Fake It ‘Til You Make It or Made It ‘Cause You Faked It? A look at Lana Del Rey
Lana Del Ray. The name is reminiscent of old school Hollywood stars; glamorous ladies lounging around smoking cigarettes and combing through their curls, elegant arms outstretched, endless poise.
This is pretty handy really, seeing as this is just the thing that Lizzy Grant was going for when she, after several attempts at cultivating a career in music with marginal success under her given name, upped and revamped herself as. A performance artist if ever there was one, and if the amount of YouTube hits first single Video Games (over 23 and a half million, and counting) is anything to go by then it’s really working for her.
Or is it?
Online, a war of words is waging, equal in intensity on both sides, and one which there seems to be no common ground at all. Lizzy Grant, or rather her nom de plume Lana Del Rey, is a walking, talking, pouting controversy. “A horrible person that’s a poor example for women everywhere,” rants one commenter, whose (probably unfounded) anger is contrasted with the short and sweet, yet no less striking statement “best song ever” on the Video Games comment stream on YouTube.
The anger that Del Ray conjurs up stems from the notion that she is a fake, a fabrication, manufactured right down to her perfectly distracting pout, which (not that it matters, of course) is noticeably different to the mouth she sports in earlier promotional material for her 2010 shelved album.
Del Rey is the daughter of multimillionaire Rob Grant, who made his fortune online investing in domains. He has backed Del Rey’s career, paying for a team of marketers to spend five years researching and creating a persona that would sell well in today’s industry. He paid for all the marketing, even going so far as to pay to have the album put on iTunes for a short while, before it was removed for reasons unknown.
The marketing team came up with her stage name, and opted for her to remain a solo artist rather than a singer in a band. From Del Rey’s Wikipedia page: “I wanted to be a band but the label I was with and the team I had around me absolutely wanted me to be a solo artist. Lana Del Rey came from a series of managers and lawyers over the last 5 years who wanted a name that they thought better fit the sound of the music.”
It seems that in this case, that although money can’t buy talent or fame, in a Veruca Salt style ‘Daddy will get that for you’ type way, it can buy you enough hype to get a head start on your competitors. And in this case, that hype bought Del Rey an invitation to perform on Saturday Night Live (SNL), an American live sketch and comedy show.
Her performance on SNL sparked a backlash against her, with people calling it “the worst ever SNL performance,” and her critics arguing that this poor performance clearly highlights her lack of talent, leaving a general consensus of indignation that this girl could be performing to an audience this large, whilst more talented artists fly under the radar.
However, both Video Games and her new album Born To Die have received generally very good reviews, omitting her one dodgy performance on SNL it would be fair to say that she at least has potential. I first listened to Video Games and was bored by it. But then I wanted to listen to it again.
So the big question is: does it really matter that she didn’t start from the bottom and work her way up? Is Lana Del Rey sticking two fingers up to the music industry and other credible artists by effectively buying her way in? Or does the music speak for itself? Essentially, who cares?
Maybe time will tell, but we all know what happened to Veruca Salt. Let’s hope for Lizzy Grant’s sake, that Lana Del Rey doesn’t end up in the garbage shoot.
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