Lana Del Rey: Indie music critics are turning on their supposed "next big thing."
Lana Del Rey has been built up over the last few months as the great white hope for music in 2012, a songwriter with the creativity to push herself in a unique direction while crafting music with hooks that are timeless and unforgettable. She’s “the gangster Nancy Sinatra,” a sultry musical minx who pouts her lips and controls the world.
Two weeks before her album Born To Die was set to release, she became the second artist to appear as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live who had not yet actually issued an album. She was a YouTube sensation, a modern example of where internet marketing can get you.
Hours after her performance, however, the ground was shaking beneath her career as a backlash mounted and the internet which built her up began rabidly tearing her down.
To get a better idea of what happened, it’s worth taking a look at a sketch which had aired earlier in the episode of SNL called “You Can Do Anything.” Vanessa Bayer and Bill Hader are hosts of a talk show touting the modern generation of YouTube sensations. “Now, thanks to technology, and everyone being huge pussies about everything, it doesn’t matter if you have skills or training or … experience, you can do it!” Hader says, describing a trio of inept performers who all feel they’re more famous than they truly are.
The rise of Lana Del Rey mirrors that sketch in a way which makes it seem oddly prescient in regard to what was coming when the singer would soon take the stage to perform her biggest hit to date, “Video Games.” She’d worked under her birth name, Lizzie Grant, for years and even got a recording deal with an independent label, but when “Video Games” became a hit on YouTube, she soon found herself signed to Interscope Records, which gave her the ability to fully eliminate the Lizzie Grant background details and fully become Lana Del Rey. Then the press run began, building her up relentlessly as the next big thing in music, when really her only experience had been in the studio.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re good at making videos, in an arena where you can tweak things until they’re exactly the version of your inner thoughts you want to release to the world, that’s perfectly reasonable. So is recording music in a studio, where a good singer can sound confident and assured, never having to step outside her comfort zone.
But on a live stage – particularly SNL’s live stage, appearing before millions on an iconic television show where image and sound don’t always blissfully mix – there’s not always a guarantee that you’ll get it right. One take, in front of a live audience, can make or break your carefully crafted public image. In the space of ninety minutes, a carefully built world where Lana Del Rey could be considered one of 2012′s surest things becomes one where the two-week wait to actually hear her debut album becomes a gauntlet she’ll have to run, hoping that she can survive the backlash and emerge at the other end unscathed.
Tags: backlash, Born To Die, indie music, Lana Del Rey, music criticism, Saturday Night Live, Video Games
So hipster douchebags are douchebags. Tell me something that isn’t the subject of thousands of pictures on memebase.
More importantly: can she sing?
To go with an acapella piece for a live debut is a risky bet, especially when it doesn’t sound like her natural voice is the smokey/sultry type.
Your piece is my intro to her sound, and my first impression is that she sounds like a derivative of what a younger generation thinks the past sounded like. Mad men meets teenage drama meets Florence & The Machine market.
(keep up the work – really enjoyed your Achtung Baby article)
How about Florence Henderson meets a bottle of Scotch?
lemmy always says: “Real bands do tour. If you don’t tour, then you are just some guys who get together in the studio now and again. You have to take it to the people and see if they return it to you.”
Well said daxypoo…well said!
The Alan Parsons Project never toured.* They were a studio-only outfit and that suited me just fine. I was never missing anything by never hearing those songs in a place with horrible sound quality and crowded with drunks.
Steely Dan went for a couple of decades without ever touring. I have no problem with that.
Yes wasted 10 years on the road without any new studio material. Now they’re old and they’ll never get that decade back. Bad move. (Jethro Tull: same deal.)
I go to concerts, sure, but if it comes down to a choice, I’d always prefer a new studio album.
(*For nitpicky trivia buffs: They toured as “Alan Parsons” years later, after Eric Woolfson was gone and the “Project” was over.)
It’s Saturday, it’s Saturday
Gotta get down on Saturday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend
Saturday, Saturday
For me personally it’s not very good music but I get what people say about her voice. Just not much there though otherwise. Hard to argue it’s really any worse than most of the stuff out there nowadays. She did better on Jools Holland in Oct. than SNL but that’s not saying a lot since even an optimal performance is pretty skinny. If you’ve ever only heard 12 songs in your life you might think it “different.”
Born To Die.
Was she in The Fountainhead?
What gives with all the angst? It’s just music, fer cryin’ out loud. Like what you like, who cares if someone else likes it or not. This tragic hipsterism is pathetic. Why do these people drag the faddish insecurities and petty squabbling of High School into their adult lives? Is the “indie” scene filled with High School losers who never fit in and never got over it?
Yes. Next question?
They’re not dragging anything into their adult lives but aiming at teenagers.
I worked in a music store in the early ’90s. We had a lot of people coming in for obscure, indie gangster rap, and they wanted it NOW! When we said, “Oh, we have to order that from their [very small] distributor,” we were flat out told by the customers, “I’m not going to want it next week!”
I suggested to my boss, “We should just sell the empty cassette cases. That’s all these guys want: to put that cassette case on the passenger seat of their car so their friends can see it.”
Wait, people still watch SNL? I find that hard to believe, even for aging hipster douchenozzles.
3 pages of additional exposure for an already overexposed young “talent” and not a single link to her SNL performance so we can judge for ourselves. Really?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zrvD-o8cII
And yes, it was really bad.
My original submitted draft had a YouTube link, which I believe had been taken down, so my editors removed the link and did not replace it with another. Apologies, if that made you go look for one
I’m not familiar with Ms. Whateverhernameis but I’ve seen the phenomenon. one used to have to pay some dues, play some hell-holes, get some blisters on your fingers, polish your craft etc. to become a great musician and now thanks to American Idol and things like this, these young people think they can just step into the spotlight and shine. Welcome to the real world. They may have talent but quite frankly without the gravitas that actual work in the field brings, who cares?
Yay, Hootie!
Appearing as a relative unknown on SNL is like betting the pot. Sometimes it is a career killer, like with Ashlee Simpson. But sometimes it can put you on the music map literally instantly.
I remember many years ago when I watched SNL regularly, an unfamilar group called 10,000 Maniacs appeared. They were in great form that night, and nailed their two songs. I was so blown away by Natalie Merchant’s voice and their unique style, that I went out and bought “In My Tribe” the next day.
Natalie Merchant left the Maniacs and had a hugely successful solo career, although I personally liked her stuff with the Maniacs better. But I think they probably would have lingered on the fringes of pop music (this being pre-Internet days), but The SNL appearance gave them favorable national exposure they wouldn’t have received otherwise.
Looks like she listened to some producer from SNL and they did what they always do, EFFED it UP. She is young and can recover if she is strong mentally. Then again the botoxed lips may have caused the train to come off the rails.
Reading the reviews on pitchfork are like hanging out with my friend Paul (not his real name) who is a bassist in a band. I love having drinks with him in a bar while hearing his thoughts on music as people pump money into the jukebox.
Every new band sucks.
New music sucks.
Every band/artist/song you like sucks.
All bands that were great now suck.
I only like bands that you’ve never heard of.
By the time you hear music from the bands that I like, they’ve started sucking.
Music snobs crack me up every time.
I once recommended an artist to a friend who had a ton of CDs and really liked music. He said didn’t like the artist cuz she was too popular. In all the years I knew that guy it was the stupidist thing he ever said to me. I was so stunned I didn’t even say anything cuz I knew he was too far gone.
Autotune, making street buskers sound better than Sinatra or the Beatles since 2008, provided the computers mix the sound before it hits your ears.
She should have known better…
I’d love to hear her do a duet with Joanna Newsom.