There’s a word for what the Lolita in Lana Del Rey suffers from—and it comes from the author of her avatar, Vladimir Nabokov—the Russian word toska, a “sensation of deep spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause, a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning, the desire for somebody, nostalgia, lovesickness. At the lowest levels, ennui, boredom.’
Sounds about right. On Del Rey’s prematurely panned album “Born to Die,” the theme is pure toska, and she doesn’t give us a respite from fashionable melancholy. Female pop singers seem bound by a trope. Rihanna entertains a female rape fantasy. Adele might forever be weary of love. And Lana Del Rey is trapped in a permanent state of longing. The question remains—for what?
On “Video Games,” the lead-off single performed on SNL to much acrimony, she speaks of love like a high school girl drunk off her first (fittingly) Bacardi Ice, passed out in your bed while you tuck her in and lie on the couch alone, listening to her somnambulist mumblings in the dark.
That’s not to discredit or scoff at her. Yet when the Idea of Love is being desperately foisted on you, it produces the funny sensation of remaining an abstraction. Lana loves a lot, and that’s disconcerting. Our generation seethes with extreme emotion, we express “love” and “hate” with mutual flippancy. It also becomes a little tiresome to love something that won’t love you back. Unless, of course, you thrive on the pain. As Proust said (fittingly), the feeling of love multiplies once the object of your affection cancels dinner. Del Rey’s love feeds on rejection.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO1OV5B_JDw
She attempts something of a rap on “National Anthem,” chock full of whimsy about “drugs,” “reckless abandon,” “blurring the lines between the real and the fake.” Why am I reminded of The Hills?
Fatigue sets in at “Summertime Sadness.” Del Rey’s defeatism moves at a snails pace, when it should be frenzied and dangerous. The last track “This is What Makes Us Girls” is recollection of high school escapades, “dancing on tables,” “drinking cherry schnapps,” and wearing “ribbons in their hair”—a “freshman generation of degenerate beauty queens”—yes, this is what makes them girls, not women.
