Lana Del Rey

tbh I would care a lot more about her if her songs were all covers of tracks off of Ready To Die

'w/r/t sexiness, it's obvious to me that the submissiveness/passivity/helplessness that del rey plays in the song goes hand in hand with a certain idea of sexiness, and the song makes it quite clear that it's just an idea of sexiness, one that's as helpful to the narrator as the passive helplessness. whether the listener actually finds it sexy is neither here nor there.'

this is kind of the central thing about 'off to the races', I think.

whatshername from mad men should make a record. don draper's wife. she'd be better at it.

LDR should arrange to get into a car accident while on pills + wearing an evening gown w/ a toy dog in her purse, it would help with the authenticity thing

whatshername from mad men should make a record. don draper's wife. she'd be better at it.

― scott seward, Wednesday, January 18, 2012 10:51 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is a good call, especially since January Jones is basically the only person to do worse on the SNL stage than LDR the last couple years

is that her name? that's a great name. she doesn't even have to change it.

wonder if the lex has ever heard this song? still makes me swoon...*sigh*. bums me out too. in a good way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgkw47HLxH8&feature=related

memo to str8 dudes: just because a female performer sings and performs ideas of sexiness in her work does not mean that "does this give me a boner" should be your litmus test of whether she's any good as an artist. it's not about YOU.

― irina-camelia begu (lex pretend), Wednesday, January 18, 2012 3:01 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ffs, "be less smug" indeed. i don't think that either LDR or "video games" is particularly sexy. that passive, needy, "wounded bird" thing has never done much for me, personally. it is, however, a very common form of erotic appeal. i think that we can easily recognize it even if we don't feel it. as a comparison, i recognize the erotic appeal embodied in sting's music, persona and imagery despite the fact that it doesn't arouse me in the least.

we can't ever know an artist's underlying intent with perfect accuracy, but we can observe the ways in which familiar devices are employed in their work and draw general conclusions. i'm simply saying that i see in LDR's songs and videos the attempt to construct a persona with a particular erotic/romantic appeal. consciously or unconsciously, gay or straight, male or female, most pop stars attempt something similar. the nature of the constructed appeal, of course, differs radically from individual to individual.

half-baked idea alert: I don't like invoking this kind of thing but I suspect that this aspect of the song would make intuitive sense to a lot of gay people.

― Tim F, Wednesday, January 18, 2012 2:57 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

point taken, but the helpless, role-bound angle is very obvious, and i suspect that it makes intuitive (and direct) sense to all sorts of people.

So one should not judge her on the merit of actually performing a song well, this is a pop world and she is a pop singer and we need to judge her on image. So when I see a comment saying "at least she was hot" or something, it seems to me like looking past her shortcomings to support the image she's selling. Which is a sexpot.

i see in LDR's songs and videos the attempt to construct a persona with a particular erotic/romantic appeal

This i agree w 100%. And by disregarding the 'rockist' performance aspect of it all, really the only way to appreciate her live appearances is as a visual object. I'm not saying it's not sexist to do so, but if the artist is relying so heavily on her visual representation it shouldn't be a surprise that it comes up.

So one should not judge her on the merit of actually performing a song well, this is a pop world and she is a pop singer and we need to judge her on image.

this is just flat-out insane

again, if performing on a high profile show wasn't apparently a more central piece of her label's promotional plan for her at the moment than getting the song on the radio or the video on TV, this would be a moot point. there's no reason she had to make an SNL performance her first exposure to a large chunk of America, other than that they apparently got the opportunity and couldn't say no.

this is just flat-out insane

yeah, got to agree (sorry, bruneau). i'm not saying that image construction trumps other aspects of a pop star's public offering, just that it does figure in somewhere and is reasonable to consider. frankly, i think that all people do this, not just pop stars. we all craft public personas, and most of us would like to be seen as sexy in some sense or other.

http://www.coveringphotography.com/sites/idesweb.bc.edu.baden6/files/images/large/Weegee-Goffman72.jpg

well yeah

Isn't image is a significant part of LDR's appeal though? If the live aspect is to be disregarded then what other aspects of her public offering should we be considering when viewing a performance such as the SNL?

best strategy relative to the SNL performance is to view another channel

xp By which I mean the 2009 debut that nobody heard at the time, not the new one, which is called Born to Die.

― Science, you guys. Science. (DL), Thursday, 19 January 2012 01:44 (8 hours ago)

ah yeah as Mark says, this really looks like at best a publishing demo, the cover more like a comp someone on t'interweb's made of some old unreleased or barely-released tracks recently, not an actual release she put out.

the sexist machinations in the gen shaming rhetoric around this go way past subtleties like "overt" and "obvious."

also this post:

in a certain way sexism is all over this incident. 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. that's often going on w/ music of both genders. partially due to the attention she got from that video (a video that was itself sexually problematic, and attention that was certainly sexualized) she was given an incredibly rare opportunity for such an inexperienced artist -- playing on SNL.

now we have a notably terrible performance from that artist. part of what made the performance terrible is what i wrote about in a post above: that instead of seeming confident, in control, savvy she came off as amateurish, naive, overwhelmed. part of the problem is that instead of being sexy she was almost childish. so it's not like sex + gender aren't appropriate here. but i think calling criticism here 'sexism' without explicating exactly how sex fits into the whole thing, is just an intellectual duck.

then on top of it, there are actual technical stuff about her performance that were imperfect. but yes, if she were someone else, maybe someone who had different dynamics in her song, or someone coming w/ a wider range of material + tropes, the reaction would be much different. but this reaction has as much to do with how she was marketed upfront.

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 18, 2012 12:25 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

p much reads like "what did you expect dressing like that?"

what if she were on tv naked? would he be allowed to find her sexy then, it would it still be sexism.

like at least a small part of you has to know how bullshitty that sounds

it's kinda long...but fairly articulate! i mean, there was thought involved. like, lots of thought.

i'm sorry but you used a statement typically used after a girl gets raped w/r/t mordy finding someone on tv attractive

i agree with the main premise. or one of the main premises. she isn't really well-rounded enough to pull off what she's trying to pull off. and i agree with the childish aspect too. its like a kid playing dress-up. not an adult inhabiting a role. fiona apple was actually much more successful at this! for better or worse.

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

her saving grace is: catchy tunes and decent production in the studio. or suitably atmospheric production anyway. she reminds me of every triphopper that wasn't portishead or massive attack. they've got the spirit, but lose the feeling. inmyveryhumbleopinion.

like at least a small part of you has to know how bullshitty that sounds

tbf, equating "i found her sexy because she was dressed sexy" with "she deserved to be raped because she was dressed sexy" also sounds a little bullshitty

the objectionable part of the latter statement isn't the suggestion that certain modes of dress are sexy.

the argument is pretty much that her failing to deliver on her "sexy image" justifies for the harsh backlash. a backlash that has a particular character to it, not one that you ever really see guys getting subjected to, not that there are no examples of guys being slammed, but i think pay attn to the characterisation of that response, which has been done already by that village voice (?) post and get bent and doesn't really need to be repeated, and really, in the end, theres this way in which it rests on a kind of entitlement to an image, or a curtain being pulled back. there's this reveal and subsequent humiliation. like this is the narrative, its sortof beyond creepy and the circularity of it is only underlined when people say "well she acted like she was gonna be really sexy so i mean"

http://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/gallery/files/9/8/2/8/michael-jackson-eating-popcorn.gif

cant the argument just be that she is terrible?

p much reads like "what did you expect dressing like that?"

honestly i don't even know how to respond to this. i'm not using the way she dresses, acts or sings to justify any kind of sexual violence against her and the suggestion that i am is... like unless you believe that any discussion of someone's sexuality is itself a form of sexual violence?

fiona could teach lana a thing or two about owning a stage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5LhxqbmsZ4&feature=related

fwiw, judith, and i wrote this above, i think that yes, some ppl on the internet (HRO seems to be the biggest offender, tho i haven't read his piece) are clearly criticizing her in language that scans as explicitly sexist. those ppl suck. at the same time, those ppl aren't (afaict) posting here on ilx so using them as a cudgel to beat back ppl criticizing her here is strawman-esque?

i mean, fiona had a pretty limited palette too. and she also had catchy songs, hearbreakm laments, psychsexual drama, and decent production. AND she could stalk a stage and captivate. and pout. she was good at it! probably younger then lana when she had her heyday too. don't know how old people are anymore.

"psychosexual"

actually i'm guessing about the psychosexual element, cuz i don't remember her lyrics too well, but the big one had the boyfriend with the deviant lifestyle and all that. whatever that meant. and the seedy calvin klein video kinda went in that direction.

sorry, i'm kinda derailing this other, uh, thing with fiona talk. carry on.

i haven't read anything on hro about this, though a language that is explicitly sexist would be preferable to an endless displacement, where certain tropes are allowed to enter in that normally have no place but refuse to rise to the surface. i mean florence or feist or robyn or p much any harvest of "quirky chicks" buzz cycles where their authenticity is so easily toppled. its a pretty similar narrative that gets repeated, it has to do with unmasking in some sense. it has its own identifiable features and it does illustrate a gender dynamic, a way in which women artists can only be framed one way regardless so that their adoption of a certain image is also this thing that makes them easy to dismiss. and yeah this does all have a lot to do with rape discourses, which tend to feature heavily this need to blame women for their ways of self-presenting. it has implications that it doesn't for men. there are roads that go places. to point that out is not to call everybody a rapist but like seriously this thread reads super badly. i probably shouldn't have singled out one post by one poster. for that i'm sorry.

As far as I can tell, LDR has no interest in owning a stage. She's aiming at a Dorothy Vallens vibe and doesn't have the life damage/acting chops to pull off that kind of mystique.

there are roads that go places?

i'm not blaming ldr for how she's presenting herself. my post that you quoted above was showing the mismatch between how she presented herself on her recorded single and how she seemed to be trying and failing to present herself that way on SNL.

also, for the record, i don't believe ldr should expect criticism + condemnation bc she dresses provocatively. i do think she should expect criticism bc she's a public figure and much like politicians, actors, and other people who have chosen to be in the spotlight, musicians (both male + female) can expect harsh things to be written about them. sometimes by ppl on ilx. i don't know if it's a good thing. it's probably a deeply embedded human thing.

short of performing behind gauze in front of a million candles while standing on a wind machine, surrounded by brass buttons held at precise, oscillating angles aloft by a trained chorus of vassals, i'm not sure she could have synced the presentation of herself in the video with that of an uncontrolled performance on SNL

musicians (both male + female) can expect harsh things to be written about them

but the nature of those things are often different for female musicians!

oh wait, you are the guy that was oblivious to the egregious gender stereotyping in Almost Famous. Why am I bothering?

t/s potential gender insensitivity vs calling people rapey

i called what he said rapey

well now how could that possibly come off wrong

i think it came off about right

"i'm not saying you are an actual rapist, i am just saying that you say things the way a rapist would say them. no offense intended."

her failing to deliver on her "sexy image" justifies for the harsh backlash.

― judith, Wednesday, January 18, 2012 4:55 PM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

okay, but i didn't see anyone saying anything remotely like that ITT. you say that this thread reads badly, but if there's something concrete you object to, it'd help if you'd point it out. i agree, by the way, that there's a narrative of exposure and humiliation that we often attempt to enact with pop stars, especially female pop stars.