Hoorey! for Lana Del Rey

A more interesting challenge to the challenge of being a female singer in the Year of Our Lord 2012 is being mustered by Lizzy Grant, whose debut CD as Lana Del Rey, Born to Die, comes out this month. Like Florence Welch, she has red hair, though she was once blond. Indeed, in her first single as Lana Del Rey, 2010's "Gramma," she confesses to her grandmother what sets her apart: first, that she's pretty, and second, that she wants to be "the whole world's girl." She's as ambitious as Gaga herself and about as authentic; though almost freakishly beautiful, she looks like the spawn of a postoperative Nicole Kidman; and her lips — not just plumped, Bratz-style, but flat, as if she's pressing them against a window — are already more famous on the Internet than her music.

And yet it's her music that makes her interesting, because almost alone of the women who've made a conscious choice to sing from the impersonal vantage of celebrity, she uses the impersonal vantage of celebrity to make music that's personal in the extreme. Her voice is not agile and overwhelming like Florence Welch's; nor is it as aerobic as Beyoncé's or Gaga's; nor is it desultory and small, with a dollop of cuteness, like Feist's or St. Vincent's. It's low and dark, with a threatened upper register that conveys rather than sheds its emotional burdens. It makes whatever she's singing sound a little like the songs David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti wrote for Julee Cruise back in the Twin Peaks days, but those songs were about the atmospherics, and Lizzy Grant's are about whatever led her to create the entity known as Lana Del Rey. It's a different kind of becoming, at once mysterious and transparent, and if you want to see it in motion, go to YouTube and compare an early performance of "Born to Die" with a recent one at, yes, the Chateau Marmont. In the first, she's wearing a white dress that's too tight and too short, and she starts the song the way she does on the record, with a breathy wink-and-titter "Who me?" In the second, she's representing a high-end fashion house, and she's singing to a crowd that supposedly includes the likes of Kate Bosworth and Juno Temple. Pretty girls all, they no doubt thought that this pretty girl was singing about them; but really she was singing about herself, for herself, with a name that no real human being has ever had, and a fat lip that, for one moment at least, she seemed to have come by honestly.

- courtesy of Esquire

Here's the official music video! Enjoy! I love her album a lot!