Lana Del Rey

glad the blogosphere vetted her as being a good live singer first before splattering her all across our google readers

wow, you guys really built this up to be something utterly dreadful. watching now and her worst crime seems to be stage fright. they're not great performances but i could see them being good if she were less nervous. her high notes are better than i've seen them in the past...

her high notes are better than i've seen them in the past...

when this is the best you can say about somebody maybe they're not ready for television

well snl's cast is known as the "not-ready-for-primetime players"!

that wasn't as bad as I was expecting but it wasn't good at all either

i couldn't get thru the youtube, but tuning doesn't just sound like her problem

mainly had to stop cos of the guitar guy's "into it" head nodding. which screams "holy god we are crashing and burning up here"

I really enjoy watching unintentionally terrible performances (Shannen Doherty in "Friends til the End", for example) and this did not disappoint! In fact the fake opulence of the whole look/sound reminded me a lot of Valley of the Dolls.

It was like Neely and Tony singing "Come Live with Me" in the sanitarium only instead it was Jennifer's talentless dopey little sister playing dress up in a wig and singing about video games to the mirror. I won't say that I like her music because I surely do not, but I love the seriously campy (unintended?) awfulness of this performance.

Without the chutzpah of Nancy Sinatra, she could be a 21st c. Twinkle?

to john's point above, 'video games' has already been on gossip girl. she has lots of pros working with her.

node to LDR: when you mention a word or action you don't have to demonstrate that with your hand.

You want to hear some bad singing, try this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQYbnzWuSvk&feature=related

mostly bemused that people care about how stuff sounds live.

this reminds me of when you see someone doing karaoke and they're really "feeling it" but in a way that's humorless and just makes everyone uncomfortable

― tyga mother (J0rdan S.), Sunday, January 15, 2012 10:21 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

SNL is not the place for feelings

Without the chutzpah of Nancy Sinatra, she could be a 21st c. Twinkle?

twinkle had loads of chutzpah! (because she was crazy, yes.)

mostly bemused that people care about how stuff sounds live.

it's this weird phenomenon of having ears instead of just eyes

i generally don't care that much about how an act sounds live unless i'm paying upwards of $30 to see them play live, but that was also a terrible performance

well i listen to the album rather than looking at the record cover yes
xp

I guess I always think of Twinkle as kind of blank, but honestly I'll take blank over Jessie J clown faces.

she's loaded the clips to her own Facebook (which she has been looking after since day one) so she's obviously not that arsed about it sounding a bit weird. it DID sound weird though no doubt about that.

she sounded great live when i saw her, dead natural. she can cut it live when she wants
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIgSIz6oHzk&feature=related

:(

Jessie J can't catch a break on any thread today.

That's what SNL should start doing...digital shorts for the musical performances!

LDR SNL performance was like a real version of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdFJTbaFcZ0

Nah, real version of that is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjx_GjyXCs4

LOL @ giant mic!

i don't understand the tone of that whiney idolator post at all.

like it kinda seems like he actually believes there's an SNL conspiracy to make artists sound bad?

yes

never listened to her music but my ver of video games is me singing in a v deep husky voice

why do you plaaaaaaaaaaay
video gaaaaaaaaaaaaaames

So have you been practicing all week for SNL?

Well, no, I haven’t because I’ve been working. I don’t even know what I’m singing! I know it’s “Video Games” and I think “Blue Jeans,” but I thought it was supposed to be “Born to Die,” so I have to go figure that out. I better fucking figure that out! There’s a lot going on so there’s a lot of catching up to do.

Are you excited?

Yeah … I’m excited if it goes well. If it doesn’t, I’m gonna kill myself! But yeah, what an honor. And who knows why, but it’s really nice for me.

Expecting a death notice any minute now.

facepalmsmiley.gif tbh

twitter response...was fucking scathing

so i just watched "video games" performance on youtube, was expecting a trainwreck and it really wasn't THAT bad. Wasn't a great performance or anything, she was obviously a bit nervous, but it wasn't horrible...

i feel like everyone has it in for this girl for no good reason, it's kind of creept actually. and i'm not even into her music...

it wasn't a courtney love style trainwreck - which i could see someone anticipating after some of the comments on twitter - but it was still really terrible in an unfortunately amateur way. bc part of her narrative has already become about her inauthenticity (hard to believe in 2012 but there it is), this confirmed something a lot of ppl believed about her. there was also a lot of, i think, honest enthusiasm about her right after video games came out so there was maybe a feeling like she had a huge groundswell of support inexplicably pushing her to become this hot new artist. personally, i loved video games when i first heard it, played it a bunch, played it for a lot of ppl. the following tracks didn't really interest me at all and then i started seeing her live in various venues and she seems to be getting progressively worse with each performance. also, video games was partially really intriguing to me bc of how self-assured and self-possessed and even cocky it all feels, so these performances have been polar opposites of that. she isn't just nervous, but stammering, playacting, she seems like the confused, out of it persona that maybe seemed more ironic when i first heard video games. instead of uncomfortably sincere and frightening.

^yeah, that coupled with the uber-dramatica lighting and the pseudo-wedding gown. i cringed, personally.

A lot of people sound bad on TV (and esp. SNL) so to me her voice was only a small part of the problem. It's her presence that is so difficult to watch. She's not a performer. She radiates discomfort. She's been playing live in public since at least 2008, so maybe it's just not her thing. There are a lot of musicians in this camp.

i think mordy has def pinpointed the problem there, and actually brainwasher bringing up courtney love is apt, because the thing with c-love trainwrecks is that even at her worst those trainwrecks were entirely in keeping with what you expected of courtney. these LDR performances aren't just missing a few notes, it's more fundamentally that she seems completely awkward about inhabiting/conveying her on-record persona. which reinforces what i grew to think after hearing her other songs - "video games" was a weird one-off piece of magic that i'm not expecting her to recapture any time soon.

If you sell yourself as gangsta and you radiate ziggy, things aren't going to go well in the long run.
http://joshreads.com/images/10/09/i100915ziggy.png

dayo i beat you to the "shreds" joke by 10 hours.

hmm, well I suppose since I was never invested in her in the first place and didn't really get into "video games" until well after she was "exposed" its kind of difficult for me to get that disconnect between her "on-record persona" and live performances that you guys are seeing. I guess from the outside of this situation it seems like she's being constantly lambasted and bullied because she doesn't live up to the image/idea people initially had of her as some sort of 'indie' siren or what have you. The performance was definitely amateurish, won't argue with that, maybe she just wasn't ready to be on such a huge platform - the hype around her really just started to build a few months ago, didn't it?

Skipping 557 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

at least half of them must be your attempts at metasnark dayo

i wish snl/nbc weren't such jerks about youtube because i really want to watch weezy's guitar solo from 2008 right now

Starting this thread probably is the greatest achievement in my life. I don't know how to top this.

why would you ever care about a live performance, lex?

you might be overstating the extent to which i "care" about this but why would i not care about a live performance?

you are like this board's #1 anti-rockist

unless you're a secret rockist (about things you like)

Lol at "Skipping 557 messages"

didn't we retire the rockism/anti-rockism binary years ago? what's rockist or not rockist about live shows?

I'd be happy to have occasional studio missives from a studio-bound, inauthentic LDR persona. I don't think "pop performer complete package" is really relevant when she's mostly selling atmospherics.

This is a lesser gaffe than that "Born to Die" video, which failed because it ruptured the suburban Dorothy Vallens schtick with the European castle setting etc.

don't you know that watching a pop star play SNL is rockism lexdude? down with the machine, up with the music! xp