In Moby’s most recent memoir, Then It Fell Apart, he tells the story of a romantic encounter with a 21-year-old, platinum blonde, ‘beautiful elf’ named Lizzy Grant. They’d ‘kissed at 4am, just as the bar was closing’, and although Moby asked her if she’d stay the night, she refused his advances unless he took her on a proper date. A week later they ate at a vegan macrobiotic restaurant, then journeyed back to his luxury penthouse to share music. Moby had just released his seventh album, and was one of the most successful artists in New York City. Lizzy was accustomed to open mic nights and club gigs, and was recording a demo after impressing a judge in a songwriting competition earlier that year. Moby recalls a conversation they had in the restaurant that night:
During dinner she told me she was a musician so I asked, “Will you play me some of your music?”
“Sure, do you have a piano?”
“Yes, back on the second floor,” I said.
“Floors in an apartment.” She shook her head. “Moby you know you’re the man.”
“Ha, thanks,” I said.
“No, not like that. You’re a rich WASP from Connecticut and you live in a five-level penthouse. You’re ‘The Man.’ As in, ‘stick it to The Man.’ As in the person they guillotine in the revolution.”
The date ended amicably. Moby made a move, but Lizzy refused to go any further. She said: “I like you. But I hear you do this with a lot of people”. She wasn’t wrong. Lizzy took the elevator from the 29th floor and kissed him goodnight. Four years later, she changed her name and released a self titled debut album. Two years after that, she broke the internet with Video Games.
I have my reservations about Born to Die. On the one hand, a wonderful nostalgia ties me to the album. My mum would play it in France or on long drives to the beach, with Lana’s gentle voice syncing up perfectly with the afternoon sunshine and blinding fields of rapeseed. Her favourite was Million Dollar Man, which she would play relentlessly- she loved the bridge, where Lana sighs: ‘you’re un-believable’.
But the album makes me feel a bit strange, too. Because with the exception of Summertime Sadness and This Is What Makes Us Girls, we don’t really hear any Lizzy Grant. Not once. Instead, it’s an ensemble of characters. The husky, crooning girlfriend in Born to Die and Video Games, the bright eyed naive debutant in Carmen and Off to the Races, the glowing stereotype of patriotism in National Anthem. The same things are referenced constantly. So constantly, it almost feels uninspired: California, red dresses, heavy drinking, perfume, bad boys who are bad for her, Coney Island, California again, etc. She rhymes crazy with baby about 60 times, and it drives me crazy, baby. Influences are problematic too. Any song which glamorises the twisted, sickening world of Nabokov’s Lolita is cringeworthy to me, and there is one very problematic example on this record (two, if you include the equally creepy bonus track Lolita). It wouldn’t be a stretch to say Lana is subservient and submissive to a fault on this album, oftentimes to a man exhibiting some form of patriarchal dominance over her (look up the lyrics to Yayo on the paradise edition if you don’t believe me). This actually continues throughout the moody sequel Ultraviolence; I will never not cringe at the titular track’s refrain: ‘He hit me and it felt like a kiss’.
Admittedly, that song is about an underground cult, and it contains (what I believe are) several references to Jim Jones. It’s an intentionally harrowing story. And I don’t really have too many issues with these dominant men either, it’s just the added infantilisation, especially on Born To Die, which occasionally makes my skin crawl. Now, you may be thinking – Felix, what’s wrong with doing characters? You do them all the time! So much that people can’t distinguish whether you’re being serious or doing a bit! Is he doing a bit now? Who knows? You never can tell! Ahahahaha – it’s true. I love characters. I love storylines and metaphors and symbolism. But I also love Lizzy Grant telling Moby he’s the type of guy to get publicly executed in 18th-century France. Enter Brooklyn Baby, the realest and fakest and funniest song Lana has ever recorded.
I suppose I should start by describing the song itself. As with most LDR, the instrumentation is spectacular. Film-score-esque. A stupidly catchy hook which is just Lana humming over a simple guitar riff. Intense, breathy moments of gorgeous unaccompanied singing. A song which starts with echoey vocals and an electric guitar, and ends with a lazy drumbeat and a backing singer and a string section. It dances between categorisations, both vintage-sounding and dreamlike, with a strange ethereal quality to it. None of it feels like it’s really happening, if that makes sense. It’s very good that this song doesn’t have a music video, as it’s almost too colourful to visualise outside of your head. In fact, I defy you not to form an image of a video in your mind while you’re listening to this song. Everything about it engages with nostalgia and spurs the imagination. As you can imagine, the song has been slowed down and reverb-ed and tinkered with by a plethora of lo-fi YouTubers. But as far as I’m aware, not many people have explored just how critical this track is.
A critique of New York culture:
I’ll admit I only discovered this banger last year. But after listening to hundreds of Lana songs about California sunshine, I was gasping for a tune that hailed closer to her hometown. Interestingly, my favourite Lana song, How to disappear, is about her time spent in New York. It laments on her past relationships and adopts a tone of melancholic longing. Brooklyn Baby does exactly the opposite.
Lana’s protagonist is a walking cliché. She’s cynical and precious, her boyfriend’s in a band, she casually dips her toes in New York’s literary heritage and drug-fuelled history with the phrase ‘Beat poetry on amphetamines’. In fact, this album is steeped in drug culture, from ‘white lines’ and ‘keys’ in Florida Kilos to dancing while smoking Parliament cigarettes in West Coast. A motivation behind Brooklyn Baby was Lou Reed, who is mentioned several times across the song. Reed was a notable figure in New York’s drug scene, a heavy user of methamphetamine; interestingly his 1975 track Coney Island Baby shares some similar themes with Lana’s. Reed was supposed to feature in this song, but he died on the day of recording.
Lana has admitted to wanting to feel at home in a New York crowd, searching for an “artistic community like Dylan’s, Joan Baez’s, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’s”, but she also demanded respect as a writer. “Truthfully”, she said, “I found neither”. It’s why I’ve always found the lyric, ‘I get down to Beat poetry’ to be kind of playful and sarcastic. It gives New York less glamour and more pretense. Even the title is condescending and childish. But this song also indulges in a key theme throughout Lana’s discography: being young. Its petulance is kind of admirable; when she tells you to ‘Beat it’ (play on words) because you’ll never understand her generation, it sounds sincere and passionate. She’s confrontational, she’s sharp and disgruntled: ‘If you don’t get it then forget it’, she moans, ‘I don’t have to fucking explain it’. It’s the voice of a young artist who wants to start a revolution but doesn’t really know where to start. It’s the voice of somebody who wants to stick it to the Man.
A critique of her critics:
Born to Die was an overnight chart topper, but it came under some heavy criticism for a lack of authenticity. Pitchfork called it ‘awkward and out of date… a fantasy world which makes you long for reality’. James Reed from Boston Globe called it a ‘staggering disappointment’, lacking the ‘self possessive’ allure of singles like Video Games. The Guardian’s qualms were similar to mine, with Alexis Petridis lashing out at the repetitiveness of subject matter:
‘After the umpteenth song in which she either puts her red dress on or takes her red dress off, informs you of her imminent death and kisses her partner hard while telling him she’ll love him ’til the end of time, you start longing for a song in which Del Rey settles down with Keith from HR, moves to Great Yarmouth and takes advantage of the DFS half-price winter sale.‘
Isn’t that delightful? I love scathing reviews. But even more so, I love artists who can respond to criticism. There’s a slyness to Brooklyn Baby that makes me think this is definitely not dedicated to a man. It’s dedicated to the music scene in general. When Lana sings ‘I’m too young to love you’, she’s talking about the culture she immerses herself in: ‘They think I don’t understand the freedom land of the seventies’. Lana attacks judgemental people relentlessly across the course of this track, reducing her critics to idiots unable to read between the lines, judging her ‘like a picture book’, ‘like they forgot to read’. And in immersing her song in New York culture, Lana passes the baton of pretentiousness to her critics; suddenly they’re the ones with a ‘rare jazz collection’ and a fondness for beat poetry. It’s the musical equivalent of a ‘Me? No, you.’ I love it.
A critique of herself:
I will give Lana credit and say her aesthetic has excelled as she’s progressed, from the romantic escapism of Honeymoon to the Woodstocky good vibes of Lust for Life. I don’t think it’s mere coincidence, though, that her best record by far, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, is the only one that doesn’t immerse itself in American history. But this song gets stranger as it progresses, because it’s high art, ‘feathers in my hair’ protagonist begins to sound more and more like an East coast replica of, well, Lana Del Rey. Her aesthetic is precise, methodical, planned out. She smokes ‘hydroponic weed’ and is ‘too cool for you’ (a sentiment repeated on Diet Mountain Dew). She seems defensive, yet aware of her own forced identity. And she kind of lets her guard down and embraces the silliness of it all. How do we know this? Lana openly starts singing about herself as the song peters out, with the lines:
‘Yeah my boyfriend’s pretty cool
But he’s not as cool as me!
‘Cause I’m a Brooklyn baby’
Lana co-wrote this song with her ex-boyfriend Barrie James O’Neill. He’s the boyfriend in the band, the man with the jazz collection. And Lana seems to become Lizzy again for a second, as she blends her cinematic stage persona with some down to earth self-awareness. And as the song trails off into some luscious, improvised, fluttery wailing, we realise it’s incredibly tongue-in-cheek.
***
I think Lana Del Rey is one of the most unique and important songwriters in recent history, but I also think it’s taken until her most recent record to explore important themes like independence, companionship, happiness and hope. But this song stands out for me. It’s dripping with stubbornness, it’s contradictory and pretentious and hilarious and genuine all at once. It never loses its glamour or its romance. The narrative is hard-done-by and despicably superior, but so endearing in a way only Lana can pull off.
It’s kind of Lana Del Rey taking the piss out of Lana Del Rey. For me, it’s a flawless track.
And if you don’t like it, you can beeeeeeeeat it! Beat it, babyyyyy!
thinking about things 