Lana Del Rey had our summer, just as you suspect she's had more brawny James Dean-alikes than she and her scrupulous marketing brigade are willing to lyrically insinuate. Heck; maybe she's at they that merchandise her quite so superbly too. Who can tell. Similarly, quite what she's up to remains a mystery; a great enigma. Arguably, Del Rey is
the quintessential 2k12 "sociopath": her personality dismembered and recollected perennially so as to faintly resemble an organised disorder before it be rechiselled once more, no one knows what she's up to. Who is she? What does she want from we? Fame, adoration and all the paranoiac insecurities that may engender? Yet more affluence to lump on the dollar bonfire? Or perhaps purely some contorted sense of achievement. I've no idea. What seems rather more discernible however is the story she's plotting on Serial Killer: Del Rey is of course but an actor; a tangible protagonist to have escaped onscreen ensnarement and she's here teasing us with lyrics of "the thrill of the rush" as she comes to portray the slayer pushed over the edge by perniciously excessive infatuation.
For one reason or another I'm still hooked on Born To Die, and this one's another instance worth putting that smouldering scepticism on the back burner for.
As extract this flimsy, somewhat generic diegesis from the more general context of Lizzy Grant and Serial Killer is something of a cornerstone: the simplest of
plaisirs is intrinsic as she jejunely swoons "just have fun." It's human, if still unmistakably virtual as she again explicates that lasting hang up with nonessential button pushing: "Wanna play you like a Game Boy", she seductively avows on a line that sounds as though pirated from Radio chorus. Again crucially, it is
she now manipulating every emotion – his, hers, ours – via the medium of Video Game. The wholly consciously enticing proposals remain (she at one point moans coitally and submits the prospect of becoming "your ingénue") although most pertinently whenever this one may have been recorded it illustrates life after the sporadically excruciating, Nabokov-inspired faux-innocences of the début and the serialised televised suicide of earlier on in the year. And
just as the live show has now blossomed into a honeysuckle-sweet schmooze, Serial Killer only perpetuates the notion that we'll be buzzing around and about Del Rey 'til the end credits run.
Lana Del Rey.
