FEATURE:
Second Spin
Lana Del Rey – Born to Die
___________
I think many would argue…
that Lana Del Rey’s best albums have arrived in the past five years or so. Lust for Life is five on 21st July. Lust for Life, Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019), Chemtrails Over the Country Club (2021) and Blue Bannisters (2021) not only signal huge productivity but, when you look at all the acclaim and positive reviews, huge consistency and growth. I really like the four albums prior to Lust for Life. Coming two years after her eponymous debut, 2012’s Born to Die is an album that divided critics. It celebrates its tenth anniversary on 27th January. I wanted to include it in Second Spin, as it is underrated. Reaching number one here and two in the U.S., Born to Die was the world's fifth best-selling album of 2012, and it sold over seven million copies by 2014. In 2021, it became the second album by a woman and the first debut album by a woman to spend more than four-hundred weeks on the US Billboard 200. It is another classic case of an album selling well and being popular with consumers, but less embraced and admired by critics. More confident, lush, distinct and memorable than her 2010 debut, Born to Die has received retrospective reviews through the years. Many who scored the album low in 2012 have written think-pieces about the industry's perspective on Del Rey. I think that was one of the issues. Many were trashing Del Rey and writing her off as fake.
Many on the Internet voiced their displeasure of Del Rey and her music. A genuine and original artist with a sound that married sweeping orchestrations and visions and scenes one could take from the 1950s or an epic road movie, we hadn’t really heard anything like Born to Die. It must have been terrible for Del Rey to receive such hate on the Internet. Many critics felt Del Rey’s voice was too woozy or lazy. Despite some reappraisal and review updates, I feel Born to Die is underrated and warrants new inspection on its tenth anniversary. Alongside the notable singles, Video Games, Born to Die, Blue Jeans, and National Anthem, there are some great deeper cuts (including Diet Mountain Dew). Even though reviews were not that positive, many magazines and sites have placed Born to Die high in their best of 2012/best of the 2010s rankings. COMPLEX ranked Born to Die fourth in their The 50 Best Albums of 2012. In 2019, The Independent placed Born to Die third in The 50 Best Albums of the Decade. I will end with a couple of positive review for Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die. Before that, this article from last year took us inside one of the most remarkable and misunderstood albums of the 2010s:
“Lana Del Rey was just 26 when her first professionally produced album, Born To Die, was released, gaining her overnight success. But it had taken her the best part of ten years to get to that point. Having begun singing as a teenager, by the time she released what was essentially her debut album (a self-titled album was given a limited digital release in 2010, but was withdrawn soon after), on January 27, 2012, everything she’d been working on culminated in one remarkable moment.
Revealing her motives for making music, Lana told Vogue magazine she was more interested in telling her story, rather than making money, concluding, in her ever-authentic manner, “Oh, I don’t think I’ll write another record. What would I say? I feel like everything I wanted to say, I’ve already said.”
A decade’s worth of creative ideas
Lana began singing aged 17, in Brooklyn, sometimes using the name Lizzy Grant while struggling to gain attention. Born To Die marked a turning point, however, with the singer co-writing every song on the album and filtering a decade’s worth of creative ideas into one life-changing moment.
To gauge an early reaction to her music, Del Rey released the song “Video Games,” in October 2011. “I just put that song online a few months ago because it was my favorite,” she told The Observer. “To be honest, it wasn’t going to be the single but people have really responded to it.” Indeed, the promo clip for “Video Games” went viral, gaining 20 million views within five months.
An important creative decision
With the likes of Katy Perry and Britney Spears still dominating pop music in the early 21st Century, a younger generation of fans entered the 2010s seeking something new. Lana’s stripped-back music, performed with live instrumentation and unique vocals, offered them the sound they were looking for; the purity of emotion she drew upon added that extra depth for fans to identify with.
Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue’s 2012 Lana Del Rey cover issue, explained why the singer stood out among the pack, holding her own against the juggernaut success of Adele’s 21: “I am one of the many thousands of people enraptured by the throaty, seductive voice of Lana Del Rey… Once I had seen Lana play at a small event in London, I was convinced that she would be a great.”
Lana’s haunting vocals hadn’t always been so distinctive, but as she told the Daily Star in 2011, “People weren’t taking me seriously, so I lowered my voice, believing it would help me stand out.” Molding herself after vulnerable feminine icons such as Marilyn Monroe, the breathy tone she developed ensured she would be noticed.
Raw and perfectly sculpted
Born To Die isn’t all glamour, however. Lana created some controversy with the track “Lolita” with its obvious references to the Vladimir Nabokov novel centered around a middle-aged man obsessed with the young girl of the title. She also referenced the book’s opening in the “Off To The Races” lyric “Light of my life, fire in my loins.”
But the controversy did little to derail the singer – rather, it aided Lana’s ascent. She has come a long way since the success of Born To Die: building from a cottage-industry talent into one of the biggest stars in the world, she can now command the attention of the era-defining artists that came before her (2017’s Lust For Life found her working with no less than Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks).
As arguably the most powerful moment in her career, however, Born To Die still resonates. Raw and perfectly sculpted, Lana infused every moment with uncensored emotion, tapping into her fans’ feelings at the same time. It’s where the unassuming, somewhat ordinary Lizzy Grant became the global phenomenon we now know as Lana Del Rey”.
It is quite sad reading some of the reviews of Born to Die in 2012. So many dismissing Del Rey and being unkind to her music and image that were and are genuine. An amazing songwriter, voice and creative force, Born to Die is an amazing album. Ultraviolence, released in 2014, saw much more positivity come her way. I would encourage people to listen to Born to Die. This is what The Guardian wrote in 2012:
“It's hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for Lana Del Rey. She's hardly the first pop star in history to indulge in a spot of pragmatic reinvention that muddies her comfortable background, but you'd certainly think she was. You can barely hear the music over the carping, which appears to be getting louder as her debut album approaches: a cynic might say that's just as well, given the recent Saturday Night Live appearance in which she demonstrated her uncanny mastery of the vocal style deployed by Ian Brown during the Stone Roses' later years – she honked like the foghorn on Portland Bill lighthouse. But one off-key TV spot is surely not a career-ending disaster. Perhaps the arrival of Born to Die will silence the controversy and shift attention to the songs.
Or perhaps not. There's something impressive about her desire to brazen it out, but you do wonder at the wisdom of including Radio, one of those how-do-you-like-me-now? songs in which the singer revisits their terrible struggle to achieve fame. "No one even knows how hard life was," she sings, "no one even knows what life was like," which does rather invite the response: indeed not, but given that your father was not only extremely wealthy but so supportive that he took to the pages of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise to promote your debut album I'll hazard a guess at (a) probably not that hard and (b) basically quite nice.
There's always the chance that she's playing a character, although that seems doubtful, because when Lana Del Rey is in character, she really lets you know about it. The one truly disappointing thing about Born to Die isn't the sound, which understandably sticks fast to the appealing blueprint from Video Games and Blue Jeans: sumptuous orchestration, twangs of Twin Peaks-theme guitar and bum-bum-TISH drums. Nor is it her voice, which is fine: a bit reedy on the high notes, but nothing to get you reaching for the earplugs. It's the lyrics, which in contrast to Video Games's beguiling description of a mundane love affair, are incredibly heavy-handed in their attempts to convince you that Lana Del Rey is the doomed but devoted partner of a kind of Athena poster bad boy, all white vest, cheekbones and dangling ciggie. The reckless criminality of their lifestyle is expressed via hip-hop slang – "yo", "imma ride or die", and, a little Ali Gishly, "booyah" – and the depth of their love through romance-novel cliches ("you are my one true love"). It's Mills and Booyah.
The problem is that Del Rey doesn't have the lyrical equipment to develop a persona throughout the album. After the umpteenth song in which she either puts her red dress on or takes her red dress off, informs you of her imminent death and kisses her partner hard while telling him she'll love him 'til the end of time, you start longing for a song in which Del Rey settles down with Keith from HR, moves to Great Yarmouth and takes advantage of the DFS half-price winter sale.
The best thing to do is ignore the lyrics; easy enough given how magnificently most of the melodies have been constructed. Video Games sounded like a unique single, but as it turns out, it was anything but a one-off: the album is packed with similarly beautiful stuff. National Anthem soars gloriously away from a string motif that sounds not unlike that sampled on the Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony. There's something effortless about the melodies of Diet Mountain Dew and Dark Paradise: they just sweep the listener along with them. The quality is high throughout, which is presumably what you get if you assemble a crack team of co-writers, including Heart FM king Rick Nowels, author of Ronan Keating's Life Is a Rollercoaster, Dido's White Flag and Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is a Place on Earth.
You could argue that his presence recontextualises Born to Die, drawing it away from the world of the indie singer-songwriter she was initially thought to inhabit and firmly into the mainstream. It fits better there, where no one bores on about authenticity and lyrics matter less than whether your songs' hooks sink deep into the listener's skin. What Born to Die isn't is the thing Lana Del Rey seems to think it is, which is a coruscating journey into the dark heart of a troubled soul. If you concentrate too hard on her attempts to conjure that up, it just sounds a bit daft. What it is, is beautifully turned pop music, which is more than enough”.
The final thing I want to include is a review from NME. Whilst many were doubting Del Rey and providing her music with little consideration, there were those who were more constructive and could hear real potential from an artist who, now, is considered to be among the best in the world. This is their take on Born to Die:
“It speaks volumes about the fuss surrounding Lana Del Rey’s recent Saturday Night Live performance that, after the show, even Harry Potter’s fabled magic wand could do nothing to stem the flow of unkind words directed her way. In the same week that Mark Wahlberg claimed he would have stopped 9/11 if he’d been on board one of the planes that crashed, the self-described ‘gangsta Nancy Sinatra’ caught hell from half the internet and sundry ’slebs of dubious import for her shaky performance of ‘Video Games’, before compère Daniel Radcliffe rushed to her defence. Amazingly, we’re still not sure which story got most publicity.
Then again, it’s tempting to wonder if Del Rey doesn’t relish the critics’ barbs on some level. Looking back on the controversies that followed ‘Video Games’’ runaway success last year – big lips, career false starts, et al, ad nauseam – they begin to resemble not so much a case for the prosecution as they do a vindication of her ‘Hollywood sadcore’ shtick. Fame and romantic love are the dominant narratives sold to us by modern culture, and who better to call it than this freakishly beautiful, David Lynch-addicted, 25-year-old millionaire’s daughter?
Who indeed. And ‘Born To Die’ certainly isn’t shy out of the traps, gliding in with the title track’s big-budget remodelling of the LDR template. Strings usher us mournfully into the palace of Del Rey’s sadness, her voice curling like art deco smoke-plumes – “sometimes love is not enough,” she sighs. The slightly unhinged-sounding ‘Off To The Races’, meanwhile, swaps the tattooed Romeo of the former track’s vid for a coke-snorting sugar daddy, revelling in the amoral pleasures of being a kept woman with no questions asked.
Next up it’s the ‘Blue Jeans’/‘Video Games’ double whammy. The former’s lush Chris Isaak shades shimmer like sea-spume on Helena Christensen’s naked thighs as Del Rey longs for her James Dean. And the latter has lost none of its uncanny power, those lilting piano chords suggesting the perfect hopelessness of a cherished old photograph. She follows that with ‘Diet Mountain Dew’, a breathless, mid-tempo R&B number. Next, ‘Born To Die’ comes a cropper with ‘National Anthem’, a co-write with former Fame Academy winner David Sneddon, which features some unfortunate quasi-rapping and addresses the record’s themes in a way that’s all fingers and thumbs compared to ‘Video Games’’ flawless seduction.
‘Dark Paradise’ and ‘Radio’ fare better, but still sound like ‘Born To Die’ retreads with their splashy drums and string accompaniments. Recovering momentum, ‘Carmen’, a dark tale of pretty-girl psychosis, is a winner, with Del Rey’s richly suggestive tones conjuring the ghosts of Lauren Bacall’s classic femme-fatales. Meanwhile, ‘Summertime Sadness’, a pop number with that patented, pimp-my-homecoming parade feel and lyrics, underlines the self-fulfilling nature of her prophetic pining: “Think I’ll miss you forever/Like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky”.
Although it’s not quite the perfect pop record ‘Video Games’ might have led us to wish for, ‘Born To Die’ still marks the arrival of a fresh – and refreshingly self-aware – sensibility in pop. Some of the sprightlier stuff sits awkwardly, but Del Rey’s ballads pull deftly at a strain of American gothic that runs through performers like Roy Orbison and Bobbie Gentry, and nail the warped sense of nostalgia that’s been in the air recently in a way a thousand wafty shoegaze revisionists could only dream of. And that’s no mean feat”.
A truly underrated album, the approaching tenth anniversary might well see new articles and appraisal of an album that sounds gorgeous and sweeping. Provoking so many different vivid images and all scored by Del Rey’s smoky and beautiful voice, Born to Die is an album that is far deeper and stronger than many gave it credit for in 2012. Ten years later, many can appreciate it for the…
INCREDIBLE album that it is.