Ouch.
All this for a singer-songwriter whose first major-label record album, Born to Die (Interscope), is only now coming out (on Tuesday), and who, until three months ago, was a little-known artist with a few intriguing self-made videos floating around on YouTube. But in the span of three months she’s fallen from lauded Internet sensation into a Grand Canyon–size snakepit of haterade, which climaxed when she appeared on Saturday Night Live two weeks ago, an appearance derided as being a massive catastrophe. The performance—during which she warbled unsteadily through her two singles, “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans,” while she swished awkwardly in a long ball gown—compelled even Brian Williams to write a personal email to Gawker’s Nick Denton saying she’d “had one of the worst outings in SNL history last night.”
As a character on Portlandia likes to say: “She’s so OVER!”
Or is she?
Lana Del Rey has already run through four of her nine lives, but she might prove to be resilient. Bill Werde, the editorial director of Billboard, thinks she’s just getting started.
“I think that if you are talking to online music cognoscenti, they would say the hype cycle has gone back and forth seven times,” he says. “But if you talk to my mom in Delaware, she has no idea Lana Del Rey exists.”
In fact, appealing to the 20,000 tastemakers on Twitter isn’t the point: “That’s not the game,” says Werde. “The game for Lana Del Rey is to sell a million albums. She’s signed to Interscope. I think if you take a longer view of this, this notion that she’s been built up and torn down seven times, that’s a tempest in a teapot.”
“The reality is I think she had a fairly steady rise and awareness online to people that pay attention to these things, and then she went to Saturday Night Live, and that elevated a whole level of conversation,” he says. “Can she rebound from that? Absolutely.”
Part of the reason Del Rey inspires so much ire is that her persona is somewhat made up. Three minutes of Internet browsing will tell you a few things: She had once been a struggling singer-songwriter named Lizzy Grant. Her self-produced videos as Grant—a pastiche of nostalgic Americana imagery—were remarkably similar to that of “Video Games.” She is from Lake Placid, in upstate New York, where her father was in the domain-name business. It is not clear whether she was a trust-fund baby or she really lived in a trailer park, which is what she later told Complex magazine.
But, most controversially, she looked quite different as Lizzy Grant. She used to wear her hair short and bleached it blonde. She did not wear ball gowns. Her lips were considerably thinner. (She has denied getting lip injections.) She did not look like the gangsta Nancy Sinatra—which is how she describes herself. She looked more Mary Ann than Ginger.
But then her new music, now produced by Emile Haynie of Kid Cudi fame, stole a dash of Mazzy Star’s heroin slumber, fused it with so-called sad core soul, and paired it with mournful, poignant lyrics about a lovelorn girl. And her vocals were being sung several octaves lower. The result: Lizzy Grant had turned herself from sweet and airy to sultry and dark.
Or someone had turned her into that.
Perhaps people were upset, says Village Voice music editor Maura Johnston, because “they believed in a particular bill of goods they thought they were buying, and it turned out they weren’t.”
They were mad that she was maybe a rich girl, and she was maybe faking being a struggling singer-songwriter: “The class thing—you don’t hear this in the States that much,” says rock critic Chuck Eddy, author of the recently released book Rock and Roll Always Forgets, who also writes for Spin and Rolling Stone. “But at this time, the United States is probably losing its delusion about us being a classless society. I don’t know if this has anything to do with that or not.” Besides, he doesn’t understand why people object to her supposedly rich roots: “It seems like there’s always been trust-fund babies in indie rock. What else would they do? It’s not like there are trust-fund babies making heavy metal or country.”
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