Music

Seriously, Off to the Races

Since I have a little time.

I heard Lana Del Rey’s singing in a small factory in Sabadell, Spain. “You must listen, Satya! You will love!”, pal Horacio remarked, as he fired up his Spotify playlist. Horacio always speaks in exclamation marks, and it suits the guy. His English is marginally better than my Spanish, and our conversations, especially over email, sometimes have moments of horror where we both realize we cannot understand each other. Friends with slightly more Anglo-Spanish skills have to intervene. But it always works out. When Horacio gets excited about something, it means something deserves to be checked out.

‘Video Games’ hit me in the gut, almost everything about the song hitting the right pleasure-centers in my body. The voice, the words, the echoey chorus and the harps. But I am 32, and much attuned to the devious ways of first-time musicians, so there was also a note of skepticism in my appreciation. Mostly because it’s easy to evoke that old-timey feel with a voice like her’s, that raspy sensuousness overpowering all critical faculties with its primal appeal. It is also easy to come up with an album that exploits this seductiveness for an album, two at most, and then you realize that you can only take so much of that. (Yes, I am looking at you, Norah Jones)

But then I listened to the song again, that and ‘Blue Jeans’. And realized that her voice had three distinct textures to it. The smoky nightclub voice is the one that’s most obvious. The sex-kitten voice that makes her sound like she’s a teenage pop princess. And something in between, which you hear in ‘Blue Jeans’, when she sings ‘I will love you till the end of time’. She switches between the voices without drawing attention to that action, and that’s where she got to me, with the peculiarity of her vocal abilities.

Of course, this was before I saw what Lana Del Rey née Elizabeth Grant looked like.

I know, I know, I get shallower by the day.

I confess to being completely enamored by ‘Off to the Races’, the first song on her album Born to Die. This track gut-punched me on a drive back from Vegas last weekend, when these lines crystallized into being on the car speakers.

And he grabs me, he has me by my heart
He doesn’t mind I have a Las Vegas past
He doesn’t mind I have a L.A crass way about me
He loves me with every beat of his cocaine heart

This resonated with me on a personal level (don’t ask) and a grin that could, without question, be classified as “stupid” slowly enveloped my face. That widened when the verse slipped in a Lolita reference.  But what checked the song into Earworm Central was the sex-kitten-voice chorus singing “I’m your little scarlet, starlet/Singing in the garden/Kiss me on my open mouth/Ready for you“. The chorus brings to mind imagery that has me worried about listening to it when in office.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj6LHO3IUqg[/youtube]

If liking this is akin to indulging in musical porn, I don’t care, baby.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGR1iDuKabU[/youtube]

Del Rey has gotten a lot of flak in the recent past, especially after a Saturday Night Live performance that did not come out as well it should have. The voice changes that sound so good on the recording came out pretty jarring in the live set. Not only did it sound like she did not have an iota of control on her vocal chords, but the performance was listless, as if she was being made to sing against her will, without any practice. This in turn led to a lot of internet commentary – you know, voices of reason that flock around any momentous event such as this. Lana Del Rey is a fake. Lana Del Rey does not know how to sing. Her music is “manufactured pop”. She is painful to watch. “Worst SNL performer ever”.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zrvD-o8cII[/youtube]

Shit hit the fan so bad – especially when people began to remark on her name-change and alleged cosmetic enhancements and her alleged millionaire dad financing her music career – that Kristen Wiig did a parody rebuttal a few days later on SNL.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hKq07zwwAw[/youtube]

Recently, Lana Del Rey sang the same song on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and sounded so much better this time. Only goes out of tune in 2 or 3 places, but the adventurous voice and chord variations (especially towards the end) just makes me feel like this woman’s the real deal. Someone who still has some work to put into her live shows, but good all the same.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPqhgm7R8c8[/youtube]
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3 thoughts on “Seriously, Off to the Races

  1. Haha, when I saw pictures of Lana Del Ray, she felt like the antithesis of Norah Jones. Jones looks perpetually bewildered. Ray looks like nothing could impress her.

    Agree though. Perhaps she’s just a case of good ol’ stage jitters, and finds it safer to hide in a studio.

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