Rogueish
Lana Del Rey - Cola
11/21/12
“My pussy tastes like Pepsi cola” really is the perfect Lana Del Rey lyric. The sticky-sweet erotics of nostalgic americana.
From Ned's Review of Lana Del Rey→
01/25/12
It sounds like the soundtrack to a James Bond movie directed by and starring twelve year olds.
In more “descriptions of Lana Del Rey that I think are supposed to be critical but which make me want to listen to her album” news.
(The rest of this review is sort of positive-ish although in the rather patronising “it’s for tween girls so let’s lower our standards” genre, of which I am not a huge fan).
01/25/12
The songs come off like 15 different variations on a drunk chick at the bar trying to convince someone to come home with her.
I misread this as claiming that each song sounds like 15 different variations on a drunk chick at the bar, which actually isn’t entirely inaccurate and is an aesthetic I could kind of get behind.
(Source: stereogum.com)
01/15/12
I suppose messing up an appearance on Saturday Night Live has a certain amount of potential hipster appeal. That is, the idea of Lana Del Rey as a delicate and faintly ethereal artist who, nervously, falls apart in the harsh gaze of a middle-American TV audience kind of fits with her narrative. That “Lana Del Rey” is fairly obviously a performance is what makes her a bit more interesting than she otherwise might be; but if I really thought she was sufficiently committed to the performance to fuck up her first US TV appearance, then I would be impressed.
12/11/11
It turns out a friend of mine is friends-of-friends with Lana Del Rey; more than a little embarrassing that it took this personal contingency to get me to pay attention to her music, which, I discovered when my friend played me this track, “Born to Die,” is really good. But I kind of blame the internet, because all the discussion seemed to be about how “Video Games” was about a guy who plays video games, what a loser, which sounds super boring. And even though “Video Games” isn’t her best song, it’s more complicated than this description suggests. Just on an obvious linguistic level, it’s not at all clear who’s playing the video games: the “you” of the first two verses, or the “him” of the second two (are these the same people)? Or Del Rey herself (I can’t see anything in the lyrics that rules that out)? And then there’s the way that “video games” floats as a signifier through the song: actual video games, probably, before the first chorus; but how do video games relate to “playing pool and wild darts” or the narrator’s “idea of fun”? At this point, the most obvious reading is that it’s the narrator herself who is “playing video games.” Is this a reference to the general idea of “playing games” in a relationship? Or a metaphorical description of her relationship, the one she’s having or the one she’s imagining, as escapist or ersatz or instrumental?
Also, according to Google, no-one has written a post about Lana Del Rey and gamification, which surely would have been some crack link-bait six months ago.
