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"For those of you who know about Lana Del Rey (or Lana Del Scandal, as I jokingly call her), you are either familiar and enamored, or familiar and exasperated. Some background for the unfamiliar: she&amp;#x27;s a pop music sensation that built her success on the strength of a couple viral tunes that had self-directed music videos incorporating evocative clips of skaters, romanticized gangsterism, and scenes of old Hollywood. The overall product left viewers and listeners either enthralled with the nostalgia or enraged by her rumored lip job (I especially love how concerned people still are with her lips--as if plastic surgery is somehow socially unacceptable now; I swear we only do this to the girls). See the clip for first single &amp;quot;Video Games&amp;quot; and judge for yourselves: No matter how you slice it, Lana Del Rey remains incredibly polarizing and almost none of it is her own doing. What she is in control of, however, is her music and whether or not she wants it to &amp;quot;mean something.&amp;quot; Personally, I believe Miss Del Rey has gorgeous pipes--there&amp;#x27;s an oddly dolorous, whiskey-drenched quality to her voice that I think gives her songs a certain emotive (usually sad) power. And her lyrics might be simple pop ditties littered with clich?\uFFFDs (&amp;quot;I will love you &amp;#x27;til the end of time&amp;quot;), but I think even they are embedded with lots and lots of feeling. But Lana hasn&amp;#x27;t always sounded the way she does now, which obviously means she hasn&amp;#x27;t always looked the way she does now. (If it tickles your fancy, Google images is a handy tool to see vintage pictures of Lana, pre-Lana.) There&amp;#x27;s seems to be a lot of speculation attached to Lana&amp;#x27;s backstory: rumors of a rich Daddy Del Rey who bankrolled her into success; she was allegedly a pre-plastic surgery nobody desperate to break into the music scene via Lower East Side open mics; there was an album she released in 2010 under her birth name, Elizabeth &amp;quot;Lizzy&amp;quot; Grant, and pulled from iTunes after it struck out. And now we have LANA DEL SCANDAL, with her (luscious) auburn, coquettish tresses (admit it!) and semi-Quaaludes-and-vodka-awkward stage presence and . What gods would curse America this way on purpose?! We&amp;#x27;ve been duped! Bamboozled! And then, after things seem to have cooled down, another album leaked last week to the interwebz, under yet another pseudonym: &amp;quot;May Jailer.&amp;quot; Apparently, it was recorded before the &amp;#x27;10 Lizzy Grant album. My first thoughts about this: Lana&amp;#x27;s nearly 25 years old, which means she was 20 or 21 when her Lizzy Grant LP dropped, which means she could&amp;#x27;ve been like, 16 when she recorded as May Jailer. Let&amp;#x27;s just focus on the music, though. The May Jailer record, in its web form, is 15 tracks of airy finger-picking anti-folk. Vocals and guitar only. We can hear where current-Lana got her affinity for personal, affective lyrics. &amp;quot;My dreams are bigger than your junky pride,&amp;quot; she coos defiantly in &amp;quot;Pride.&amp;quot; There&amp;#x27;s even a song about how she and her momma don&amp;#x27;t get along--aptly, &amp;quot;My Momma.&amp;quot; It&amp;#x27;s all appropriately confessional: Lana likely was a teen writing these songs, and her observations of adolescence seem charmingly mature. The 2010 album that was pulled from iTunes (Lana has since come out to say that she&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;not ashamed&amp;quot; of these songs, as it was previously presumed by her critics, and that it would be re-released this summer!), Lana Del Ray A.K.A. Lizzy Grant, is another series of confessional stories that segue to current-Lana. There&amp;#x27;s more instrumentation and production value, albeit super low-budget, and the lyrics are more abstract. It&amp;#x27;s here that we see the roots of her now-signature Hollywood vampish sexuality: songs like &amp;quot;Mermaid Motel&amp;quot; are shrouded in a Coney Island cigar-lounge haze (sample lyric: &amp;quot;You call me sunshine/ You say take it off&amp;quot;), while &amp;quot;Little Girls&amp;quot; offers a, um.... creepier? take on femme-fatale noir (&amp;quot;C&amp;#x27;mon, you know you like little girls&amp;quot;/ &amp;quot;You can be my daddy&amp;quot;). And now at current-Lana LP, Born to Die, we have a richly orchestrated array of dark tales about dangerous, down-and-out romance. As her first major release on Interscope Records, it&amp;#x27;s been widely dismissed as derivative (Like, um: hello, what art isn&amp;#x27;t derivative in the history of ever?) and dubbed as artificial as its creator. And this is my favorite album of the three; I see it more as a progression from where she&amp;#x27;s come from than a label-engineered regression. I find much of the record hauntingly beautiful, and if you listen to the other two albums before this one, the progression to Born to Die isn&amp;#x27;t unfathomable. And assuming artifice were present on this album and in Lana&amp;#x27;s constantly changing image, isn&amp;#x27;t that kind of the whole deal with pop music? Aren&amp;#x27;t all of our current pop stars selling something, playing pretend? Don&amp;#x27;t all of them have backstories? All of the above considered, no one is more or less sketchy than anyone else, and in pop music, everybody&amp;#x27;s got their somethin&amp;#x27;. So why do we charge Lana Del Rey for artificiality when that&amp;#x27;s the name of the game, especially as one pursues major label success, as she has? Regardless, we as a culture still buy whatever&amp;#x27;s selling, even if that means &amp;quot;controversy,&amp;quot; or stuff leaked to the internet, presumably recorded in a teenage girl&amp;#x27;s bedroom. What do you guys think of Lana Del Rey? Will you be listening to her pre-Born to Die records? What&amp;#x27;s the big fuss over, anyway? Discuss, and don&amp;#x27;t hold back. More music... *Reviews of Patti Smith&amp;#x27;s Banga vs. Friends&amp;#x27;s Manifest! *The New Edward Sharpe &amp;amp; The Magnetic Zeros Video *Which of These &amp;quot;Call Your Girlfriend&amp;quot; Covers Is the Coolest? YouTube"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/entertainment/blogs/obsessed/2012/06/lana-del-rey>