3/31/2024 0 Comments Lana del rey sexy hair shakeWhen Lana’s first proper album, Born to Die, debuted on the heels of that SNL appearance, the New York Times called it “album as anticlimax, the period that ends the essay, not the beginning of a new paragraph.” The public did not agree: Born to Die became the fifth-highest-selling album of 2012 worldwide. (The Village Voice called it “early-’00s singles bar music.”) Still, her image had real juice. If writers paid more attention to her iconography than her music, well, that was partly because there wasn’t much music out there yet, and critics seemed to agree what she had released wasn’t interesting. “It’s just that the aesthetic references surrounding her are all already so pungent, evocative, and well worn that it’s hard to reshape them.” “It’s not that there’s anything ‘inauthentic’ about Del Rey,” argued a Pitchfork writer. By the time you’d heard of Del Rey, you’d probably also heard she was a fake, an industry plant who put the “retro” in “retrograde.” Soon, though, there was a backlash to the backlash: Hadn’t plenty of male artists embraced alter egos? Critics noted this but remained unconvinced. That hair! Those lips! Who could forget the press release touting her as a “gangster Nancy Sinatra”? Five minutes’ digging proved her backstory was not very gangster at all: She had a marketing-exec father and a well-to-do upbringing upstate, and had previously released an EP under her real name, Lizzy Grant.
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