The buzz surrounding Lana Del Rey’s recently released fifth studio album Lust for Life(2017) may be dying down (after debuting at Number 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart, it dropped to number 10, number 23 in the following week, and then to number 32), but her diehard fans can potentially look forward to a new album that will include 25 of her favourite unreleased songs. This is hardly surprising, since there are nearly 200 songs that never benefitted from an official release (but which have nevertheless found their way to YouTube via fan-made channels like LizzyGrantTV and Mermaid Motel. Going through them is akin to hitting rewind on an artist’s evolution: a rare glimpse of the different aesthetics and personas Elizabeth Wooldridge Grant experimented with – Lizzy Grant, Lana Rey Del Mar, Sparkle Jump Rope Queen, May Jailer - before settling on her definitive California-via-New York style, sound and persona.
"Put Me in a Movie" from Lana Del Ray a.k.a. Lizzy Grant (2010), her debut studio album, recently caught my attention. It contains everything I found lacking in “Lolita” – a track officially released on Born to Die (2010) – which came across as a lacklustre sonic interpolation of Nabokov’s iconic novel. Its contents lie at the heart of all the feminist critiques of Del Rey’s preoccupations with unequal power dynamics, but there is something else at work here. There is a hint of ominousness in her vocals (which are higher and sultrier than usual), suggesting vulnerability, a growing awareness of one’s sexual powers of persuasion and a sense of menace as sings from the perspective of cinematic jailbait (‘Lights, camera, acción/ He didn't know he'd have this much fun’). The song appears to both romanticize and acknowledge the darkness inherent to unequal power relations between men and women: a dynamic that colored much of her oeuvre (and recently inspired an apt Ivanka Trump parody).
There is also an element of intertextual rewriting that endows the tragic literary character with more agency. Nabokov’s Lolita (Dolores Haze) does star in a school play written by the second paedophile she encounters (Clare Quilty) and eventually leaves Humbert to marry him, but refuses to star in one of his pornographic films. Haze flees to a nondescript life in the Midwestern town of Coalmont, whereas Del Rey’s lyrical persona seems to be fully intent on using her sexuality for celluloid fame: ‘Put me in a movie/ You can be my daddy’. The song is dark, cinematic and disturbing, but also catchy and intriguing: it presents the inconvenient truth that this age-old conundrum persists across the developed and developing world alike, even if contemporary pop culture predominantly privileges a message of feminist empowerment.
