I don’t at all understand all the negative flap about Lana Del Rey changing her name and cultivating a new persona to match the work she’s putting out or her less than perfect performance on SNL. It sounds like she has actually done a very authentic thing in making sure that she has control over her work and her image. And isn’t it naive to suppose that the majority of what entertainment we consume, whether indie or pop or tv or whatever, isn’t extremely calculated to make us like it so we come back for more? (Hello Lady Gaga, who is all reinvention, Katy Perry, who was a failed Christian singer, Avril LaVigne, who was a Canadian country singer, etc, etc, etc…) It strikes me that Del Rey is at least transparent about the steps she’s taken, none of which seem shady or unfair to me. Reinvention on the part of pop singers is nothing new.
The article above is a great overview of how Lana Del Rey became Lana Del Rey. But I guess a lot of music critics and bloggers have been piling on the vitriol since she came to light. I read a review that at first had me thinking she must have done something terrible to get that spot on SNL. But no. The whole problem was that she didn’t have an album out yet, wasn’t terribly experienced, and therefore didn’t deserve the opportunity. But hey. She’s doing something new and interesting. So far I like it.
This whole deal is interesting because things are being done differently in the music business, thanks to the way that technology and access to it has made getting noticed a different matter. Del Rey made her own video for the song “Videogames” on her MacBook. It’s not bad!
A paragraph from the article on the third page:
For an artist whose homemade approach shifted her career out of obscurity, her labels aren’t concerned with losing her indie prowess. “It’s not about old-school label tactics and all of that crap. It’s really about helping an artist who has a clear-cut vision for herself, really bringing the muscle to make this work on a worldwide level,” Jackson says. Unger Gamilton adds: “The real brilliant artists move the mainstream toward them, not the other way around. She’s doing something that no one else is doing, and it’s just going to draw people in. It’s already drawing people in.”
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Congrats to Idris Elba on his BET Award “Best Actor” nomination for BBC AMERICA’s Luther and his feature films.
