's not a lack of emotion but an emotion that is different to the one being portrayed. In the case of the video I posted, she is feeling a negative emotion but displaying a positive one.. that is the cause of this feeling of fakeness. It's half-hearted Id Block Fe.

Interesting view on that it could be true but I still don´t use the Inter-type Quadra value System anymore. Thanks for the Insight.

Suggestive Introverted Sensation? That leads to Clumsiness, not nervousness.

This is one of the many forms but not for V.I.

No, Extroversion does not lead to nervousness or physical security (that's a pretty counter-intuitive assertion). Extroversion leads to an expansive mindset, a willingness to take on more, even biting off more than a person can chew.

I don´t said that Extraversion would lead to nervousness quiet the opposite I said her face compensates suggestive Sensation which nervously moves the face.