Lana Del Rey - Born to Die

IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"you like Lana Del Rey? fine. if you want to defend "her" music, then make a good case for why or what about the "fabricated inauthenticity" (a description no one had a problem with) works, and is appealing.
don't go around saying "the Real is horrible" and "authenticity is meaningless" and similar shit-turds."
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But I never said anything like that. And I think that MrSloane was being slightly tongue in cheek when he said that - I took him to mean that real life can be horrible, what's wrong with some escapism every now and again? But I could be wrong of course.
Anyway, yeah, I like the song a lot. I find it interesting that she is so obviously manufactured to do what she does that she can do it really well. But if the song is no good then that is not interesting on its own. For me, the tune resonates and connects and the fact that something so fake can do that is all the more remarkable and makes me wonder how such a trick can be pulled off.
You said that the line of authenticity/fake and the line of good/bad are not the same so you are admitting that some "fake" things can be better than some "real" things - how is that?
 
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Beast of Burden
The Alarm are massive in Germany. Maybe not massive, but popular. I was on a ship to Hamburg once, on a very rough crossing. As I never get seasick, I was the only person in the bar apart from a German postman who'd been on holiday in England watching Premier League football matches. When I told him I was from Wales, his immediate (and only) response was -- "ah, yes! The Alarm!"
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
What's that go to do with Lana Del Rey though? Is it cos they were the Welsh Clash? Maybe if you are a copy of a fake band you become real - though that's probably wishful thinking and it doesn't work like that.
 
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Beast of Burden
The thing about pop music is that it demands a response that is by its nature out of context, immediate and extreme, and is affected by "authenticity" and "inauthenticity" only in the sense that it alters image or aesthetic. As soon as you start to evaluate pop music using objective criteria, you end up with Robert Sandall and Paul Gambaccini and the Pop Scholars, and the entire conceit falls apart. Pop is all about context and image. It is immediate and superficial, like lust or anger. It is pretentious and inauthentic. That's its strength. The Germans find something in the Alarm and the Maoris find something in UB40 and maybe their radically decontextualised response locates something unique in these bands we could never see, or was never intended, or isn't even "there" as such. But it's largely irrelevant. What they make of the music and how they use it is as interesting, and creative, as the music itself. (Dick Hebdige, Aged 33 and a 1/2.)
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
IdleRich said:
For me, the tune resonates and connects and the fact that something so fake can do that is all the more remarkable and makes me wonder how such a trick can be pulled off.
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yes interesting in some ways. but then again, loads of films calculatedly play with emotional triggers in predictable and formulaic ways, (those who went to film school can especially attest), yet "resonate" and "connect" with the audience. which is not all that remarkable.

IdleRich said:
You said that the line of authenticity/fake and the line of good/bad are not the same so you are admitting that some "fake" things can be better than some "real" things - how is that?
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in the example i gave of YT or Gentleman being possibly better than a hypothetical Jamaican artist making tunes-by-numbers --- YT and Gentleman are inauthentic in the sense of B. -- outsiders imitating, and hypothetical Jamaican dude is authentic in this way -- from that culture. BUT YT and Gentleman can be argued to be making music from the heart and real life experience, so in the sense of A, they are more authentic than Generic Rastaman.

here is my working definition of Authenticity again if people don't want to click back looking for it:

A. a product having resulted from the actual subjective life experiences of its maker, created with his/her aesthetic and otherwise decisions, as opposed to decisions made from more impersonal and alienated methods such as statistical information, focus groups, etc.

B. a product originating from within a collective historical body, the shared language and customs of a social group, the cohesion of distilled individual subjective experience over time, which we can here call Culture; as opposed to imitations of such products, by superficially appropriating its language, aesthetics, or characteristics, from agents which exist outside of the particular tradition, the particular culture.
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also on the level of pure craftsmanship the inauthentic can, probably more often than on other levels, be better than the authentic.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yes, that does answer my question Craner.
No-one likes Scritti-Politti.

"yes interesting in some ways. but then again, loads of films calculatedly play with emotional triggers in predictable and formulaic ways, (those who went to film school can especially attest), yet "resonate" and "connect" with the audience. which is not all that remarkable."
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Well, lots try, few succeed I'd say. Same with music. What makes those that succeed, succeed? One of the factors that can help that is a sense of the music or film being in some way genuine, authentic if you like, but surely that's only one factor and it can be swamped by others.

"BUT YT and Gentleman can be argued to be making music from the heart and real life experience, so in the sense of A, they are more authentic than Generic Rastaman."
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But you could say that about UB40 or any other so-called inauthentic bands which have used a scene to which they are not obviously connected to to talk about their own life experiences.

"also on the level of pure craftsmanship the inauthentic can, probably more often than on other levels, be better than the authentic."
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Yeah, that's trivially true but we weren't talking just about technical virtuosity.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Interesting

She always seemed to have to idea of this throwback Nancy Sinatra meets “Madmen” meets current white trash thing as her entire theme. She was obsessed with images of swimming pools, drinking tab soda and just a certian low brow elegance that wasn’t common in music.
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In fact the whole article(s) is quite interesting although maybe more for what they about the music industry than about her.
 
yyaldrin

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
Nice article yea, spot on writing this in 2010:

Since I’m an honest wifed up guy, my first thought when seeing her (which would normally be, ‘I would like to have sex with this person.’) was ‘This girl is insanely marketable.’
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Z

zhao

there are no accidents
article seems to make her seem a little bit more... AUTHENTIC than maybe before no? what with the continuity of themes and such (which i thought was an entirely calculated mix: Americana kitsch / 60s nostalgia / skaters / 2pac / etc)
 
M

muser

Well-known member
ok so what exactly is Lana Del Ray supposed to be inauthentically trying to replicate?? I've heard a range of unrelated suggestions in this thread and the other one she was talked about in. (Chris Isak/ Nancy Sinatra/ Gospel music from the 30's to the 60's, David Lynch)

I only really like 3 of her songs I've heard the rest I find really dull but didn't strike me as inauthentic to anything just a bit dull.
 
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