Member Since: 8/12/2012
Posts: 13,665
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A review from the concert
Quote:
From the nineties, I remember a spoken book called The Nineties – When Surface Was Depth, i.e. "the nineties, when surface was depth". The book title pops up again when I hear Lana del Rey at Hartwallarenan on Sunday night.
Now it is of course difficult to distinguish surface from substance in all artistic activities. Is not the expression substance? Isn't style medium at least as important as "content"? And do not lead the discussion to end deadlock over what is — gasp — "authentic"?
Sure. At the same time, there are artists who are interesting as artistic designs even though they may not tell us much about what it means to be human. That is why adult critic could write long essays on Lady Gaga without really listening to her music.
You could easily pick up a fempoängs course in aesthetics around Lana del Rey. You could only spend a week studying her expressions — loans from 40-talsnoir, the contrast between dark and light in her texts, images of women – and then take a few days to write little essays about how she moves on stage.
On Hartwallarenan, she is charming, descend in the audience time after time and touch the outstretched hands – most young girls, whose screams are amplified by microphones (or, possibly, come directly from the band). She sings surprisingly well considering how much criticism she received when she made her first live performances for a couple of years ago. Helsinki concert is the last during the tour and an hour and a half is just as much as her song material allows.
The stadium never feels that the optimal stage for an artist, but Lana del Rey and her bands fill the air. You are left on the floor near the stage, you can almost forget the stands behind it and live into her blackened Hollywoodglamour.
So what is it about?
Above all, it is about an artist who has a rare studied ways of expression. All facial expression, all hand movements, downcast gaze – everything seems to go out on to emulate Jackie Kennedy and other sixties icons that we've seen more of the dumb archive movies than in real life. When Lana del Rey waves to the crowd, she makes it in slow motion, as if the big screen in the stadium actually showing a documentary film about a millionaire's daughter on her first pr trip to Cape Cod.
Musically, she picks up heavy strings and 40-talsmelodram, little Nancy Sinatra, actually also some hip hop. Lana del Rey can bitwise letting cinematic epic as Swedish Jonathan Johansson. New single Young & Beautiful from the Great Gatsby-the soundtrack is a typical example: a larger-than-life-ballad of escaping beauty, if fear of losing his youth (one of her songs called, in short, Lolita). Other numbers breathe death wish, and although the artist Lana del Rey sometimes drowns their texts in violence and sex fantasies, I find it hard to believe that Elizabeth Woolridge Grant – who she really is – go to motorcycle clubs after his concerts and pick up tattooed motorcycle bikers, that in their videos.
If Amy Winehouse was tragically self-destructive in real life is probably the only part Lana Ray on the paper. Which we can all be happy.
At the same time, there is nothing right in this contrast, which she plays on: death disdain mixed with shyness. She lives out in the idea of the Hollywood star's hidden demons. It is both campigt, superficial and quite skillfully.
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The thirst is real.
The fan SCREAMING "yes, of course I will my darling"
