They launched it with great fanfare, with so much advertising frame, that so many people put the fly in the ear: his album Born to Die (2012) immediately divided the audience between those who saw her as a unique artist and those who only saw her as a marketing product. The photos of her looked like those of a nice American girl who, looking at her closely, might not have been so pretty. Your name, King’s woolwas fake (it was born as Elizabeth Woolridge Grant in New York in 1985), but it was very suggestive, as it reminded her of a nonexistent Hollywood actress of the 1950s. Her detractors blamed her for being a rich girl (Rob Grant, her father, was an internet domain investor) and was considered a snob who had started playing the role of an old-fashioned and slightly eccentric star who couldn’t be taken very seriously. To get rid of doubts, I did it Born to Die and listened to it obsessively for several weeks (which in the case of a good friend’s teenage daughter had been months: strange unanimity between a minor and an aspiring glutton). The record worked for me compelling, hypnotic, absolutely personal and I would say so too timeless. I’m melodramatic tone It sounded slightly fake, but it didn’t matter and, anyway, the melancholy was genuineas well as forays into the chant of the torch and in a dream pop that would not have been out of tune in the films of David Lynch (some passages resembled those of Lynch and Badalamenti written for the deceased Giulio Cruise): not in vain had she been locked up in a Connecticut boarding school at the age of 15 for an early alcohol addiction.
Prior to Born to Die, Miss Grant had released a record that wasn’t a hit, Lana del Ray aka Lizzy Grant (2010), which she herself was responsible for making disappear after turning Ray into King (previously, she tried other aliases, such as May Jailer or Sparkle Jump Rope Queen). The success of Born to Die it was immediate and encouraged him to compose and record relentlessly, as he became an eccentric pop character whose mission seemed to be to locate the sinister hiding the so-called American dream. After inventing a character halfway between a sex symbol a retro and metaphysical student who was in college, Lana del Rey has become the fodder of tormented listeners without a specific age group (think of my friend’s teenage daughter and me); tormented beings, yes, endowed with a certain sense of humor that they also intuited in the melodramatic songs of our heroine, capable of being at the same time sincere and slightly ironic, using that tone that the Anglo-Saxons define irony.
After three albums that were simply correct, albeit somewhat repetitive –Ultraviolence (2014), honeymoon (2015) a Joy of life (2017, title of a song by Iggy Pop and one biopic film from Van Gogh hero Kirk Douglas—the one that strikes me when Miss Del Rey’s masterpiece arrived, Norman fucking Rockwell (2019), an impeccable album from start to finish in which Lana’s character is consolidated – “partly false, partly true, like everything”, as the Roxy Music song said For your pleasure – how Fatal woman who does not take herself completely seriously and as an American who has ambivalent feelings towards her country (hence the title: defining the leading illustrator of the american lifestyle how Norman Rockwell’s fucking has a nose). The best ironic description of herself can be found in this verse of one of the songs on the album: Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me … (Hope is a danger for a woman like me ..). To which he adds, in a low voice, But I do.
The main irony in Lana del Rey’s work consists of lawsuit for plagiarism that Radiohead put on him for the song Get it for free, included in Joy of life, which the group considered a copy of their famous one Creep, which in turn ended up in court for a complaint of Alberto Hammond (won the trial), who felt he shared too many lines with his old theme for the Hollies The air I breathe: the great Thom Yorke became the irrigated sprinkler.
The albums after Norman fucking Rockwell they don’t reach the same height, but there are always moments of special inspiration. Those who hated Lana del Rey seem to have stopped hating and the artist has joined the list of safe pop values. The main result of her, in my opinion, is having reinvented herself as an ironic megastar and having composed the right material for her character. Sorry about your plastic surgery tendencybut I do not exclude that this is also part of the peculiar, charming and funny character that he decided to become when he stopped being called Lizzy Grant.
