Interscope Artist Lana Del Rey

[john]

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Indie-music publishing
The Lana Del Rey affair
Mar 1st 2012, 17:17 by J.D. | CHICAGO


AMERICA’S well-documented independent music scene once valued tour-van mileage, lean living, anti-commercialism and a layer of sonic inscrutability. The DIY work ethic of the 1980s and ‘90s meant everything from booking your own gigs to pressing your own debut single, if necessary. Would-be scribes wrote criticism in Xeroxed zines, published in copy shops. It was more concerned with a grassroots revolution in sound than SoundScan figures—the pre-internet gauge of sales.



In the past decade, indie music blogs—often American, each fancying itself like a mini-NME—have become increasingly influential. Pitchfork and Stereogum, in particular, had the power to break bands from independent labels with every thumbs-up they give. Acts such as the Arcade Fire and Fleet Foxes owe much of their commercial viability to enthusiastic online editorial coverage. The online hype machine—which drops new tracks and videos along with breathlessly excited text, plus the usual reviews and interviews—can easily make a musician that has never played a live concert a buzz-worthy act over night. Often the more mysterious the act, the better for the site that breaks it. Traditional media blogs have restyled themselves along the same lines—Rollingstone.com for instance. In this day and age, that online hype may not translate into massive sales, but it can mean a career in music with potentially lucrative touring and licensing. Publishing and live performance are the profit centres in the industry these days.

Nothing illustrates the conflict between the power and influence of the blogs and their romantic notions of an indie music work ethic better than the Lana Del Rey affair. In short, indie music blogs initially championed her “Video Games” single/video via YouTube and covered her as a rising star in the tradition of Cat Power, an underground darling. But then they outed Del Rey as an ambitious pop-star wannabe, who had already released an album to little fanfare under her given name. She had management, a label and the business savvy to reboot as Del Rey with a signature look (a retro brunette bombshell that rarely smiles) and the blogs felt duped. Del Rey wasn’t the undiscovered organically grown rare orchid they had hoped. Rather, she was nurtured in the corporate hothouse.

But it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle: Del Rey was already on the way to a major label release, an appearance on Saturday Night Live and a number one album on iTunes in 11 countries.

What Del Rey illustrates is that indie cred, and indie values and credential checking is a useless exercise in this day and age—if indie was a private party, the bouncer has long since left the building. Del Rey wasn’t the first career-oriented songwriter to reconfigure herself with an indie scene-friendly look; acts like the Drums had already done that. And the artists that are given carte blanche on the hipster blogs are just as likely to employ powerful publicists and booking agents, and license tunes commercially as those working the industry showcase circuit and toiling away with songwriting teams. And music industry insiders, who once might have ignored bands playing the basement-show circuit, are combing the blogs, SoundCloud and of course YouTube looking for the next sensation. The walls have been broken down for years, and it is a good thing that they are unlikely to go up again.

Del Rey’s new album isn’t quite worth the kerfuffle. Outside of the unique and downbeat “Video Games”, which contrasts a schoolgirl fantasy of glamorous life with a humdrum chore of keeping a boy interested, "Born to Die" only bears modest fruit. We’re given a heavy dose of Gangsta Nancy Sinatra on songs which wed trip-hop beats, sweeping strings and near-raps. Often, she’s playing a gold-loving, retro-styled vixen that savours the thrills that come with bad boys but ends up bored and conflicted. The lounge filler in “Diet Mountain Dew” and elsewhere lends itself to a gangster moll storyline, but altogether, Born to Die is more pop curiosity than a youthquake. Never fear. With the hype machine humming along 24-7, something else will come soon.