how born to die became the most influential album of the 2010s ❤️‍🔥

without born to die there would be no Halsey there would be no Billy eilish there would be no Lord Lana Del Rey's debut album was truly the blueprint for so many of the projects that the new girlies are doing and you know it's time to give it the Deep dive and the further academic explanation that it so desperately deserves this is my long-awaited and long overdue full analysis of Alana Del Rey topic and yes like I mentioned we're gonna be talking about her 2012 debut on a major label born to die and the indelible impact that it's had on pop music and even you know wider pop culture ever since its release it has miraculously somehow maintained its complete Forefront utter relevance even over 10 years after it came out so I want to get into exactly how and why that happened and also critically examine the kind of influence that this album has had upon other artists and the music industry and culture at large so Born to Die is super compelling to me as a consumer and also a you know analyzer and historical chronicler of Pop Culture because of how it has unraveled over time and become more complex and even you know explained itself a little bit more as Lana's career as an artist has changed over the years I'm a huge Lana Del Rey fan and if you're new to my channel my name is Zach I'm the swiftologist I'm a journalist by trading Associated by choice and I make thoughtful weekly videos about pop culture last week I was talking about Prince Harry's book and today we're talking about born to die so there is a whole breath of topics covered on this channel something for everyone if I do say so myself born to die was fundamentally misunderstood from its release and it has only really gotten its dues over the last couple of years and that's because as an artist Lana has always been totally ahead of the curve Born to Die is this highly stylized glossy overproduced debut from an artist that seemingly popped out of nowhere that was so effortlessly Chic and deeply original that critics were suspicious of the authenticity of the situation the maker and the circumstances with which she arose into our pop culture quite frankly in hindsight there were definitely misogynistic undertones to the whole Lana Del Rey discussion there was this hyper fixation on her as a vacant superficial bimbo who just had to be a puppet that was orchestrated by a boardroom of men because God forbid a young woman could come up with something as elaborate and intricate and detailed as the world that we enter when we listen to born to die we're less quick to doubt a woman's agency I think in this day and age but in the early 2010's the girl boss feminism was freely just in a soft launch mode and it was still perfectly acceptable to spend an entire album review as a male critic discussing whether or not Lana actually lived in a trailer park had a nose draw of her lip filler uh what kind of relationships do you have with her dad and only give a line or two to the actual music that you are reviewing that would not fly today but back in the day God it was open season on born to die and Lana Del Rey when this record came out at the very beginning of 2012. but to her credit Lana has always resisted categorization worn to die is super interesting because of how fully formed it was when it landed and how well it intuited pop culture and the general mood and Vibe of the time that it existed and was created in I've always felt like listening to Lana's work is like looking in a trick mirror you're looking into something that is reflecting something real but it's been distorted in some way that's kind of like the filter I think that Lana applies to pop culture she is super observant and she picks up on what's going around her but it goes through this kind of crazy machine in her brain and when it comes back out it is something really come compelling and interesting something that feels close to us and real but also from another world which is why I think there is this endless sort of fixation and Fascination on Lana Del Rey's Persona now she would argue that she doesn't have a Persona she has always said that she's never needed one never will but I think it's hard to when you're looking at born to die and reappraising it in hindsight it's hard to say that there wasn't at least a heavy hand consideration in the construction of her image and a persona for lack of a better word over the years Lana has become known as one of the best Contemporary American songwriters who is committed to documenting exploring and probing what it means to be an American in an age where that label feels increasingly irrelevant and perhaps even splintered and hard to pin down certainly in this View kind of hemorrhaging culture that we have where our attention is displayed everywhere Lana has maintained a kind of universal mainstream appeal despite not having very radio friendly or traditionally commercial music or material and that all be began with a very commercial and very material oriented record born to die that's where it all stems from and it's super interesting because Lana has never really made a record quite like this and I can't ever see her revisiting something like this with this attention to detail she quickly abandoned this level of gloss and commitment to the bit if you want to call it that but born to die to me really was a warm-up for her and her artistic development has taken her so far beyond the scope of the songwriting on born to die that it's almost like it was by a different artist and I don't love it when people say that they're dying and begging and gagging for Lana to return to this this sound and this music I understand what they mean and I wanted that too for a while this kind of like overtly pop very unapologetically commercial interpretation of Lana's songwriting skills but what we've had so far beyond that is much more compelling and interesting but that's what we're talking about today I make that point that she's developed a lot as an artist just to say that she has a very rare talent and skill where she can discard something that was as fully formed and as widely successful as born to die was and move on to completely different things and do stuff and make music that was in completely different areas even if we look at the material that ended up appearing on her follow-up album to this Ultraviolence which which came about two years later it's like it's a different artist like it's completely different Vibes there's a lot less of the gloss of the overproduction it's more focused on live instruments it truly is interesting to see how many different things that Lana Del Rey can do but even though Lana has kind of abandoned and put this project and this Vibe this Aura this Mystique aside we still hear Echoes of Born to Die around us all the time in our pop culture from new and emerging artists and existing artists that were influenced by Lana after this record came out and that's what's so interesting about it is that this album is still at the Forefront of our culture whether or not you have fully put the pieces together and realized it doesn't matter because it is truly still ringing about in our collective subconscious and that's just evidenced by how commercially successful it's been I think it's one of only two albums by female songwriters that has been on the Billboard Hot 100 for over 400 weeks that is a long ass time for an album that you know technically had no big hit Summertime Sadness you can like kind of argue was a little bit of a mainstream hit but none of those songs on the Lana Del Rey albums are shake it offs they're not bad guys by Billy eilish whatever it is you want to call it Lana is truly not a singles artist she's an albums artist and I think that the fact that this album has stuck around for so long despite not really having a traditional hit and also despite it being abandoned and put aside quite quickly by Lana really speaks to How Deeply it resonated with the culture at large I think something that's also really interesting about Lana as a pop star is that she's kind of a bipartisan Pop Star Hip-Hop fans pop girl aficionados and Indie heads are all drawn to certain aspects of Lana which I think helps her have that mainstream appeal that is so confounding when she has no hits so this video is a celebration of born to die and any Critical examination of its impact on popular culture and I want to start with a little bit of a backstory on Lana because I know a lot of you aren't super familiar with her story her origin story she was born Elizabeth Grant Lana Del Rey is her stage name as we all know she was born in Manhattan to two advertising professionals and when she was a year old she moved to Lake Placid in New York this is in the Adirondack Mountains it's kind of a remote isolated area the official population of the Town itself is I think it's called a village not a town the official population is around 2 200 people so that's where Alana grew up as a child Lana sang in the church choir and she contended with a host of substance issues according to her from a very young age so when she was around 13 or 14 she sent off to boarding school the Kent school is an elite boarding school Delana says that she had financial aid in order to go there it has sliding scale tuition which was one of the first Elite boarding schools of its kind to introduce that tuition model which is kind of cool but Lana had trouble making friends and found herself really uh being kind of an outsider in school so when she graduated she straight away moved to New York City and started trying to make the music thing happen she knew that she loved to sing and she loved writing songs and she wanted to get a little bit more experience so she started performing on the dive our circuit in Brooklyn she started to develop a small following here and in 2004 Alana enrolled at Fordham University in the Bronx to study philosophy with an emphasis on metaphysics and I think this is something that we learn more about as Lana's career kind of unravels she is very fixated on like the the omniscience of God and the relationship between God and the physical world if there is one she is interested in all of that stuff but that doesn't really come through on born to die but what I'm saying is Lana has always kind of been thinking a little bit larger than just right now or just what's going to get me my first big hit or what's going to get me to my next place she is strategic and smart but also very carefree and wild as she would call herself so while she's in college she releases a couple of eps here and there and slowly but surely the Lana Del Rey image kind of starts to unfold she performs at this songwriting competition in Williamsburg and an a r guy from a very small independent label sees her and offers her a ten thousand dollar advance for a record he uses that ten thousand dollar advance to go and live in a trailer park in New Jersey no comment on that the anarch guy who signed her noticed that when he signed her she was undergoing a period of great change he came to her with this kind of like very simple plain straight blonde hair a lot of eye makeup and slowly she started becoming more glamorous and expressing an interest in adopting a stage name so she releases an EP called kill kill and she looks for a stage name for her first album and she wanted a stage name that she could shape the music towards so in essence she was creating a character or a Persona even though she wouldn't like anybody to use that word she was creating a kind of new being with which the music could unfold from so the name was a really important part of that if you ask on how she came up with this name she said that she was hanging out with her Cuban friends in Miami and she loved the kind of oceanic vibe that the phrase Del Rey had and the name Lana was plucked from one of her favorite Hollywood starlets Lana Turner who was a noted extremely glamorous person like she was one of the most glamorous starlets of her time and was always known for being perfectly manicured and put together and having Gorgeous Nails and her makeup always done she was an old Hollywood star of the highest order so Lana's first full-length album is called Lana Del Rey AKA Lizzie Grant with Delray spelled with an a instead of an e famously and that came out in 2010 and it had some truly great songs on it Pawn Shop Blues is one I might recommend if you haven't discovered any of Lana's unreleased songs as of yet but it was still kind of a premature or a soft launch of the Lana Del Rey thing she was definitely still kind of working on it and sharpening it over time but she had to deliver this record with her first record contract a few months later she met her managers Ben Molson and Ed Millard who helped her get out of this independent label contract she felt stuck and like she wasn't going anywhere she was destined for something bigger and so she moved to London and acted in a short film called poolside I think that proximity to the moving picture industry really cemented that she wanted to be a star so let's get into the start of the Born to Die campaign video games and we'll talk a little bit about the industry plant thing that kind of arose with that as well so in 2011 Lana uploaded two self-made music videos to YouTube of her singing on photo booth the app that you have on your MacBook interspersed with found footage of old stuff generally animated film titles a waving American flag shot on film close-ups of the Chateau Mar mall and which is the home for celebrities from New York in Hollywood for people who are either on their way up or on their way down in their careers and this found footage paired with the general kind of washed up Starlet aesthetic that she was walking at the time this carefully messy beehive semi-smudged eyeliner a sultry pout and her dead-eyed stare video games went viral and catapulted Lana from a middling songstress with no real success in her late 20s to a bona fide internet phenomenon why is that I mean it's hard to say exactly why something goes viral in the first place part of it is luck but also part of it is a magic that's really hard to pin down and my supposition here is that Lana really recalls a different time she's otherworldly in a sense and she's very of the moment but also completely out of step with it especially with video games entering the modern music industry which was really changing as streaming was entering the game and things like YouTube were becoming more popular as mediums to share music he was entering the space with a really tasteful and intriguing seductive Nostalgia and the draw of nostalgia and the peel of it that we have now seems like it's type of present and so familiar but back in the day back in the early 2010s we were focused on the new we were focused on the modern we were focused on the Contemporary we were not really looking back into the past other than in really fleeting ways Lana capitalized on something that I guess she could feel was in the air which is that people were hungry for a time when things didn't seem so all over the place and sure many pop girls of that era like right before Lana came up around this time had tried on some old-timey stuff for size Katy Perry doing vague 50s pinup girl thing with the one of the Boys album campaign and Christina Aguilera doing that whole World War II 40 Circus theme with the Back to Basics album but no one really bar Amy Winehouse who I think is Lana's closest contemporary has really captured this old school devastatingly Hollow Melancholy and what I've always loved about this era and what I find to be so interesting about Lana is how she's a purveyor of both the high and the low brow and an expert really in making these one-of-a-kind very peculiar and eclectic references that land with a mainstream appeal and have an impact even though they feel as though they were kind of plucked out of nowhere with no context and I think part of the reason why her references and this Nostalgia core that she was creating landed so well has something to do with the medium that she was working with because putting together something as polished as video games really wouldn't be possible for an artist with with no budget 10 years before Lana had debuted right she had the tools iMovie she had photo booth she had the access to all of these archival stock footages online to pull something like this together at a very short notice with almost no financial support behind her so Lana was not only very tuned into the references of the past she was also completely plugged into the messaging and the mood of the moment this next part is kind of coincidental but it also played a huge part in how Lana Del Rey became this kind of cult-like figure and managed to find a lot of success with a large audience despite being critically pretty poorly received her emergence coincided with the rise of Tumblr the microblogging platform that really became the epicenter of good taste teens right so the teens that weren't like spending all day long listening to Katy Perry and going to 7-Eleven and getting their Slurpees and tumblers are micro Trends and niches really evolved in a super Advanced way over time it was kind of like a test drive for what we see on Tick Tock with all of these different niches and kind of styles and subcultures that are mushrooming and blossoming up all over the place though Lana's music definitely propelled everybody's interest in her her image was equally as important I think with Born to Die it truly is like a 50 50 split between the iconography of that era and the sound of it because I think it's really impossible to divorce one from the other when we're trying to look at this era as Lana's image really circulated I think quite wide and far before her music ever really did she had this otherworldly glamor that she very particularly honed in order to get a very certain kind of person involved and it were after video games blows up Interscope reaches out to her and she signs a record deal with them and I think this is where the industry plant rumors start to emerge because what happened after this is that Lana decided that she wanted to buy back the rights to her first album Lana Del Rey AKA Lizzie Grant because it was that kind of soft launch test run and she wanted to have a totally Clean Slate to start over and communicate her Born to Die message with as much focus and attention to detail as she could and without kind of marginal revisions like um entire album that was created it before it getting in the way of communicating the message now I think a lot of people interpreted this as Lana trying to hide that she had had a life before she became Lana Del Rey that she wasn't in fact grown in a test tube and appeared randomly on our doorstep she had a life before and I think she has never shied away from giving context but but she was certainly very focused on constructing and Manufacturing an image and I don't think that that is a bad thing I don't think that makes her any less of an authentic artist but at the time these men with their stupid blogs I they just felt like they could say whatever the they want and you know what they did so now let's talk a little bit more about the moment that Lana emerged into I think I referenced this a little bit earlier when I was talking about Katy Perry and Christina Aguilera but I also spoke of this in my Lord video when I was discussing why I thought that solar power was received kind of poorly because the moment that it met and the mood that Lord was in didn't really Vibe like it didn't feel of the moment it didn't feel fitting for the time that it was released in Born to Die is like the exact opposite of that because the the moment that an album on art artist or a song enters the public lexicon affects how it performs and also how we view it and perceive it and that can certainly change over time and that's definitely been the case for Alana who was hugely misunderstood though near immediately hugely successful when the Born to Die campaign kicked off in full swing and the early 2010s were aesthetically terrible it was the era of Party Rock Anthem and excess and what we had lost in this new vibrant like optimism this hyper materialistic consumerist culture was taste and style and subtlety and Katy Perry's Mammoth confection Teenage Dream was spilling candy covered rainbows all over the place Lady Gaga was wearing neat dresses and giving birth to things on stage and Nicki Minaj was living in her Barbie Dream House LMFAO was trying to sell us shutter Shades I mean it was ugly there was a lot going on at once that's not to say that any of those things are bad though some of them are but it was just a very homogeneous way of presenting art the only kind of tasteful mainstream Act was Adele who didn't really have a huge kind of demographic pull with younger people it was certainly aimed in an older audience and she was hitting really big with rolling in the deep at this time but here her old schoolness was less referential and more kind of just copy pasted because it was a product of the kind of voice she had and the kind of music she made and it didn't really seem to have any relationship to the moment that it was within and I mean like content wise what is everyone singing about when they're singing in their bras that are shooting whipped cream everywhere and shuffling all day long they're singing about more and more and more and more partying taking shots dancing SNM loving yourself just the way you are it was all very Earnest straightforward garish a little bit uninspired and Lana's music was the antidote in that it offered you no salvation there was no solution she wasn't telling you that you were born this way or that you were a firework Lana's second and official single after the Dual release of video games and blue jeans was born to die and this fatalistic Dark Side of that garage consumption and Relentless optimism is that obsession with mortality she was a breath of hot and heavy air sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough I don't know why that was the refrain that we heard over and over from Lana's Sullen sultry lips so video games only came out in October of 2011 and by January 2012 she was booked to perform two songs on SNL the SNL musical guest spot is a really coveted thing for an emerging artist and also a huge kind of moment to prove yourself and to show live television in a very prestigious setting that you are worth betting on and Lana's performance was kind of a flop it was widely derided and mocked for weeks and to be fair Lana was wooden and stiff and a little bit nervous and I don't think that Lana actually is the best on stage performer in general but if she seemed a bit nervous why wouldn't she be she'd been deemed the next biggest thing by this time she had already started to absorb some of the criticism that was going on around her this incessant conversation about her nose and her lips and her history and her father her she kind of understood from the beginning that she was never going to get away with just being able to sing and I think that that pissed her off and it also made her rightfully nervous and it was kind of Brave of her to get on live television and stand there in a dress and sing without any gimmicks or dancers or any sort of backing up vocals she truly just wanted to stand there and sing her sad songs and boy nobody was having it and so as quickly as she'd been crowned the next kind of best Indie sensation she was now the most fake thing the most artificial thing the conversation veered even more away from her music and towards her appearance and her fakeness or her authenticity was her nose fake was that her real hair why did she change her name what is she running from she pulled the first album that's proof of a conspiracy she must be an industry plant and is it a crime for an artist to think about what kind of Legacy they want to leave and how they want the world to perceive them I feel like as an artist you should be in control and you should care about how people view your musical Legacy and you should be Discerning about what you put out into the public Lana felt like that first album was not the way she wanted to be met by the way world and so she bought it back she wasn't trying to hide it she just wanted to make it a little harder to find what Lana understood early on is that having an image is really important even if people don't connect with it even if people think that it's fake if you put enough thought into it and if it's glamorous and if it comes from an authentic place it's gonna land with some people somewhere it's how people remember you and having that visual element getting people to remember you allows your music your message your songwriting to travel widely it enables you to make more art so I think it was really smart of her as an emerging artist shooting for the stars to focus on her image and her packaging and her performance the Persona at this point when you're an emerging artist establishing yourself it almost becomes more important than the music itself what I thought was really despicable about all the criticisms being lobbed her way were that her creative control was called into question and I mean how can she be at once so calculated and artifice and you know an industry plan but also have completely no say over all of these alleged conspiracies she's cooking up and coming up with it's it is that kind of misogynistic criticism that I think other artists like Queen Taylor Swift had to suffer with as well men assume that there are other men behind the woman pulling the strings telling her what to sing about how to present it it can't just be this glamorous person doing glamorous things on stage now let's talk about how born to die was ahead of its time so Born to Die comes out in January of 2012 and it's a cultural reset it really was the album enjoys instant Commercial Success debuting in the top 10 across the world and continuing to sell phenomenally well for the next 10 years and as I mentioned it spent over 400 weeks in the Builder top 100 before I get into the visuals and the cultural Legacy of the album let's get into the music and the album itself Born to Die is like the very surface level of Lana's songwriting capabilities and that is not a knock on the album or Lana because I love this record so much it's just lyrically not as evolved or deep or as exploratory as some of her other efforts have been and her vocals are good but they are not as you know ethereal and wonderful as they have become she truly is like a fine wine aging and getting better over time the production on this record super intricate and very ornate it is perhaps overproduced in areas at times there are these gorgeous swelling string Arrangements these kind of trippy hip-hop infused beats and it's been described as Baroque pop Indie pop sad pop what can be agreed upon from all of these categorizations is that this is pop music honey it's catchy it's hook heavy and it's Radio Ready Lana described her sound at this time as the gangster Nancy Sinatra and I think that that's a really good kind of like modern but also referential high low combination way to describe what she was going for at that time she also mentioned in a couple of interviews that her two primary musical influences for this were Britney Spears and Elvis Presley and that makes so much sense if you have listened and been familiar with this album over the years something that Lana does a lot on this album is she slips into this kind of like talk singing this kind of like Mumble rap this SoundCloud rap she was doing it way before all those boys were that we really haven't heard from her again like it truly was kind of robbing almost and there was a lot of like hip-hop inflection and influence at this period of her career some of the best tracks on this record were produced by Emily Hayne I think I'm saying that right I'm not sure who was fresh off of a production stint with Kanye West and Kid Cudi she also had Rick Knowles on This Album as well and he is a really like kind of long-term producer he worked on Heaven as a place on Earth by Belinda Carlisle so he's been going since the 80s and I think that explains some of the more bombastic over-the-top Productions of this record like Dark paradise and Summertime Sadness so because Lana's lyric writing is kind of vague on this record what it does do instead of offering us a lens into exactly who Lana Del Rey the person is it creates this mystique and it manufactures some Intrigue what do we know about this narrator from one lesson of the album well we know she's often apathetic perhaps she's even sad she wants to die sometimes she's detached she's often writing like she's an observer of her own self but she's also camp and silly and funny and I think that that's what a lot of the critics missed on their first evaluation of this that Lana is not always taking herself so seriously I can see why you might think she is given the image that she presents but if you really listen there are a lot of funny moments on this record and at times the Persona is a little bit too detached I will give the critics that if you only have born to die as your reference for who is Lana Del Rey is an artist you would come away being kind of like I don't know but I want to hear more Paradise Edition I think rounds this out wonderfully and solves a lot of the kind of issues that maybe appeared with the first version of born to die because she really elaborates on that specific kind of Americana visuals that she brings up and the themes and the songwriting gets a lot more fleshed out I think with those additions it really reminds me of The Fame Monster Lady Gaga's reissue of the fame that added a layer of subtext and depth that maybe wasn't there on the original album so lyrically the girl boss was on the horizon outside of Lana Del Rey you know empowerment I don't need a man girls doing it for themselves other girls that was another thing that was going on at this time this was already starting to take place either that or a very hyper-sexualized kind of Pop performance and Lana's experience of femininity on this record is more complicated and subdued our narrator is not afraid to fall in love she is not afraid to surrender totally to the experience of belonging to someone else she rejects the idea that this is always a bad thing to belong to someone else or that it's something to be ashamed of isn't it glamorous to fall in love and isn't it even more glamorous to be heartbroken because of falling in love that's the question that Lana is asking throughout this record she wishes she was dead she's got a red dress on she's dropping it like it's hot in the pale Moonlight and above all she does not want her lover to leave her and as I mentioned born today is really funny Diet Mountain Dew Off to the Races and national anthem all offer something in the way of Camp social critique or humor and the writing on National Anthem is actually kind of brilliant money is the reason we exist everybody knows that it's a fact kiss kiss I mean she was widely mocked for saying that in a superficial way like people listened to that and took it at face value but then when you see the music video and you see what she did with the visuals there it all kind of adds up that it is somewhat of a social critique and that leads me straight into the visuals because it is hard as I mentioned and to separate the visual artist from the Sonic artist because they have such a symbiotic relationship in Lana's world so visually in Lana's world we see a flattened Americana which is very interesting to me it's not really specific to any time period other than that it's you know from Yonder year we hear about James Dean and later on in Body Electric we hear about Marilyn Monroe and Jesus Christ she's got her hair up beauty queen style mascaras running down her face she's drinking Cherry Cola she's at Coney Island then she's at Rikers Island in the same song she's falling asleep in American flags and she's wearing her diamonds on Skid Row there's a lot to contend with there's a lot going on about materialism about consumer culture about the American dream about finding your place as an American what does it mean to be a nationalist images that she recalls in her videos are very striking flashes of American life from now and long ago and Lana's approach to visual storytelling as she put it in an interview in 2009 is very swayed by how things look on the outside she said though I have been burned by what's on the inside many times I still have a love for something that hits my eye right a flag waving or a Pontiac Grand M I didn't even have to know what those things stood for to know they were beautiful and that's what's so appealing but also very disorienting about Born to Die is that these references all kind of collapse in on themselves there's not much a logical connection to the listener between all of these kind of like visuals that we're getting from the past and so we ask ourselves how do we make sense of that and in hindsight this kind of amalgamation of references that become so dizzy and you don't know where to start really reminds me of the algorithmic spell and demise that we're all under right now it's just this endless stream of nostalgia porn and content on Twitter and Tech talk and Instagram and it all doubles up on itself and eventually it all means nothing these images from the past are taken out of their context and places like old and new ornaments alongside each other on a Christmas tree we truly don't I guess understand or have any relation to these images that we use and consume and deploy so often now but what I think there was definitely going on in these kind of at times incoherent somewhat rambling references was that Lana was very deliberate with curating her high and low aesthetic and it was extremely modern let's turn back again to Katy Perry and Adele for examples of what was soaring at the time Katy Perry's Technicolor dream world was taking over the world but now when you look back at the videos and stuff it looks kind of dated and tacky and you could really point it and pin it to that specific time period Adele 60s songstress thing was fitting for her voice but again not particularly memorable and it certainly hasn't ever been modern so Lana's first big budget music video born to die kind of merges these two things this excessive focus on more more maximalist materialism and also this reverence and respect for the glamor of the old world all with a very distinctly sad girl spit on it our establishing shot for this music video is Lana curled up in her boyfriend's arms looking very sad while an American flag wavers in the background and then we get into to a beautiful palatial marble foyer where she's sitting on a throne and what looks like a Versailles inspired mansion with two tigers on leashes wearing her iconic blue flower crown and she looks Regal and distant and unfriendly and unhappy and after this shot we cut to Lana running down these marble steps in a white crop top blue denim jeans red high-waisted Converse red white and blue America baby to meet her degenerate looking boyfriend who looks like he hasn't eaten in a couple of years he's wearing a leather jacket and he has greasy stringy long hair with a bunch of tattoos all over his body and he is driving what looks like a Mustang or a Corvette very contrasting images right we have this like Marie Antoinette kind of like Old World reality paired with this very kind of like scummy gross looking guy that Lana is clearly infatuated with and the music video ends with her dead covered in blood and the car on fire with her boyfriend holding her in his arms and the idea that Lana sees life or sees her position in this world as someone who was born to die is truly a thought-provoking statement meant when it's accompanied by a big budget pop spectacle something that's become interesting of our Collective Consciousness as we've gotten uh more mature in this modern stage is we do kind of surreptitiously peddle immortality we're always looking at like wellness and tinctures and ways to extend your life and anti-aging it's all about permanence being here forever Lana was kind of putting that on its head and saying well what if we were all just born to die because essentially that is the truth of the matter and I'm going to remind all of you who've been trying to outrun fate that you know there's one thing that is absolutely going to happen to you in this world in this life you're gonna die she's not like the other girls and what about it but the best encapsulation of how successful her compelling cross-generational references could be is in the music video for a national anthem where Lana plays both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy while casting ASAP Rocky as JFK this video is frankly stunning it's shot on film and it's no coincidence it was directed by Anthony madler who also did the incredible ride music video there's found footage of these assassination alongside these just like gorgeous sets of Lana in Hyannis Port presumably smoking cigarettes at the dining table drinking whiskey with her man it's quite subversive to do what she did in this video it kind of reflected the modern American dream of the time this powerful political mixed race couple with their lavish parties building their powerful Empire and it's also super interesting that Lana does not pick a side of femininity she can be both Jackie and Marilyn and they were two women who were both kind of damned or doomed by unfortunate circumstances in their lives and they were both restrained by very specific brands of femininity Jackie by this kind of Prim and properness of being the perfect housewife the perfect first lady the perfect mother the perfect mourner and Marilyn being this kind of effervescent Harlot that was doomed to die alone because nobody would want to settle down with her because she was too crazy and too unstabled and too ran through what's so interesting is after all this very careful and deliberate performance Lana still maintained that she has ever needed a Persona and never will and and in 2011 even when this was happening she said I'm not trying to create an image and I do find that hard to believe that none of this was intentional so now let's get further into the backlash and the misunderstandings that emerged when born to die came out it's worth noting that most female musicians that emerge during this time were subject to plant conspiracy theories I think this goes back even further than Alana's age and these conspiracy plant theories you know ultimately I think discredit the artist's agency and creative control there were many facts that I mentioned earlier about Lana that were cherry-picked and presented as smoking guns of her inauthenticity so widespread conversation about her nose and lips whether or not she lived in a trailer park who was her dad what was her relation to him every review and conversation about Lana seemed to want to suggest to us that there was this Grand Lana conspiracy being thrust upon us but I think the true story about Lana Del Rey became a successful artist is more boring and it's that Lana has been working towards being a star since 2004 when she's first started performing on the Brooklyn club scene she found her first mainstream success in in 2011 that's seven years later and when she debuted she was quite a bit older than your average pop star she was 26 years old by the time she actually became famous and at 26 years old you have a life behind you and Lana certainly had experiences on her belt notched and hundreds of songs already written she was kind of in a sense the furthest thing from an industry plant because she had been preparing and gearing up for this level of exposure and this chance to communicate her message for so long in general Lana was really admonished for a long time I think even until honeymoon came out for being this vapid materialistic and obsessed with appearance as person it seems that nobody wanted to understand that in order to be a successful artist in the social media and the digital age you had to have a Persona you had to construct an image it couldn't all be about the music that's just not the way that we consume or interact with music and musicians anymore another criticism that has plagued Alana I think even to this day kind of is that she is the anti-feminist this nightmare for young girls citing her sadness her disillusionment with the world her perceived passivity as a inappropriate for young girls to model and it's always hard I think for Old Men to kind of get when something strikes a chord with a younger demographic of people and I mean that's fair enough they're out of touch it's not made for them right it's made for us something that was so interesting to me about this critical backlash is that I don't think I've ever witnessed before such Discord between the way that the public received the record and the way that the industry received the record because born to die you would think would kind of get killed by all of these negative reviews that were targeting Lana and calling her fake and saying that her product was bad but instead Lana's sword she continued to be really successful and I think that that is probably a tone that has set and sustained her for the rest of her career because even when Lana wants to take a risk or do something experimental or make a single cover on pix art her fans are going to be there to support her because they understand that there's a message there's a purpose behind it but yeah so born to die was never really uncool for many people to love I think in fact a lot of people saw it exactly for what it was it was just the Gatekeepers and The Taste makers don't know a thing about anything most of the time they're literally just talking nonsense and a lot of Publications have come out and revised what they said about Lana in the first place Pitchfork re-scored it from a five and a half to a seven and a half and again I think this just proves that you know being a taste maker means almost nothing in the digital age when there are so many uh smart engaged tuned in young fans that can discern for themselves what's good or what's not good because nobody on Tumblr was caring whether Joe schmoe in his basement blogging for Pitchfork nobody cared what he was saying about Lana Del Rey all we cared about were the images the quotes the interviews the videos of her smoking on stage that's what we wanted to see another accusation that was lobbed at born to die a lot was that it was overproduced but also not well thought through and I don't really see how you can have both of those things happen at the same time it seem kind of contradictory but born to die was a clear concise focused and intentional record and that has only become more clear as we've heard more from Lana so to be fair I think it maybe might have been hard for some people to see past the glamor if you weren't won over by buy it in the first place it may have seemed kind of empty but that also kind of explains why there's been a retrospective appreciation of Born to Die rather than a renegotiation of it and by the time paradise rolled around Lana had really nailed her Born to Die thing like this shtick this character that she had and She Came Out Swinging with her most lana-esque project ever the ride music video that monologue those visuals of the American West the road running it it is truly Sensational Cola is a super interesting song a highlight for sure from her discography for me starting a song with a lyric like my tastes like Pepsi Cola I mean it's something that only Lana Del Rey can get away with so what's the impact of Born to Die how do we still see it in pop culture today well we still hear aftershocks of it all around us and I think that speaks to its lasting power halsey's entire debut the Badlands era was like the ride music video like it was truly like Walmart version of what Lana was doing with born to die while it was watered down and presented in an even poppier more radio friendly format and that's no surprise because Halsey was a Tumblr girly we know this about her so she definitely encountered Lana in her formative years Billy eilish is also a direct descendant of Lana the restrained breathy wispy vocals the dark and deliberately unsmiling narrator board also owes a debt of gratitude to Lana I think in terms of someone else taking the heat before her for being too serious too miserable and perhaps the biggest imitator of Lana Del Rey is my queen Taylor Swift 1989 is the first album that Taylor Made after she heard born to die and what's on that album Wildest Dreams what is Wildest Dreams literally I don't want to say a rip-off but it is a sister to Lana's song without you while this dreams is probably the better song the more successful song Because Taylor took it and Taylor fight it and made it a bulletproof song that would instantly go number one all over the world the influence was there Taylor's I knew her Trouble music video was directed by the same person who directed The Ride music video and basically is the same concept miss American on the Heartbreak Prince is Born to Die inspired song that came out in 2019 like the list goes on and on the Legacy continues and continues and continues so that's all I have to say today about born to die let me know what you thought of this album and what your favorite songs were in the comments down below dying to hear what your specific connections to this albums were how did you feel when it first came out what did you think about it my first encounter with Lana was the Bornstein music video and I was instantly like fixated by the presentation of it I wasn't so keen on the music but a couple of months later when the album came out I was instantly hooked and happened ever since so that's my journey with Lana what's yours make sure to follow me on Tick Tock I'm starting to do more Lana content there having so much fun on Tick Tock it's super easy low effort fun to do I am posting some shorts of The Tick Tock stuff that I do post if you don't have it so don't worry you'll see some of it here February's gonna be a great month for the evolution of a snake we are going to the men and music business conference that is all I can say on that to make sure to check it out and listen and I will see you guys in my next video goodbye

Channel: Swiftologist

Views: 90,353

Keywords:

Id: EibVuh_Kbms

Length: 39min 50sec (2390 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 22 2023