The Lana Del Rey Problem

Okay, this is happening and I'm going to have to deal with it.

Have we all watched Lana Del Rey (the only thing keeping me from putting her name in quotation marks is a rather stern admonition from Theodor Adorno to not use 'nem shits ironically) flame out on Saturday Night Live yet?  Okay, I'll wait here for those of you from the remedial class to catch up.  With us now?  Okay, down the rabbit hole (Christ, am I out of wine already?  This is going to get rough.) we go.

Layer:  The performer on Saturday Night Live is attempting to embody a James Ellroy slash (intended) David Lynch Old Hollywood tragic starlet persona.  She is failing.  Her voice, meant to be a Billy Holliday-style sultry croon, is all over the goddamn place.  She sounds more like Joanna Newsom than anyone genre-appropriate, which means she's hitting every note BUT the right one.  Her body language is awkward and muted.  Her role demands bold, confident motions that convey their semiotic meaning with a direct, sensual strength that simultaneously evokes a submissive vulnerability and a predatory, sexual strength.  Instead, she moves like she's been drugged.

Layer:  Lana Del Rey was born Elizabeth Grant.  Her father is the kind of millionaire where I don't really understand what he does.  She claims to have been performing in Brooklyn since she was 17, to little or no acclaim.  Her father hired a management team for her.  These are the people who rechristened her, fusing Hollywood legend Lana Turner with the midsize 80's sedan the Ford Del Rey (I admit to not understanding this part AT ALL).  T-shirts and jeans were replaced with satin evening gowns, lips were inflated, and Lana's vocal register shifted from a mezzo-soprano to a smokey contralto.

Layer:  Official internet canon allows two pre-Lana recordings by Lizzy Grant.  They are the Kill Kill EP and the Lana Del Rey A.K.A. Lizzy Grant full-length.  This album may also be called Nevada.  Or Nevada  may be a totally different album of earlier songs that sound a lot like Cat Power.  Except for the disco songs... which sound like they belong on an entirely different album.  Which may or may not exist.  Get me?


Layer: The song at the top of the page is a fucking KILLER.  This is where the country-indie-pop of her early work meets the club-crushing production of the new album and the doomed glamour of the new persona and the submissive sexuality and nihilistic desperation that have been through-lines of her entire career and...

Layer:  In the lyric "Open up a beer/and you say get over here/and play your video game", who exactly is playing the game?  Is it the male subject of the song, or the narrator (Lana)?  Is the video game literal, in which case these lyrics are TERRIBLE, or is the game a metaphor, in which case these lyrics are probably FILTHY?


Layer: Why is the performer in the "Born to Die" video so much more convincing than the live performer on SNL?  Is it perhaps because the mise en scene of the video demands a perpetually blank expression?  Despite its provocative imagery, this video dosen't really demand a wide emotional range of its star.  Also, the shot where the tattooed Vincent Gallo Clone sleeps with his hand around Lana's throat is pretty fucked up.


Analysis:  Is there perhaps something disturbing about a young woman (or, worse, her management team) erasing any trace of her early work?  What if her father pays for her reinvention as a fallen-angel-virgin-harlot-superstar?  What if she seems to suffer from severe stage fright?  Are lyrics like "Let me put on a show for you, Daddy" part of the Hollywood Babylon image, or are they indicative of something deeper, darker?  And is it disingenuous for the daughter of a millionaire to constantly use imagery of trailer parks, dive bars, and the American South?

Fucking probably.  Also, the stage fright thing means she's DESPERATELY unprepared for the amount of attention she's about to receive.  If Lana/her management/her father/the world want a tragic second act for the drama they've worked so hard to manufacture, they could at least have a little patience.  Amy Winehouse's corpse is, after all, still warm.

The Dark-Skinned Christopher Walken

I'm gone for two whole months, and I come back with a post that's only about ONE SONG?  YUP.  Because the song in question is the version of "Slick Talkin" by Tame One that appears on the Weathermen mix CD The Conspiracy.  Got all that?  Good.  'Cos I've got something to say.

Hip-hop is a single-driven medium.  Just like Rock 'n Roll used to be until, I dunno, the mid-to-late-sixties.   Even with three decades of excellent, artistically unified hip-hop albums, the genre still runs on short, compelling stabs of innovation (and, sometimes, moronic novelty and lowest-common-denominator vulgarity... not that innovation and vulgarity are mutually exclusive).  This is why, say, Tyler the Creator is still super important even though his album is an uneven, indulgent mess that would have made a really excellent EP.  The visceral thrill and sonic challenge of "Sandwiches" are so important that it's almost like "Boppin' Bitch" never happened.  Almost.

Anyway.  As with most genres, hip-hop innovation is a bottom-up proposition, with underground artists churning out dense, challenging work so sonically extreme it borders on the avant-garde.  These ideas then either win their creators a shot at the mainstream brass ring, or they get strip-mined by creeps like P. Diddy and Will. I. Am.  Either way, broke and hungry motherfuckers drive the artistic development that allows rich assholes to make Rolling Stone year-end lists, and if anyone can find a credible example of top-down progression in hip-hop, I have a particularly delicious-looking hat I am prepared to eat.

The upshot of all this is that, due to bad luck or excessive weirdness or old-fashioned ugliness, there's an almost infinite supply of really AMAZING rap singles that never reached anything like mainstream consciousness.  And "Slick Talkin" is a PRIME example.

A showcase for PCP-addled New Jersey MC Tame One, "Slick Talkin" appeared in a SEVERELY (one minute, forty-five seconds) truncated version on Tame's debut solo album, When Rappers Attack.  THIS version, which was buried at the exact center of a "mix CD" from a rap crew (The Weathermen) that only a handful of surly white kids liked, features an additional verse by Breeze Brewin (formerly of the Juggaknots) and clocks in at a much more satisfying 2:24.

The beat is by producer/rapper/curmudgeon/author J-Zone, and if he's ever done anything better than this, you all need to cram it in my ears RIGHT NOW.  We open with the sound of thunder and a sort of typewriter/freight-train noise that will be percolating in the background for the whole song.  Tame give shout-outs to J-Zone and DJ Mighty-Mi, there's an ascending synth squeal, and we're off to the races.  

Some sort of far-eastern stringed instrument (a shamisen, maybe?) gets looped to the point of dizzying abstraction, a classic boom-bap beat drops, and a CRUSHING bass tone keeps pulsing out on the first off-beat of every other measure.  The track is queasy and punishing and relentless and awkward at the same time, claustrophobic despite the vast amounts of space it contains...

And Tame One starts to rap.  "The dark-skinned Christopher Walken/Slick talkin'/Out in the bricks flossin'/T-shirt ripped off and/Wrapped around my head like it's a turban/Drinkin' Hennessy Bourbon/Cursin' all over the Clean Version".  And on.  And on. AND ON. And then, as suddenly as it started he's tossing you in the Passaic River and talking about White Castle.  It's here that the album version abruptly cuts off, which is too bad, because the Breeze Brewin verse is a cool wind after the furnace blast we just experienced.  It's nimble, clever ("I start with an open mind/But let me get vexed/I start with a peace sign/But quickly dead the index"), and, while excellent, it's mainly a nice come down from how stunning that Tame verse was.

This brings me to an important point about Rap Lyrics:  They Are Not Poetry.  Not necessarily.  The function of a rap lyric is to be PERFORMED, and performed WITH A BEAT.  Breeze's verse is, I would argue, more satisfying as poetry than Tame's.  The rhyme scheme is more challenging, the metaphors are less obvious.  It features some compelling uses of alliteration and is intellectually light years ahead of Tame's "Street team full of weed fiends that'll merk you".  And yet, Tame's verse fucking BURIES this shit.  This is because it fits perfectly into the empty spaces the beat creates.  It's thick with menace and swagger.  If it's dumb, it's IMMACULATELY dumb.

Look, I'm not trying to get you to run out and buy any Tame One albums (even though he's got a couple good ones, his recent work makes me think the PCP has finally cooked the part of his brain that did the rapping), but I wanted you all to hear this.  It's a GEM, and there's more where that came from.  Shit, there's probably some kid making one RIGHT NOW.  And that's why I love hip-hop.