Lana Del Rey: Her Life in 94 Songs about Love, Sex and Death

by F.A. Mannan

Literary Nonfiction. Music. Biography. The controversial artist Lana Del Rey seemed to appearfully-formed with her melancholy viral hit Video Games , but her story started long before. She had written and performed for many years under many names with no fanfare. Each time she changed her name, the artist was drawn closer to the finished the synthesis of real life and fantasy we see now. In this anatomy, F.A. Mannan considers all that has gone into the Del Rey the music, poetry, films, places, and experiences that allow the songs to communicate despite the media circus around them. The guide considers the way the music industry and press operate, and the tense gender politics and blurry notions of authenticity that jut into Del Rey's otherworldly image. This is the definitive treatment of Lana Del Rey's work to date.

Genres: Music

130 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2016

Reviews

[margot · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.75) Encapsulating and easily accessible analysis of Lana's early artistry! I wish this could have been written later so as to include all of Lana's work post Honeymoon era, but regardless it was enjoyable. I was glad to see an inclusion of many unreleased songs, however there are still many missing. The author mostly stuck to analysis of songs on albums, but didn't really synthesize the narratives of Lana's various eras in an easily understood way. However, maybe the beauty of those narratives is how open it is to interpretation. Overall a fun read, I'd recommend for any fan.

[Jakub Sláma · Rating 1 out of 5]

Trivially descriptive and sometimes Wikipedia-like, reading too much into stuff ("In the video [for Young and Beautiful] she appears with two black teardrop tattoos... this could mean she killed someone or was raped in prison"???), assuming that the reader already knows everything the author's talking about and thus rendering the book pointless ("as she rattles off the opening lines of Lolita" – if you don't know what the opening lines of Lolita are, and that Lana uses them in the chorus of Off to the Races, this must be pretty confusing slash annonying to read, because the autor is not going to tell you; similarly, "She breathlessly quotes Lou Reed, inverting the tone of his delivery" – dude! be more specific for christ's sake, what's the quote? where does she quote it? what is the tone of his delivery? how does she change it?), and including a few factual errors (the author says, for instance, that in the Born to Die video, Lana sits "on a throne in some sort of computer-generated palace" – babe, that's the pretty much real palace of Fontainebleau in France), unfortunately the book ultimately feels like a bit of a waste of paper.

[Derek Neveu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sparse and far from comprehensive, it only goes to 2016, and fans of Lana know she’s covered a lot of ground artistically since then. That being said, informative, academic, and to the point. Although only 134 pages in length, Mannan gives us a lot of food for thought, and if you leave this text without a greater appreciation of the artist and a keen interest in doing a deep dive into her musical, cinematic, and poetic influences, you were not reading it the way it was meant to be read.

[sofia 🍓 · Rating 4 out of 5]

states the obvious but was interesting

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5