How the stylized singer became a casualty of her own hype.
It used to be that artists’ careers were measured in terms of albums and years; nowadays, they’re measured in the timespan between their first YouTube video upload and the moment they become the subject of a Hitler/Downfall parody . By that yardstick, Lana Del Rey is already over—and her debut major-label release only comes out this week.
Though she presents herself as a ’60s pin-up—with a come-hither, torch-singer sound that complements her look like a pair of go-go boots—Del Rey’s instantaneous success could have only played out in the totally wired 2010s. Since her single, “Video Games,” appeared on YouTube last August, the performer has signed to Interscope, scooped up Q Magazine ’s “Next Big Thing” award, appeared on Live With Jools Holland , racked up play-counts well into the tens of millions on your video-streaming site of choice and been obsessed over on every international music website of note.
She’s also been the target of intense scrutiny and skepticism, most of which hinges on the rusty saw that is authenticity. Del Rey may have shunned her past as a plainly attired aspiring singer-songwriter (recording under her birth name, Lizzy Grant), and adopted a hyper-stylized pose and alias, but she’s hardly the first artist to reinvent her persona and distance herself from her earliest musical efforts. (Hey there, Alanis!) While her makeover apparently involved getting a new set of lips, she’s also not the only artist rumoured to have sought out certain aesthetic readjustments. She’s not the first singer to pursue a concurrent modelling career, and she’s just one of many indie cred–seeking artists born into privilege. (Del Rey’s father, an investment tycoon, reportedly helped bankroll her 2010 independent release.) She’s not the first musician to swiftly parlay internet-bred renown into a major-label record deal, and she’s certainly not the only one who’s appeared to be completely out of her element while transitioning from online phenom into real-life performer.
But Lana Del Rey is perhaps the first artist to embody all of these red flags in a single manicured package—one that came completely unravelled during a disastrous Jan. 14 appearance on Saturday Night Live , eliciting the Twitter equivalent of a public stoning (as well as the aforementioned post-show YouTube critique from der Führer).
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The expediency with which reactions to Del Rey have turned from raves to revolt highlights a great irony of the digital age: In an era where we change our Facebook profile photos daily and carefully curate the version of ourselves that we present to our peers online, we’re still suspicious of a performer who seemingly transforms their public image overnight. And we’re still outraged when the real-life version of a person doesn’t quite live up to the idealized online one. (Even though the institution of internet dating should have preconditioned us to expect this outcome.)
Image is indeed everything when it comes to Lana Del Rey, but that’s not an inherently dubious conceit—to deny the value of artifice in pop music is to deny everyone from Little Richard to David Bowie to Nicki Minaj. Sure, there was something opportunistic about the singer’s metamorphosis from Lizzy to Lana: The Betty Draper-esque bored-housewife act and Super-8 feel of her “Video Games” clip conform to both the mainstream appetite for post–Mad Men retro chic and the film-noir atmospheres mined by left-field artists like Vancouver’s Dirty Beaches, respectively. But even if you see Lana Del Rey’s career as some calculated bid for both pop stardom and hipster cool, you can’t accuse her of taking the easy route musically. Her signature single, “Video Games,” is an atypically languorous ballad that reveals its charms slowly, with subtle shifts in melodic structure and an ascendant chorus that seemingly appears out of thin air. And though I haven’t been quite as taken with Del Rey’s subsequent singles, her brand of misty-eyed melancholy still feels bravely anomalous compared to the over-caffeinated Katys her major-label bosses are hoping she can compete with on the pop charts.
The problem with Lana Del Rey is not that she presents a contrived version of herself but that, as a live performer, she does not yet appear fully invested in that character. This was abundantly clear in that Saturday Night Live appearance—instead of a velvet-gowned vamp who stalked the stage like she owned it, she resembled a misanthropic teenager who was forced to dress up for a relative’s wedding. And the dreamy drawl that spawned more than 40 million YouTube hits gave way to awkward shifts in vocal pitch, as though someone was randomly flicking a switch behind her neck. It was an oddly bloodless performance for someone whose new album boasts the overly melodramatic title Born to Die . Hype or no hype, without the passion to back up her persona, Lana Del Rey could very well be doomed to fail.
