Lana Del Rey

[consentingadult]

Doing the right thing for myself over that of the individual strangers would be my so how is an SEE helping me with that? Dunno what the and version of that is

You really need to shut the fuck up, because obviously you do not know shit about Classical Socionics in general. What Jack Oliver Aaron said about SEIs is spot on. I live with an SEI, and their social role in life, which manifests through their creative function, is to influence the (Fe) emotional state of other individuals. ILEs do not have good control over their emotional state, even though they can act as clowns and as such can emotionall influence other people (Mobilizing Fe). When an ILE is emotionally stuck, all the need is a hug and a smile from an SEI to get out of that state. Such is the nature of the power of SEIs over ILEs.

As to the question above, the answer is very simple. A true ILI (and I'm not assuming you are one), like true SLIs, has issues relating to other people, in the sense that they inclined to misanthropy: their appraisal of other people is inclined to be negative, other people do not easily meet their standards. Such is the nature of Mobilizing Fi, and it can potentially result in alienation. The Creative Fi of SEEs (and IEEs) overcomes the resistance of Mobilizing Fi, and dissolves the sense of alienation. I have described this in several of my blogs:

http://mavericksocionics.blogspot.nl...-function.html

http://mavericksocionics.blogspot.nl...n-by-ilis.html

[Zero11]

You really need to shut the fuck up, because obviously you do not know shit about Classical Socionics in general. What Jack Oliver Aaron said about SEIs is spot on. I live with an SEI, and their social role in life, which manifests through their creative function, is to influence the (Fe) emotional state of other individuals. ILEs do not have good control over their emotional state, even though they can act as clowns and as such can emotionall influence other people (Mobilizing Fe). When an ILE is emotionally stuck, all the need is a hug and a smile from an SEI to get out of that state. Such is the nature of the power of SEIs over ILEs.

As to the question above, the answer is very simple. A true ILI (and I'm not assuming you are one), like true SLIs, has issues relating to other people, in the sense that they inclined to misanthropy: their appraisal of other people is inclined to be negative, other people do not easily meet their standards. Such is the nature of Mobilizing Fi, and it can potentially result in alienation. The Creative Fi of SEEs (and IEEs) overcomes the resistance of Mobilizing Fi, and dissolves the sense of alienation. I have described this in several of my blogs:

http://mavericksocionics.blogspot.nl...-function.html

http://mavericksocionics.blogspot.nl...n-by-ilis.html

So what do these static definitions teach you? assumptions! feel free to brag about it and who are you to tell me to shut the fuck up? Know your place! The ILI description is spot on but only outside of positive action because without that there is no pushing forward. You just proved your stupidity here, come back to common sense. Dogmatic Stereotypical action led me into an dead end. If you don´t realize it thats not my problem.

Oh nice how your mobilizing is not able to differentiate between an ILI and an IEI.

update:
open misanthropy or disapproval
Your "ILI" with mobilizing Fi is a extraverted example and therefore not strategic which makes him/her IEI who is able to say such things and shift easily through it with Fe which a ILI isn´t capable and therefore remains strategic. I don´t expect you to understand this as a Static type as I do the same for my messy Fi example which led you to write this as a reaction.

@Jack Oliver Aaron

I was reconsidering her today, checked some samples and stuff and you might be right about her being ESI. I couldn´t wrap my mind about her having similar looks to Emma Watson who has eyes and now after getting some fresh visuals she could be ESI.

The Lana Del Rey typcial expression can be also seen on IEEs Kate Bosworth and Emilia Clarke especially as Daenerys.

http://www.listal.com/viewimage/894272
http://www.listal.com/viewimage/1529061h

[Jack Oliver Aaron]

An SEI does not cover your weaknesses because that is just a theory. And you think that you need a Fe and Si fix that is not true (I give later examples but if the typings remain different you just see it from your System and nothing changes) I for example induldge easily in sensory pleasures as is suggestive for me. Doing the right thing for myself over that of the individual strangers would be my so how is an SEE helping me with that? Dunno what the and version of that is

Protection from is easily established dunno how to explain that but it happens. The version never happened to me so I can´t say.

To put it simple if you have the other 4 functions conscious you are easily able to navigate me through it. If that is not the case you are accustomed to use the other 4 you may be able to have it easier with the same Quadrant but thats just it.

I already gave you the Ti needs Te.doc and there are the other 2 Inspiration videos on Youtube about Interpretive/Intuitive and Values/Ethics they explain that, there is just the Problem that you jump into cold water_ it took me a long time to realize these Dynamics.

You are simply not attracted to your own Quadra just take a look at the clean samples:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6kuyf4x0ye...%20females.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9mofughmxc...%20females.jpg

I can promise you that I have a great need for Si and Fe and so does my ILE girlfriend. We both feel like we really need more of it in our lives and often seek out Alpha SFs as a result. They have a very positive effect on us.

Si>Fe can best be understood by looking at The Shire in The Lord of the Rings. ILEs want that, LOTS of that. I think indulgence in sensory pleasures is actually a misunderstanding of Si. I would say that Si allows temperance rather than excess. An ILE might overeat on the candy and get sick, the SEI knows when to stop and does.

That would be the theory manifested in reality. It works, at least it works as well as anything could work prior to formal scientific investigation.

My Ti does need Te to work properly, that is true. What is endless theoretical structure with no practical use? Oh, Pod'lair. That's because it's run by a bunch of IEIs trying to use Ti with no Te.

Irrationality - The attitude of 'what is' (sounds like Sensation)
Rationality - The attitude of 'what ought' (sounds like Intuition)

contradictory stuff

No, Intuition isn't about 'what ought', it's more 'what may come to pass', which is just 'what is' in a temporal rather than physical sense.

[Zero11]

I can promise you that I have a great need for Si and Fe and so does my ILE girlfriend. We both feel like we really need more of it in our lives and often seek out Alpha SFs as a result. They have a very positive effect on us.

I know what you mean but thats not the same, your need for Super-id functions is a problem of diversity and misunderstanding that needs to be augmented and understood to feel safe. But Inspiration is the exact opposite that goes into the direction of growth which needs "positive" friction. That is what is interesting and worth to be pursued.

Si>Fe can best be understood by looking at The Shire in The Lord of the Rings. ILEs want that, LOTS of that.

? explain further please

I think indulgence in sensory pleasures is actually a misunderstanding of Si.

I totally agree with that and I think that it relates more to the Enneagram Self-Preservation / Sensual (Udit Patel)

I would say that Si allows temperance rather than excess. An ILE might overeat on the candy and get sick, the SEI knows when to stop and does.

makes sense but where is the difference between and then? because I am the same on this

My Ti does need Te to work properly, that is true. What is endless theoretical structure with no practical use?

I need to get more into the F and N version, just Logic is a bit dull.

Oh, Pod'lair. That's because it's run by a bunch of IEIs trying to use Ti with no Te.

They blame society created problems on and and I agree with the lack of that is annyoing as hell.

No, Intuition isn't about 'what ought', it's more 'what may come to pass', which is just 'what is' in a temporal rather than physical sense.

your Socionics Introduction needs to be updated with this

[Jack Oliver Aaron]

I know what you mean but thats not the same, your need for Super-id functions is a problem of diversity and misunderstanding that needs to be augmented and understood to feel safe. But Inspiration is the exact opposite that goes into the direction of growth which needs "positive" friction. That is what is interesting and worth to be pursued.

Ummm.. no, no there's only one kind of friction I like and I think an SEI would do a better job with it

It actually fits in well with Aristotle's Golden Mean, you cannot be virtuous unless your IM Elements are balanced... The SLE's courage needs the IEI's patience in order to not be reckless. You need Sensory/Intuitive, Logical/Ethical opposites for that.

? explain further please

If you watch the Hobbits, their lifestyle is centered around Si... agriculture, farming, comfy, rustic lifestyle, no adventures, lots of food, lots of fun parties, beautiful scenery etc.

makes sense but where is the difference between and then? because I am the same on this

One is Extroverted and Static, the other Introverted and Dynamic.... one is about Lots of Wants (I want that job, I will take it). The other is about a Few Continuous Desires (Am I still comfortable? How can I keep this feeling of comfort?)

your Socionics Introduction needs to be updated with this

Hmm... I thought I did make that distinction...

[IBTL]

She's an IEI who fell for an SLI... or she just has a thing for SLI's. IEI's and SLI's are like independent contracting partners in crime.




IEI/SLI is like a silent black and white film that needs no words or captions...

[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...

[TheWholeEnglish]

Did we decide IEI, because I kinda want to be exactly like her. <33333

[Amber]

She's ESI looking for a LIE. This is enough proof - the beginning , I mean

[IBTL]

She's ESI looking for a LIE. This is enough proof - the beginning , I mean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzYLNM-xsNk

What about National Anthem or Born To Die? Those guys look SLI to me, and IEI/SLI is "electric" for sure... SLI's have said that I'm "wild" or that everything I say is "different".





James Dean anyone? He's SLI for sure... and look how the man in that video "hurts" her. He silently drowns her, and she lets him.

[TheWholeEnglish]

What about National Anthem or Born To Die? Those guys look SLI to me, and IEI/SLI is "electric" for sure... SLI's have said that I'm "wild" or that everything I say is "different".





James Dean anyone? He's SLI for sure... and look how the man in that video "hurts" her. He silently drowns her, and she lets him.

That man could drown me any day of the week.

[silke]

She's an IEI who fell for an SLI... or she just has a thing for SLI's. IEI's and SLI's are like independent contracting partners in crime.

She fell for an SLI because her own type is IEE haha

IEE-Fi sp/sx 2w3

The SLI-IEE is the 'troublemaker' dyad of Delta quadra. They have a lot in common with the SLE-IEI dyad, but if you watch Lana's videos closely there are many scenes that incorporate Si - sensual strokes, gentle caresses, smooth development of events, there is zero aggressor-victim playfighting, no Se "edges", collisions or sudden shocks, even the drowning scene is incredibly calm and peaceful and sensually pleasant. Lana is Delta.

[TheWholeEnglish]

She fell for an SLI because her own type is IEE haha

IEE-Fi sp/sx 6

The SLI-IEE is the 'troublemaker' dyad of Delta quadra. They have a lot in common with the SLE-IEI dyad, but if you watch Lana's videos closely there are many scenes that incorporate Si - sensual strokes, gentle caresses, smooth development of events, there is zero aggressor-victim playfighting, no Se "edges", collisions or sudden shocks, even the drowning scene is incredibly calm and peaceful and sensually pleasant. Lana is Delta.

I'm sure she doesn't design the videos herself. She probably comes up with a concept, or at least approves of a concept, but she doesn't direct them. IEI has demonstrative Si (right?) so they're naturally drawn to that sort of stuff. It might be something a director has incorporated for aesthetic effect that she like/agreed with, but that she wouldn't have necessarily thought to include herself were the video entirely up to her.

Anyway, not all of her videos are like that. Ride, for example, has this whole narrative in the beginning about a girl who leaves home and runs away with strange, older men, showing her on a bike living this rugged, caution to the wind kind of life.

[IBTL]

She makes so much sense to me right now...
In other words, I feel the same pain in IEI/SLI.
I've been having to listen to her to cope with something that's outside of possible, I think.
He's married with two kids, anyone?

[darya]

4w3. Very image obsessed and vain, but also extremely awkward and romantic. There's hidden sadness and vulnerability oozing out of her. Reminds me of Marilyn Monroe a bit (both have similar fake pose in interviews, but you can sense the real person behind it) . I think IEI.

[IBTL]

Super-Ego: Lana Del Rey(IEI)/Miley Cyrus(SLI)





Super-Ego: Drake(SLI)/James Arthur(IEI)

[IBTL]

[suedehead]

Maybe EII. I'm somehow having an easier time picturing her being naturally responsive towards others' initiative, as opposed to being the one initiating, so I don't like IEE for her, although an infantile type seems like a good start.

[Amber]

Fi "blocked" with Se

[Radio]

SEI or IEE, i dunno which. have you guys ever seen an ESI?

[jessica129]

Her nose is so perfect

[jessica129]

I think she looks way better with the fake nose. Ppl make a big deal about plastic surgery like with kylie jenner but she looks SO MUCH better after surgery

[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") **

[Birdie]

...It is literally going to take hours to digest your post @HERO

[leakingdreams]

I think IEI works for her.

A lot of her lyrics can read superficially but are actually just her attempting to recreate a mental landscape in her listener's heads. For example:

Gargoyles standing at the front of your gate.Trying to tell me to wait,
But I can’t wait to see you.

So I run like I'm mad to heaven's door.
I don't wanna be bad,
I won't cheat you no more.

Roses, Bel Air, take me there,
I've been waiting to meet you.
Palm trees in the light,
I can see late at night
Darling, I'm waiting to greet you,
Come to me, baby.

Spotlight, bad baby, you've got a flair
For the violentest kind of love anywhere out there

Mon amour, sweet child of mine,
You're divine.
Didn't anyone ever tell you
It's OK to shine?

Roses, Bel Air, take me there,
I've been waiting to meet you.
Palm trees in the light,
I can see late at night.
Darling, I'm waiting to greet you,
Come to me, baby.

Don't be afraid of me, don't be ashamed.
Walking away from my soft resurrection.
Idol of roses, iconic soul. I know your name.
Lead me to war with your brilliant direction.

Roses, Bel Air, take me there,
I've been waiting to meet you.
Palm trees in the light,
I can see late at night.
Darling, I'm waiting to greet you,
Come to me, baby.

Roses, Bel Air, take me there,
I've been waiting to meet you.
Grenadine sunshine, can you break this heart of mine.
Darling, I'm waiting to greet you,
Come to me, baby.

And a lot of her songs have this tone; she's very interested in death and arriving in heaven. She studied metaphysics to "find God." I don't believe she's as depressive as she seems; the persona is a hyperbole of her actual self, but I do think she's very interested in death in a metaphysical fashion.

She also doesn't seem very connected to her body when singing live; there's this hyper emotional energy that belies her otherwise stiffened gestures, as if she wants to convey something without actually being present many times.

She also uses her voice to juxtaposition the conflicted inner states of the character she embodies; it's almost never just for looks or sound--though it can appear this way on a casual listen.

[darya]

I'm currently typing her IEI 3w4 sx/sp, but hard to tell for sure with her manufactured persona.

[Moonbeaux Rainfox]

I will go with IEI, too. I would have guessed 4w3 for Enneagram. For instinct I thought sth. along the lines of sx/sp (maybe sp/sx).

Opinion based on these interviews, and her music videos (style, content):

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/18-things-you-learn-after-two-long-days-with-lana-del-rey-20140724
http://www.complex.com/covers/lana-del-rey-interview-against-the-grain-2014-cover-story/
http://entertainment.inquirer.net/163131/lana-del-rey-i-was-very-wild

[golden]

I'm currently typing her IEI 3w4 sx/sp, but hard to tell for sure with her manufactured persona.

Some of her songs are really good, but I have to say, that particular video is absolute dreck. She talks like she's four with a mouthful of cottonballs while glamorizing teen streetwalking, a Julia Roberts Pretty Woman wannabe in a hairpiece. Can it get any dumber and more patronizing for this woman who grew up silver spooned to resort to that garbage? Can it get any more sultifyingly boring? Can it get any less actually sexy? NO IT CAN"T. JESUS.

[leakingdreams]

Some of her songs are really good, but I have to say, that particular video is absolute dreck. She talks like she's four with a mouthful of cottonballs while glamorizing teen streetwalking, a Julia Roberts Pretty Woman wannabe in a hairpiece. Can it get any dumber and more patronizing for this woman who grew up silver spooned to resort to that garbage? Can it get any more sultifyingly boring? Can it get any less actually sexy? NO IT CAN"T. JESUS.

Some of her songs are really good, but I have to say, that particular video is absolute dreck.

This is one of her better songs, IMO.

She talks like she's four with a mouthful of cottonballs while glamorizing teen streetwalking, a Julia Roberts Pretty Woman wannabe in a hairpiece.

It's part of the persona. She's 'lolita in the hood', so yes, she's supposed to sound sort of juvenile and lost, which is the basis of the lyrics.

Can it get any less actually sexy?

It's not supposed to be sexy. She's supposed to be a train-wreck of a person in this song, so it looks as though she's succeded in conveying that to you in one form or another ;-)

[ScarlettLux]

I used to really like her, before she blew up and had the terrible live SNL performance.. eurgh.. now she just irritates me. Shallow hipster trash .. especially re-watching that Ride video and the monologue at beginning & end LMFAO .. what does that even mean? It's totally dumb. Type..? Dumb IEI?

[golden]

...

I appreciate your attempt to enlighten me. However, I didn't think it was done on accident and am familiar with her persona. I don't think she comes across as a train wreck in this video. I think the video comes across as a very stupid, unenlightened, poorly conceived and executed ball of predictable schlock. My opinion, in other words, is reasonably well informed.

[leakingdreams]

I appreciate your attempt to enlighten me. However, I didn't think it was done on accident and am familiar with her persona. I don't think she comes across as a train wreck in this video. I think the video comes across as a very stupid, unenlightened, poorly conceived and executed ball of predictable schlock. My opinion, in other words, is reasonably well informed.

That's respectable. For me, the video is good when compared to the videos of her contemporaries (other pop starlets); if you have a desire for thought-provoking pop music, then I could see how this would indeed be shit. However, if I compare her to the likes of Swift et. al, her songwriting and conceptualizations are not that bad and succeed in her goal in creating this chaotic, gloomy individual with life stories and circumstances that have only existed in her head. That's ofc, IMO.

I'm also surprised at how long she's maintained the persona and musicality of it, which to me doesn't imply that she, herself is dumb. I find her to be quite crafty at creating visceral emotional atmospheres with her own signature vocal phrasing and lackadaisically melancholic lyrical slant.

[darya]

Some of her songs are really good, but I have to say, that particular video is absolute dreck. She talks like she's four with a mouthful of cottonballs while glamorizing teen streetwalking, a Julia Roberts Pretty Woman wannabe in a hairpiece. Can it get any dumber and more patronizing for this woman who grew up silver spooned to resort to that garbage? Can it get any more sultifyingly boring? Can it get any less actually sexy? NO IT CAN"T. JESUS.

Haha, I dig her music a lot and find her very sultry & sexy, but want to punch her in the face for being a poser and acting like a clueless slutty doe all at the same time : )

[glam]

why do hipster white girls think it's cool to wear Native American headdresses?

[wacey]

why do hipster white girls think it's cool to wear Native American headdresses?

haha, I just want to say omg to this...I've been to many music festivals and hippy EDM festivals and I love the headdresses. Its about having fun, its not disrespectful in my opinion.

Several of my friends don't agree with me, they think as many others do, that the headdresses are disrespectful to native cultures.

They are even banned now at many festivals. Its just like give me a break guys.

The times change and cultures change and the headdresses are awesome.

In my view, people take their cultures way to seriously sometimes. I bet 800 years ago, the native americans wore those dresses for the same reason people now do- because its fun to dress up in a costume and stomp around together to the beat of a drum.

[wacey]

Haha, I dig her music a lot and find her very sultry & sexy, but want to punch her in the face for being a poser and acting like a clueless slutty doe all at the same time : )

haha I'm dying, good observation.

[glam]

haha, I just want to say omg to this...I've been to many music festivals and hippy EDM festivals and I love the headdresses. Its about having fun, its not disrespectful in my opinion.

Several of my friends don't agree with me, they think as many others do, that the headdresses are disrespectful to native cultures.

They are even banned now at many festivals. Its just like give me a break guys.

The times change and cultures change and the headdresses are awesome.

In my view, people take their cultures way to seriously sometimes. I bet 800 years ago, the native americans wore those dresses for the same reason people now do- because its fun to dress up in a costume and stomp around together to the beat of a drum.

the fact is that it's an example of cultural appropriation, reinforces stereotypes, and is pretty offensive - you saying "omg get over it, it's just for fun" doesn't somehow make it harmless.

in the tribes that use them, the headdresses are an important spiritual and political symbol that only certain members of a tribe can wear. so no, they're not worn just "for fun" and to "stomp around together" like the way white people do when they wear them as a "fashion statement" at music festivals.

on top of all the bullshit that Native Americans have had to endure in their history since white people showed up to kill them and take their land, this little act of cultural appropriation is just the cherry on top.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_bonnet