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The kitsch is integral to LDR, but over time, she's stripped back the Valencia filter that floats around her aura and opened up her bleeding heart even more.
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(It's the fantasy she deserves.) It's all extremely seductive, like a character out of a Sofia Coppola film. Originally, as much of Born to Die and her music videos illustrate, LDR was a persona loosely based on Grant's own past: NYC's own " Queen of Coney Island" who struggled with addiction before setting off cross-country for a glamorous life in Los Angeles, where she settled into the Hollywood sign. LDR and Elizabeth Grant are largely one in the same, and have become even more synonymous over time. If that very mystery of her mid-century aesthetic has made you shy away from getting into her music, it's important to know that LDR isn't just an elaborate and meticulously crafted stage presence. She knows as well as I do that her ethereal plane of existence is the one to get on. Unfazed, she's been LDR-ing hard since then, with five records to her name and several soundtrack themes. If you didn't catch the initial Born to Die wave, or any of her excellent releases since then, you may remember her entrance into the general pop cultural consciousness with her 2012 Saturday Night Live performance, which she got a lot of flack for at the time, some calling it one of the worst performances on the show ever. The rest is history: That record has now spent 322 whopping weeks on the Billboard 200. She then signed a joint deal with Interscope and Polydor to release her first official LP, Born to Die. She used the funds from the contract to make home for herself in a New Jersey trailer park, where she spent time writing as Lana Del Rey, and scored big when her tracks " Video Games" and " Blue Jeans" went viral on YouTube. She ultimately landed her first record deal after being discovered via a songwriting competition. While living with relatives on Long Island after high school, she'd make the trip into New York City to play gigs under a variety of names, and she began to pursue her dream while studying at Fordham University and working in youth outreach programs. She didn't begin donning those flower crowns or start collaborating with the likes of Stevie Nicks overnight, like some pop mavens do these days. Lana Del Rey was born Elizabeth Grant in 1985 and grew up in upstate New York. It's time to immerse yourself in her body of work. She's been stunning critics and her devout fanbase for years, but now, as we enter what's basically become the Lana-ssaince, you'd only be doing a disservice to yourself by refusing to hop aboard the S.S.
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She may never move away from her love for the past or novelty nostalgia tracks, but she's never sounded more current than on her stunning new album, Norman Fucking Rockwell! It's like her dream for America is more present than ever, and her extended hand on its cover is an invitation to come aboard her sailboat for a voyage to her version of the future. She's also inadvertently become the sort of mysterious icon that she jockeyed into her inscrutable persona.īut now more than ever, there's no better time to get into Lana. It's drenched in pastiche and revolves around "sad girl" lyricism more than anything else. Her music rarely gets radio play - aside from when "Summertime Sadness" was literally unavoidable - and it tends to veer in the opposite direction of the rest of the pop landscape, both lyrically and in its sound. This doesn't necessarily make her an accessible pop star, though. This is unfortunate for her, of course, but lucky for everybody else who gets to bask in her poetic musings and grasp the American dreamscape she's relaying. It's like she was displaced into our world when her vision of America - a bewildered place of possibility that's just as enamored with the open road as it is icons - is long gone. But alas, she's an alternative pop star who's headlining festivals in the 2010s. The singer with an Old Hollywood voice and decadent '60s Bel Air starlet style was meant to be sharing the stage with Sinatra and starring opposite Elvis in genre flicks. If anyone was born in the wrong era, it was Lana Del Rey.