Lana Del Rey, the inexplicably popular sort-of-indie it girl of the moment, may be headed for one of the briefest moments in the spotlight of any pop artist in recent memory.
She rocketed out of obscurity on the back of the music video for her single “Video Games” (which has been viewed more than 23 million times on YouTube, for some reason). Then she became the subject of intense debate on music blogs, where she was either crowned the next queen of indie(ish) pop or vilified as a poser with no real underground credibility. Most recently, she seemingly justified the scorn she had garnered with an off-pitch appearance on Saturday Night Live.
All this before she had even released her first major album, Born to Die, which is finally debuting just as Del Rey’s star appears to be fading.
It’s not likely to save her career.
A lot of the backlash against Del Rey has focused on her lack of “authenticity” or “indie cred,” whatever that means. Those aren’t the real issues — whatever pretentions of artistry she may have, she’s pretty clearly a pop starlet, not a sensitive artiste, so focusing on her emotional honesty is missing the point.
No, the problem with Del Rey is she’s just boring. Her sultry persona is just as carefully calculated as Katy Perry’s, but at least Perry has the (hollow) charisma of a star; just look at Del Rey’s vacant-eyed attempts at sex appeal on SNL to see she doesn’t have the magnetism — much less the talent — to maintain her status as a legitimate (if baffling) phenomenon.
Her overproduced tracks drag on interminably, lacking in either melodies that stick in your head or beats that get your foot tapping, which makes them essentially worthless as pop songs. Her choruses run the gamut from laughable (“Money is the reason we exist/ Everybody knows it, it’s a fact/ Kiss kiss”) to disgusting (the album’s low point comes when she sings the opening line of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita in a sexy-schoolgirl voice).
I would call it a trainwreck, but a trainwreck at least has a kind of sick fascination to it. This is just bland. I’m not sure why she ever got her 15 minutes in the first place, but I’m willing to bet they’re about to come to an end.
VERDICT: Boring, boring, boring. What else do you have, Internet?
gifford@umdbk.com
