Hope is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – But I Have It (2019)Ī cynic might suggest that, from its title to its lyrics (“24/7 Sylvia Plath”, “spilling my guts with the Bowery bums is the only love I’ve ever known”), this is a song that teeters on the verge of self-parody. Like Dory Previn’s Mary C Brown and the Hollywood Sign, Lust for Life is haunted by the 1932 suicide of failed actor Peg Entwhistle: like the relentless pulsing synthesiser in the background, the allusions to it add a dark undertow to what initially sound like bullish assertions of strength from Del Rey and Abel Tesfaye: “We’re masters of our own fate.” 13. It’s jazzy in the sense that a torch song is jazzy, but – beyond the parched, reverb-heavy guitars that recall Mazzy Star – the most obvious influence is John Barry’s Theme From Midnight Cowboy, echoed in the lovely descending vocal melody. Lana Del Rey’s favourite song from Honeymoon, apparently because it was “jazzy”. Even by her more recent standards, the music here is minimal, which only adds to the song’s mood of creeping disquiet. There was a time when Lana Del Rey singing about riding a tractor in Oklahoma would have seemed no more likely than Lana Del Rey doing a cover of the Hokey Cokey, but here we are. It perfectly fits the song’s mood of weariness, an early sign of its author’s wariness about her celebrity: “I can’t survive if this is all that’s real.” 18. High By the Beach sounds superb: shimmering organ, exhausted-sounding washes of synth, a trap rhythm that seems to have been sapped of all its swaggering machismo. Apparently inspired by the suicide of a friend and remixed by Cedric Gervais into that rarest of things – a party-starting Lana Del Rey banger – Summertime Sadness was a hook-laden highlight of her second album Born to Die, later becoming a key text in the #prettywhenyoucry “sad girl” aesthetic Del Rey inadvertently spawned.
0 kommentar(er)
