Quill Studios: January 2012

At first blush, everything about Lana Del Rey screams "fake". A wannabe posuer. Psuedo-hipster Astroturf.

So of course right away I want to not like her. After her performance on SNL last night - which I'll get to in a moment - I performed a cursory web search that yielded the following results.

the fact she's the daughter of an internet millionaire
in spite of the fact that her dad was a millionaire, claims to have lived in a trailer home and was barely able to afford Cocoa Puffs, which is I guess a weird way of saying you're having trouble making ends meet?
the fact that she admits that her stage name "came from a series of managers and lawyers over the last 5 years..." (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lana_Del_Rey )
her first album has mysteriously vanished (a la Alanis Morissette)
and of course rumors of plastic surgery

First off, I cannot confirm the fact that her dad is indeed an incredibly wealthy man; judging from his website, he kind of seems like a guy who just did alright for himself in the shady field of domain name speculation and designing crappy-looking websites seemingly modeled off of his own crappy-looking website. And she does seem to have quite a bit of representation and management for a girl who used to live IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!!!! but whatever. I certainly don't see any smoking gun indicating her daddy bought all this for her. To the contrary, it seems like she had a wild streak and her dad sort of disowned her for a bit. That would explain how she could live in a trailer park yet still have a penchant for top-dollar breakfast foodstuffs, right?

The disappearing of her first album is pretty weird, but Alanis Morissette did the same damn thing. Now that I think of it, many of the issues people have with Lana have previously been mentioned in reference to Alanis. OMG - if you rearrange the letters in 'Alanis', you get 'is Lana'...they're the same damn person, I bet! I mean, who has heard from Ms. Morissette lately, hmmm?

As far as the plastic surgery goes, I just don't see it (disallowing, for the moment, the very real possibility that she is in fact Alanis - then she'd need to have had the surgery). Her lips don't look that different to me; they just appear to be painted differently. I will wager that she wears a wig, though.

Now, back to SNL.

Having not heard of her before last night, I was not subject to any buzz expectations, however I, like Juliette Lewis, was a little underwhelmed by her performance of 'Video Games'. In an apparently since deleted tweet, she was heard to remark:

“Wow watching this ‘singer’ on SNL is like watching a 12 yearold in their bedroom when theyre pretending to sing and perform #signofourtimes.”

But Juliette is a Scientologist who supports Ron Paul for President and seems to post her every damn thought on the interwebs, so I take that with a grain of salt. Plus she is a chicken shit and retracted it the next day. Have the courage of your convictions, girl! (Loved you in 'Natural Born Killers & 'Shit Grils Say', BTW) Let's move on.

Her next song (also, of course, her last, as you would know if you stayed in on Saturday nights like me often enough that you could basically be the show runner for SNL if you had to) was the one that got me. And not just her singing, or the lyrics; no, was I really enjoyed was the musical sensibilities of Blue Jeans.

OK, I'll admit I have no idea WTF the deal is with her voice. Maybe she was just nervous. But no one can accuse her of lip-synching like Ashlee Simpson, amirite?

Now, of course, the lyrics are hardly original. Hell, I'm sure you could probably pick every line in the chorus from another song. And the whole song reminds me a little of 'Wicked Game'. But I don't care. I just don't effing care. Her key changes are interesting and exquisite. And she writes her own material, which is a huge plus in my book.

Here's a better version, just because I love you guys: