The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper Read Free Book Online

during her lost years. A pale, blemished Spears is shown clad in ripped black fishnets, black cowboy boots, a black jacket, mini skirt hiked up her waist, revealing her blood-stained underwear. She wears oversized black sunglasses, and her hair is dyed black—her weave a ratted mess—and there is a phone in her hand. She is heading in to L.A. boutique Kitson for a private shopping spree at 2 a.m.
    Though Gaga’s work is as platinum-perfect (perhaps even more so) as Britney’s, Gaga’s work is rife with irony and self-possession—she satisfies with a cultivated, purposeful strangeness. She should by all means be the Black Swan of the two, and as she plays with the idea of pop’s manufacture, she winks at us from atop her skyscraper heels. Being nearly nude in LAX, she obliges our most debased wish: to see celebrities naked, to ogle them, completely. She acknowledges the ironies, the ruptures, the fantasies of pop, and she abides by them as she rips them apart. In doing so, Lady Gaga shows that she understands the only real rule of popular entertainment: Give the people what they want.

DECONSTRUCTING LANA DEL REY
    SPIN magazine, January 2012
     
    I. The Origin Story: A Star Is Born/Made
    The myth, as it is presently understood: Lana Del Rey is a vanity project bankrolled by the singer’s dad and honed, over the years, by a series of lawyers and managers who’ve shaped her image and plotted her career path. She is a canvas of a girl and a willing one at that. Her real name is Lizzy Grant, “Lana Del Rey” is “fake,” as are her lips.
    What we do know to be true: Lizzy Grant is indeed now Lana Del Rey. She is 25 and grew up in Lake Placid, in upstate New York. “I lived in a small town,” she told MTV, “and I just thought it was gonna be a long life.” She spent her time as a teen wandering in the woods and writing, feeling like a secret weirdo and having her first real connection to music through Biggie’s “Juicy.” Back then, she says she was something akin to trouble, and got shipped off to Kent, a private prep school in Connecticut. Her autobiography of that era can be heard on the track “This Is What Makes Us Girls.”
    At 18, she moved to New York to attend Fordham University, where she studied metaphysics, looking for proof of God, and began writing songs. She stopped drinking and got sober. She played shows, performing versions of songs that now make up Born to Die . Just before her senior year, she found a deal with the small independent label 5 Points, through a songwriting competition. The label gave her an advance, which she used to move into a trailer park in New Jersey shortly after graduating from Fordham.
    David Nichtern, who runs 5 Points, solicited producer David Kahne (who has worked with everyone from Paul McCartney to Sublime), who agreed to helm the Lizzy Grant record. “It was a bit of a coup because he is a big name, and we are a tiny record label,” says Nichtern. In the studio, Kahne saw in Del Rey a singer who was motivated and self-directed, always looking for ways to move her work forward. “What she’s doing goes against the grain of chart pop,” says Kahne. “The country is fraying at the edges; she wanted to look at that edge, at destruction and loss, and talk about it.” According to Kahne, Del Rey was “solitary” and often spent her nights riding the subway out to Coney Island, exploring.
    The songs from these sessions were split into two releases, the Kill Kill EP and her debut album. According to Nichtern, after the release of the EP, the singer said she wanted to change the name she recorded under. “First it was ‘Del R-A-Y,’ and then she settled on ‘R-E-Y.’ This story that it was anyone but her making the decision is complete fiction,” says Nichtern. “If she is ‘made up’—well, she is the one who made herself up. She has very strong ideas about what she does. The idea someone could manage her into a particular shape—it’s