#88: LANA DEL REY
"Video Games"
from the album Born To Die
Released: January 2012
It could be either the last or first song of Creation.
The bell tolls for the field, which may well be rendered to carbon or may not yet have formed.
The harp of an angel.
It
may as well be a country song with its talk of pool, wild darts, big
arms, bad girls and old bars. It could equally be a teenpop song about
how technology makes us all fall in love or see love's true essence,
hence should ideally be accompanied by a ghostly troupe line dancing to a
silent limbo.
The
singer sounds nervous, bewildered or awed. It is possible that she
could be all three. Awed because this is love as she has come to
recognise and understand it - here, in this least promising of human
arenas, drunk guys clicking and scoring points, but outside the bar, in
the big drunken moonlight, you realise this is all you ever wanted and
it's here, right here and now ("It's better than I ever even knew").
Maybe
she also sounds a little disappointed - the third and fourth "Ev" of
the "Everything"s which commence the choruses, the slightly impatient
and frustrated "I tell you all the time," the way her voice falters and
gulps on the two syllables that she manufactures out of the first "video
gay-haymes," the prematurely bereaved whimpers of her "Is that true?"s.
As if this is all it is, all she's going to derive from this gaudy
puzzle called life.
And
as for "baby, now you do" - now you do what? They (who are "they" and
is the ghost of Kay Dick aware of "them"?) say that the world was built
for two (life is like a bicycle), only worth living if somebody is
loving you. That whole sequence makes no sense, is subtly delirious like
the lucid dreams you might come into if the morphine quarrelled with
the anaesthesia. But we know what she means; it is the same subtle discolation of reality you get in the fed-back undertow of Psychocandy.
Strings,
bell, that piano which you might imagine is being played inside your
head. The emptied or fruitful plain; it's hard to tell in the dark.
The mysteries of love; a possible solution.
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