Lana Del Rey

i'm not sure about that. it might seem that way bc we're commenting on a ldr thread but i can think of many many female artists working in popular music + in more niche genres who are able to do things that are much more nuanced. idk if i have a lot more to say about this, but i will say that Kathleen Edwards is performing on Dave Letterman tnite and as i think she's one of the most amazing musical artists making music today i highly recommend everyone check her out.

exactly, tim f. "playing with" sex and gender isn't necessarily the same as "painting herself into a corner with being intimate/vulnerable/a damsel in distress." i listen to an ldr song like "you can be the boss" and i hear her as the one in control, the one who's kinda making fun of the guy with malt liquor on his breath. she'll fuck him anyway. because people in "control" get to make that choice. cue janet jackson.

"it's you / it's you / it's all for you. / everything i do."

i haven't heard "you can be the boss." i really only know the video games song very well. but that song does paint her into that corner imho.

I'm in his favorite sun dress
Watching me get undressed
Take that body downtown

I say you the bestest
Lean in for a big kiss
Put his favorite perfume on

The whole song really depicts her as an object of male/listener attraction - explicitly so. The clothing she wears is "his favorite sun dress." She is being watched as she strips down naked. She sings his praises, her very smell is what he wants from her.

The line between that song being a critique of that kind of relationship, and just being that kind of relationship, is how in control of the message she appears to be. When she doesn't seem in control, it's not a surprise that ppl begin to read it as literal.

I'm not sure Kathleen Edwards is appropriate here. How are they worth comparison -- they're both women?

i really only know the video games song very well. but that song does paint her into that corner imho.

I was shocked to see a recent picture of Meryl Streep and discover that her transformation into Margaret Thatcher wasn't permanent. Talk about pulling a fast one.

women today are so empowered to choose whatever asshole they want to fuck

Is there a male equivalent of "ingenue?"

xxxp well, we're discussing whether all female performers are forced into this particular system of evaluation. so i was thinking about female performers i care a lot about right now + she is at the top of the list. i remembered she was performing on tv tnite and took the opportunity to advertise for her.

ime 'edgy' or 'new' music aesthetically privilages hypermasculinity, "feminine vulnerable" and all manner of genderfuckery from male performers. it's a big tent. but it really can't deal on a nuanced scale with anything more complicated than virgin/whore/virgin-whore from female performers.Is that really true? I'd say that rock allows a fair amount of gender fluidity and experimentation from male performers and less (but still some) from females. "New music" allowed a bit of room for the likes of Ani di Franco, PJ Harvey, Bikini Kill, Tuneyards, etc., at least in indierock circles. Still, I can't deny that males get a LOT more privilege in this regard.

Thing is, hip-hop and country (and pop, too, more often than not) are extremely rigid in terms of the gender roles they assign to both men and women. So it's not like there's a single set of rules. It changes a great deal relative to genre and audience.

Tim -- I'd point you to the post I made directly above yours. Meryl Streep is always in control of her performance.

I will say that Kathleen Edwards' gender is totally ancillary to her music. Her musical lineage is, for lack of a better word, rockist, which is to say, the "authentic" antithesis of the packaged performer. Whether one cares or not is a different matter.

xp: but it's a *performance*. and there are others, and they're not all the same.

xxpost - Even a bad, uncontrolled performance is not a literal one. If anything, the reverse is more likely to be true: a well-executed performance of a role erases the conventional hallmarks of performance such that it is more likely to feel "real". A poor performance of critique will is more likely to resemble unconvincing mockery than actual literalism.

IMO the SNL peformance, however bad it was (and I agree it was bad), does not give rise to any reasonable basis on which to assume "Video Games" is literal.

you know what i think makes an interesting comparison? "he hit me (and it felt like a kiss)" it's a tremendous song imo, but part of what really makes it amazing is that it's unclear what level of sincerity or mimesis it is operating on. i think there's a similar thing here and in the music video she seems to have a lot more distance from it (tho still razor thin i'd say -- unlike a track that was obviously explicitly about how being a passive love object is terrible). her snl performance made it sound much more unclear. maybe. i mean, i didn't walk away from her snl performance and say, "oh wow, ldr actually believes that her persona in that song is a good thing." but i did walk away feeling like i had just seen someone who embodies that song in ways that were... idk, uncomfortable?

u know, maybe i'm entirely wrong. i'm kinda talking myself into liking the performance. the way she sang that song was kinda a perfect way to sing that particular song.

women today are so empowered to choose whatever asshole they want to fuck

― the 500 gats of bartholomew thuggins (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, January 17, 2012 4:52 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

boom

thing is, when a female artist is presenting herself, generally speaking, in strongly sexualized terms, it may be slightly disingenuous to equate her repeated embodiment of a self-negating and powerless form of erotic desperation with empowered gendered play.

that is, mordy's description of her appeal OTM (at least where a straight male audience is concerned):

we have an artist whose entire act is either enacting particular sexist tropes about female passivity, male domination, a whole dynamic of neglect + pining, or at the very least problematizing + dialoguing that it. she records one single that that gets her a lot of attention. i'm not going to pretend that my love of that single has nothing to do w/ gender + sex. i found her performance in that video really sexy, i found her vocal performance really arresting, and titillating.

the way she sang that song was kinda a perfect way to sing that particular song.

except no. to make anything interesting out of that kind of literalization, she'd have to be dripping pig blood, carrie-style (or i dunno, something like that). just being bad isn't interesting.

Number 7 in Pazz/Jop

I feel with "Video Games" it's not so much that it can't be taken literally, more that it can't be taken only as literal - the sense I get is that LDR-the-performer wants you to believe this is real while LDR-the-author wants you to know how screwed up it is. The trick is how these two competing roles are perfectly balanced and also impossible to disentangle - in particular, in that the performance creates the text (in fact a lot of the "text" component could actuall be described as "context" or at least "frame", like an artist reframing found objects in an installation).

I think often the "problem" with live performances in this regard is how the variability of the performance is foregrounded over the text, such that it unbalances the relationship in favour of the former.

Interesting, totally different take by Tom E in his P&J essay:

"For me—and there are kinder, just as convincing interpretations—the singer in "Video Games" is a solipsist, casting herself as a master manipulator and her lazy, drifty relationship as a great love. So I hear a record about fakery and self-projection, which is more timely than how "authentic" the woman who made it is."

the sense I get is that LDR-the-performer wants you to believe this is real while LDR-the-author wants you to know how screwed up it is.

I don't know how you can possibly parse this kind of dichotomy in a productive way but fwiw, I'm not convinced that is true.

i understand why you would read it that way. she repeats video games over and over (and it's the title of the song). that seems to code culturally as a guy that is immature, neglectful, etc, so a critical voice interpolating and making the critique explicit through repetition.

but i think there's an equally valid interpretation that she reads this as a moment of intimacy. "and you say get over here / and play a video game" could be read as an invitation to join him (i don't get a sense of explicit rejection by the video game player), and i think that reading makes even more sense syntactical sense than the alternative. "go play a video game," doesn't have an obvious negative interpretation. "this is my idea of fun / playing video games" - actually equates her own agency + enjoyment with playing video games. i don't even see the other way of reading that line -- that her idea of fun (watching friends fall in and out of Old Pauls) is just as alienating and passive as watching her boyfriend play video games? maybe...

Perhaps replace "LDR-the-performer" with "LDR-the-character". I feel that the character "means it" as much as a character in a book or a tv show or film does.

no, i understood what you meant. i'm just pushing against the notion that there's necessarily a critical voice w/ more distance than the character

there's of course our own critical voice as listeners + i do believe texts include multiple levels of meaning (cf. Derrida)

just being bad isn't interesting.

But she wasn't "just bad." She was human, which WAS interesting imo.

more that it can't be taken only as literal - the sense I get is that LDR-the-performer wants you to believe this is real while LDR-the-author wants you to know how screwed up it is.

i'm a big fan of "lady in satan" -- i don't think ldr's performance here was nearly as good as that album, really, but i can see ways in which it achieves a kind of beauty that i also hear in lady in satan.

contenderizer re 'dripping pig-blood carrie style' i dunno if you were actually referring to it or not but in case not; here's one of the photos from Q mag's latest issue!
http://www.theprophetblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Lana-Del-Rey-Q-Magazine-Carrie-2.jpg

It's not so much playing video games that has a negative interpretation as:

"I tell you all the time: heaven is a place on earth where you tell me all the things you wanna do."

This line is too revealing, I think, not to imply the critical voice.

edit that last post variously: is = are, it's = its, etc.

contenderizer re 'dripping pig-blood carrie style' i dunno if you were actually referring to it or not but in case not; here's one of the photos from Q mag's latest issue!

DAMN! no, i pulled that out of the air. holy shit.

i would agree if i didn't think LDR was attempting to arouse explicitly sexual interest. thing is, genuine erotic allure generally doesn't allow for that kind of ambiguity. regardless of whatever art-games the author might be playing, the core of the "sexy" must read as 100% real in order to function properly.

This proposition strikes me as both unfounded and incorrect.

IME such ambiguity generates erotic allure.

In fact a lot of romantic and/or sexual yearning is built around the ultimate unknowability of the object's feelings and intentions, whereas transparency encourages familiarity which encourages boredom.

i dunno. if vulnerability is sexy, then any erotica appeal based on vulnerability must seem "real" in some sense in order to generate the frisson. and if ambiguity is the point of appeal, then the ambiguity must seem real. if it's intelligence, then the intelligence must seem real, etc.

and maybe "real" is the wrong word. maybe i just mean that the siren song must be erotically convincing on some level. i'd argue that, as erotica, on a strictly sexual level, the battered desperation of the narrator of "video games" is and is supposed to be erotically convincing.

maybe i'm wrong though.

Number 7 in Pazz/Jop

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, January 17, 2012 8:14 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

kinda fun to have that announced the day everyone's running "critics EVISCERATE lana del rey" headlines

1st "erotica" = "erotic"

*sigh*

"I tell you all the time: heaven is a place on earth where you tell me all the things you wanna do."

seems very sincere to me actually! where are you reading critical distance into this line?

it reminds me of the scene in High Fidelity where the ex complains to John Cusack that he never talks about what he wants to do + his future anymore

anyway, "carrie" would have been a much better SNL look than "whooping cough"

i dunno. if vulnerability is sexy, then any erotica appeal based on vulnerability must seem "real" in some sense in order to generate the frisson. and if ambiguity is the point of appeal, then the ambiguity must seem real. if it's intelligence, then the intelligence must seem real, etc.

and maybe "real" is the wrong word. maybe i just mean that the siren song must be erotically convincing on some level. i'd argue that, as erotica, on a strictly sexual level, the battered desperation of the narrator of "video games" is and is supposed to be erotically convincing.

I think you're applying a fairly rigid framework for the operation of desire here.

Vulnerability isn't sexy as some kind of standalone concept such that the more purely it is presented the more enticing it is. The things we find erotic are always performances or articulations, weaving together a host of ideas and resemblances and implications and relationships and assumptions (on the part of the audience).

To determine objectively whether something was "erotically convincing" you'd need to exhaustively define that articulation first.

But I think that one of the things that can result in a performance seeming erotically charged is how it can exceed or go beyond the concepts which the observer brings to the table, and refuses to be limited by them (apologies for the psuedo-lacan). So an observer not really knowing how to box LDR's performance strikes me as being as capable as generating desire as the observer being able to box it squarely and neatly as "vulnerable".

agree with all that, but i'm not trying to prove my case objectively and don't think anything would be served by an exhaustive attempt to define terms and frame my argument. perhaps i am applying a rather "rigid" framework to the operation of desire, but i'm speaking more in general terms than trying to account for all cases and variations. in general, i do believe that erotic offerings must be erotically convincing on their own terms in order to "work". and i do believe that the core of LDR's erotic offering in "video games" is desperate self-negation. i don't find any fault in this, but i am a bit suspicious of attempts to excuse or deny it.

it seems to me that the best counterargument to mordy's point isn't that LDR's self-abasement is distanced gender play, but rather that we're often far too quick to pass simplistic political judgement on eroticized female submissiveness.

morelike lana del GAY amirite????

no idea why i'm getting into this but...

i don't get how you could possibly watch the video for "video games" and not see ambiguity and critical distance. after reading the first wave of responses to the video and watching it i was surprised at how much was made of her character's attitude towards her video game-playing boyfriend (which to me seemed intentionally vague and somewhat beside the point,) and how little was made of the double meaning of the song title, which if you watch the video, seems pretty obviously to be about her put-on persona and performing for the camera, she's playing video games. the emphasis on cameras in the video, the footage of sunset strip, the way her look and sound quote cliches of past pop starlets, it reeks of irony and self-consciousness. btw, you can't accuse me of giving her too much credit w/o exposing yourself as a misogynist. so yeah, i think i agree with tom e's take on it.

ps: this has no bearing on her snl performance which was definitely bad and not intentionally vulnerable or w/e.

omg that double meaning doesn't exist get out of here

idk, maybe it's too pat, but its what i thought when i first saw the video

video games = games you play with video? cute.

agree with everything karl just said. my point isn't that she lacks complexity as an artist, but rather that the erotic offering she very clearly and intentionally projects (both musically and in the "video games" video) is not similarly complex. it's quite simple, and it leans in a simple way on vulnerability and need.

even though that song is simple i do think it would be hard to sing live on t.v. unless you are REALLY good at performing live cuz its kinda like singing a capella. you have to captivate. when i hear the studio stuff by her i always wish someone who could sing was singing the songs. cuz the songs are catchy and compelling, and the right person could do them justice. someone who can really sing should cover video games immediately. someone more soulful.