If you hadn't heard the name Lana Del Rey before last month, you're probably in the majority. With her heavy-lidded eyes and bubble lips, the 1950s throwback queen resided in the realm of Pitchfork-esque obscurity until a month ago. Once you listen to her older discography it's easy to see why. Her cultivated siren song appeal, which has started to attract new fans, never appeared before the release of her newest album, Born to Die.
A throwback to the blues era, Born to Die offers something akin to the steamy sounds of an old-fashioned night club singer, but it is the words Del Rey sings which attract listeners more than the way she sings them.
During her already infamous performance on Saturday Night Live last month, Del Rey sounded like an awkward teenager in a bad middle school talent show. As the singer later explained, she doesn't focus on live performance, choosing to put most of her energy toward developing her lyrics, which are, for her, poetry. Born to Die reconciles these distinctive lyrics with the commercial appeal of smoothly edited vocals.
What makes Del Rey so impressive is that we not only forgive her imperfect voice and idiosyncrasies, we embrace them as part of her mystique. Throughout the new album, Del Rey evokes images of bluegrass and bygone days of romanticized love, complementing nicely her rural upbringing in Lake Placid, New York.
The new album presents Del Rey as a feminine vision of the United States, invoking images of fireworks, motorbikes and flags. This appeal to nostalgia is perhaps most blatant on the hazy "National Anthem," which goes "Tell me I'm your national anthem / red, white, blues in the sky."
Similarly, the sultry allure of Del Rey's soaring voice and the songs' slow pulsing bass synthesize almost too well, creating an emotionally potent mix of the past and present. Del Rey's appeal comes from a mixture of this modern style, her widespread viral marketing, the controversy surrounding her and also strangely the nostalgia which pervades her music. Each song fantasizes about some dark and infinitely more beautiful past which we, as listeners, also begin to crave.
The song "Blue Jeans" emerges as the album's seminal song, as it encompasses Del Rey's glamour, nostalgic patriotism and romantic angst. Pictures of daisy dukes, mascara and full-bodied hair surface as Del Rey sings lines such as "It was like James Dean" contrasted with "You were sorta punk rock / I grew up on hip-hop." These lyrics exemplify Del Rey's use of both the classic and the new.
The power of the album as a whole lies in these images and in the carefully calculated poetry of Del Rey's lyrics. Born to Die deserves its spot as a best-seller because it stands out within Del Rey's body of work and within the general musical canon. Del Rey shows us exactly how 'different' a singer needs to be to balance popularity and eccentricity.
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