If only Will knew…
[Video][Website]
[5.91]
Will Adams: I didn’t participate in the Great War of Lana Del Rey. All I could do was sit back and quietly lament how essay after essay became less and less focused on the actual music. So where are we now, half a year later? Born to Die is slumming around the lower rungs of the Billboard 200, SNL is a distant memory, and “National Anthem” is still fantastic. Attention-starved and armed with vacuous catchphrases, Lana raps about being your national anthem, commands you: “boy put your hands up,” and then, as usual, tempers her demands by revealing it stems from a need for “someone to hold [her].” Setting a contradiction so human –- a tough façade concealing a vulnerable interior -– against a backing so calculatedly engineered –- those opening fireworks snapping unnaturally in tempo -– hooked me on the first listen. What kept me coming back was her voice, which flits about, adding extra syllables to words –- “ov-a-ti-on”; “di-a-monds” –- like they were the original pronunciation and deftly constructing her character. But masks on masks on masks isn’t enough, so it helps that “National Anthem” is also adorned with a lovely melody to complement the gossamer strings around it. I’m confident that few others have patience for her anymore, and I’m even more confident the eight-minute Instagram-happy video will yield scores of theses on American idealism. If anyone needs me, I’ll be playing this through a pair of nice headphones.
[9]
Katherine St Asaph: I’m starting to suspect we’re in for a Born to Die reappraisal, born of either thinkpiece fatigue, misguided pseudo-feminist nonsense or the guilt falling away from more guilty pleasures than anyone admitted. It damn well better not be born of “National Anthem.” The track’s less “Bittersweet Symphony” than mopey MIDI line, with unenthused heaving of synth and phrasing of “E.T.” Lana either pouts like a 13-year-old who’s figured out her parents hate a certain breathy tone but not why, sings with all the enunciation of your last yawn, or “raps” languidly like she’s auditioning for that Marilyn Monroe musical in Smash against Paris Hilton and a talking Crissy doll. Every lyric is either indistinguishable from tropes that were already tired on The Fame, an unearned meta-reference to “Video Games” or a craven reminder that you should definitely play this on the Fourth of July. (See also: the stock firework sounds.) There is nothing good about this and plenty infuriating, and if we don’t put a stop to this now, then all our 100,000 words have fucking failed.
[1]
Edward Okulicz: So many needless words spilled about this woman and her inconsistent, merely adequate LP (a filler-choked vehicle for some genuine killer, which this song isn’t.) Her “rapping” is clumsy in the same way your mum’s would be, the backing is sleek and professional yet boring, and the chanty chorus is ripped from something else I am sadly unable to place. “Everybody knows it/Kiss kiss” is the sort of thing people put in when they can’t write actual rhyming lyrics but they still want people to quote them.
[3]
Iain Mew: The only way to accurately transcribe that first verse is with “#upperechelon” at the end, topping off a barrage of words as signifiers of class when, if you have to spell it out like this, you surely aren’t part of it. Or at least not comfortably. Her way of singing everything in the same unemotional way becomes a joyless parody of luxury that gives the empty celebration of the chorus a cutting depth. It wouldn’t work if the chorus wasn’t so pretty in its own right, though.
[8]
Alfred Soto: I’ll happily tell a guy that he’s my rockets-red-glare and so will Del Rey, who can will herself into stringing together purploid banalities as long as she can believe in them. But the belief isn’t enough, not when she doesn’t have a clue what to do with words when asked to sing them; it’s been years since I’ve heard a singer with less instinct for language. And the choir got off the wrong Metro stop.
[4]
Anthony Easton: I am not going to spend a hell of a long time working through the lyrics, because they are mostly confused and written for texture instead of narrative. But the textures of the song — sometimes overly literal (the firework sounds), some delightfully ambiguous (those bits where it sounds like a prepared piano being played under water) and some just gorgeous (the percussion) make up for everything else.
[8]
Brad Shoup: The best track on Born to Die. Still not immune to Del Rey’s worst tendencies, though: specifically, the unnecessary elongation of words and the jarring emphasis on wrong syllables. We can assign some of the fault to the writing, somewhat mitigated by the rich string parts and accrual of piano shading. Oh, the text? A lot of gross sentiments expressed through stale imagery (party dresses, the Hamptons, bow-chicka-wow-wow), a steely need to believe this wishlist means nothing and something, and the great image of Lana standing over a body with ambiguous intent. “God, you’re so handsome”: it’d send pop critics over the moon sung by a sweeter-sounding (or differently-calculating) singer. As it is, it’s the sound of someone justifying a significant outlay.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: Given her Mad Men-gone-Jersey Shore aesthetic, that the video ends up being a long Zapruder homage is both obvious and arresting. She’s very good at conveying the physical sensuality of decadence, leaving the insinuation of spiritual rot up to the interpretation of those whose politics tend that way. Mine do; but casting A$AP Rocky in the Kennedy role is a fine way of shorting out my easy assumptions and bringing out the hip-hop materialism buried underneath all the WASP signifiers.
[8]
Patrick St. Michel: Try to block out everything that has come to be associated with Lana Del Rey in 2012 — authenticity, lips, SNL, thinkpiece after thinkpiece after thinkpiece — when listening to “National Anthem.” Try to also block out the accompanying video — although the Kennedy-dress-up clip has received all the attention, it’s just a bit of pot-stirring by Lana Del Rey’s people to keep her name relevant as the second half of the year kicks in, a chance to show A$AP Rocky off to a wider audience as his debut album approaches and an opportunity to make a lot of Instagram jokes. You’re left with a song highlighting both the strengths (strings ripped from a silent movie, bombastic singing come the chorus, the production in general) and weaknesses (clumsy lyrics more awkward than poignant, pretty weak flow) of a young singer who probably shouldn’t have been thrust into the spotlight so soon.
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: He says to be cool, but I don’t know how yet. The tragedy of Lana Del Rey as an artist-character is not any of the myriad complaints about her voice or artifice or other stylistic tics — those are relatively uninteresting nubs of career trivia that collude either in her favor or against it in equal measure — but that for someone so infatuated with a classic and effortless style, she’s cringingly gauche. This applies on a textual as well as a meta-textual level: think the fireworks bursting over the introduction or the bathetic “I sing the national anthem while I’m standing over your body” — as if “by the dawn’s early light” made sense as foreplay. (Elements that could fall into either category: the mispronunciation of “diamonds” forced for a rhyme; “money is the reason we exist/everybody knows it — it’s a fact: kiss kiss.”) Lana Del Rey tends to sing about glamorous, kittenish girls who appear in popular media more often as accessories than leading lights — on “National Anthem” she’s a rich man’s eye candy — except she excises the leading men, leaving the focus on ghost women who aren’t quite sure they exist except to serve as the object of others’ gaze and aren’t quite sure they’ve successfully hidden the work that’s gone into their artifice. No wonder Del Rey loves cinema and Americana: cinema because Hollywood melodrama is rooted around starlets who try to regain their lost innocence through the strength of their own moral righteousness and Americana because the United States is a country forever trying to do the same. As if all that naked striving might be worthwhile because you can release a single with a blissful chorus exulting “red, white, blue is in the sky/summer’s in the air and, baby, heaven’s in your eyes,” on the week before the Fourth of July, with a video dreaming up a post-racial Camelot, starring one of the most hyped rappers of the past year, and people might actually think you’re being clever.
[8]
Colin Small: Groan.
[3]