I’ll confess to being a fan of the somewhat divisive Lana Del Rey ever since I first came across ‘Video Games’. What’s not to like? There’s the melancholic, often fatalistic (and always stylized) lyricism, the cinematic references to Old Hollywood glamour that visually enhance many of the tracks, the refreshing blend of baroque pop with hip hop and trip hop influences, and of course, Lana’s highly produced image, which Pitchfork.com describes as “part-county fair beauty queen, part-Instagram celebrity”. While Lana’s music is often generally described as ‘sad’, I love her best when she blends her pessimistic eroticism with darker overtones, as she does to brilliant effect in tracks like ‘Born to Die’, ‘Dark Paradise’, ‘Kinda Outta Luck’, ‘You Can be the Boss’, ‘Lolita’ and ‘Gods and Monsters’.
While I did enjoy Lana’s sophomore album, Ultraviolence (2014), the overarching themes of melodramatic failed romances and determinedly languid pace made me long for a throwback to Lana’s early days. Much of Honeymoon (2015) continues in the same vein, as with the first single ‘High by the Beach’ – which is why the second single, ‘Music to Watch Boys To’ is a standout track to me.
The parallels to the pining, passive girlfriend of ‘Video Games’ (which is Lana’s main problem with feminist-leaning critics) are there from the very beginning, in the track’s title and the opening lines: “I like you a lot/ so I do what you want”. Lana’s voice “is wrapped in gauze; she sounds stunned, almost concussed, amid the soft, slow, frosty music -- chiefly strings and woodwinds” (Billboard.com, 2015). Then the more ominous undertones slink in, in the guise of her ‘gangsta Nancy Sinatra’ persona, a film noir-inspired femme fatale:
“Play them like guitars, you're like one of my toys
(Cause I like you a lot)
No holds barred, I’ve been sent to destroy, yeah”
The back-and-forth between the passive and pining female (reminiscent of the ‘I will love you till the end of time’ refrain from ‘Blue Jeans’) and the cool and calculated femme fatale continues in the bridge:
“Live to love you
And I love to love you
And I live to love you, boy
Live to love you
And I love to love you
And I live to love you, boy
Nothing gold can stay
Like love or lemonade
Or sun or summer days
It's all a game to me anyway”
The lyrics are at once coy, knowing and fatalistic, with the speaker acknowledging her ambivalent role in the relationship while revelling in the Southern California Gothic musical ambience: “I know what only the girls know/ Lies can buy eternity / I, I see you leaving. So I push record and watch you leave”.
The accompanying, recently-released music video plays up the cinematic quality, with black-and-white Old Hollywood-esque scenes of Lana lounging in a lawn with flower earphones and large gramophones spinning the background, interchanged with male objectifying shots of some basketball players. There’s a throwback to ‘Video Games’ with a projector flashing beautiful clips of a flock of pink flamingos in motion, which, along with the shots of Lana and some other girls frolicking in a pool, add a dash of colour to the video.
Ultraviolence might be the album that references famed filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, but I think its a track like this that earns Lana Del Rey Kyle Anderson’s observation that “Kubrick would have loved Del Rey — a highly stylized vixen who romanticizes fatalism to near-pornographic levels, creating fantastically decadent moments of film-noir melodrama. It’s an aesthetic that demands total commitment from both artist and listener, and it would be difficult to buy into if she didn’t deliver such fully realized cinema.”
