Tee-El, Dee-ar, El-Dee-ar.
Well, it’s no surprise that Lana Del Rey has managed to sell a number one record in under a week.
“Oh hi, I didn’t see you there. Let me continue to show off my crotch, nails, lips, hair, and Victorian fainting couch.”
That’s right, and what’s more is that she’s moved more units than the entire UK top 10 combined. Wow. What an accomplishment. Especially when your whole career is based around people either loving or hating you, and walking that line between “legitimacy” and “fraudulence”.
As much as I find her music unremarkable and …ehh…what do you call people who flaunt luxury and privilege in the face of massive debt and poverty?
Ah fuck it, here’s some lyrics.
Money is the anthem
Of success
So before we go out
What’s your address?
I’m your National Anthem
God, you’re so handsome
Take me to the Hamptons
Bugatti Veyron
Normally I’d rail on and on about how over-produced tripe like this is corrupting youth and teaching them to value looks and money over everything else, but they seem to do that anyway.
In case you didn’t know exactly where the Hamptons were. To me, it seems like Orange County East, but I’m Canadian.
However, I have a question: What did everyone expect? I know it’s bad form, but I’ll follow this with another question: Isn’t the entertainment industry perpetually chastised for being all flash and no substance?
I don’t know, I don’t love her. It’s just another slickly produced, slickly marketed, slickly packaged, and sickly-sweet advertising campaign for disposable pop music. The whole ordeal seems like a 21st century version of the used car salesman selling you a gussied-up lemon. You know it’s a lemon. You can tell that he knows it’s a lemon, but by god, you buy it anyway, and you treat it like it’s the most important thing in your life. It becomes your raison d’etre for a while, and then eventually it will blow it’s rad on the freeway and you’ll be stuck there for days, and you’ll curse it for ever appearing in your life.
Now thankfully, no one has to ride in Lana Del Rey. She’s not the most useful means of conveyance, nor would she be particularly fast or reliable, what with her preoccupation with teal booty-shorts and Victorian couches.
I know I have a lot of haterade on here, and typically I’m known to rail on and on about music I hate—I had many words about Katy Perry’s ‘One of the Boys’—but really, how much can I say anymore?
I mean, I saw the SNL performance, read the Pitchfork review, vimeo’d the video (UMG seems to be blocking a lot of the YouTube content in Canada, which is just damn foolish) and I am now dedicating a post on my blog (which is a Tumblr, which is so in right now) to the whole ordeal.
What this is all reminds me of is that episode of South Park where they introduce Towelie and they do a false commercial for it as part of the show. It’s all meant to elicit some kind of reaction.
“Sorry I’m late. I’ve been at the bottom of Matt’s laundry basket for a while. It was wonderful.”
Hell, I’ll even call it what it really is, which is just Agitprop. Unlike it’s 20th century counterpart, this isn’t about getting the target market to react by joining a labour team or donating to a Christian charity to stop leprosy. It’s not even like units sold. It’s really, actually, just about ad impressions and cash flow—-filling the coffers of the rich for another quarter, thus keeping society from complete collapse anon. The chitty-chitty-bang-bang of society chugs on, inexplicably, and the world continues to spin.
So what do we do about it?
Nothing.
I like to think of it as preparation for having a teenaged child. It’s a phase. They’ll grow out of it. They’ll move on to something less-or-equal-or-more irritating, and it’s just a question of waiting it out. I have my music, my headphones, a book, my blog—all of the usual coping mechanisms I use to suppress my annoyance with how shallow and stupid society can be. I have my critical theory to help me decide what I like and what I don’t like, and what’s good and what’s not good.
(FYI, these are not mutually exclusive. I like Katy Perry, but I know she’s not amazing. I don’t like The Gossip, even though they are amazing.)
In the mean time, I know that I have the smug satisfaction of cranking out some writing on a Tuesday morning before I go back to work, while good ol’ El-Dee-Ar is probably sleeping off a hangover and has a press conference this afternoon.
Enjoy your money, Lana. I hope you choose to invest it wisely.