Lana Del Ray - Born to Die

Lana Del Ray’s success among people who should know better baffles me.  Unquestionably, the best song on this album is her single Video Games, and that’s only because it has some pretty instrumentation.  Let me just say it.  Lana Del Ray isn’t bad because she’s a particularly bad singer, or because she’s offensive, it’s because she’s lazy.  Her songs are so lazy, that they seem to circle all the way around to actively lazy.  Let’s take a look at some choice examples from Video Games.

I'm in his favorite sun dress
Watching me get undressed
Take that body downtown

I say you the bestest
Lean in for a big kiss
Put his favorite perfume on

Now let’s ignore the fact that the song presents itself with no reason to listen any further musically.  The chords fully resolve themselves at the end of each triplet which gives us a perfect time to listen to something else.  Insofar as the lyrical content goes, not only do the songs suffer from a complete lack of cohesion, they are also written using painfully workman like diction.  Normally, I consider it the height of songwriting laziness to rhyme a word with itself, but the most egregious offender in this is her use of the word “bestest.”  I’ll just say this, I liked it better when Nicki Manaj used it in “Bedrock,” and keep in mind that in that song, she rhymed it with “asbestos” and that I consider “Bedrock” to be one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard on the radio.  For Lana Del Ray to attempt to rhyme it with “big kiss” is just lazy.  Lana Del Ray’s painfully repetitious word choice and dreary song structure make this one a definite pass. 

Recommended tracks: Literally anything else


- Peter Guilherme