That has caused consternation and outrage in more recent memory, and at the time it raised much intrigue and ire. The breakdown between where the persona ends and the “real person” begins is muddy, especially now after a decade of actual fame has warped some of the project’s seemingly more tongue-in-cheek intentions. Del Rey has never been a particularly adept communicator to the public her interviews and dispatches often come across as a combination of overly earnest and woefully out of touch. That her entire identity was met with skepticism is not exactly surprising. At one of her first live shows after becoming a topic of conversation, she was billed as the Queen Of Coney Island.

Del Rey’s persona was drawn from old money glamor and Hollywood’s golden age she channeled patriotism for a dying empire. A flag waving or a Pontiac Grand Am - I didn’t even have to know what those things stood for to know they were beautiful.” Lana Del Rey was an artifice, a name Frankensteined from signifiers of grandeur that also communicated a false exoticism. But I still have love for something that hits my eye right. “Though I have been burned by what’s on the inside of them so many times - don’t get me wrong. “I’m very swayed by how things look on the outside,” she said in a 2009 interview. With new managers, she relocated to the UK and started plotting a re-introduction, which would involve some surreptitious YouTube uploads, an eventual major-label deal, and a whole lot of buzz, both manufactured and organic.Įven before Lizzy Grant became Lana Del Rey, she displayed a fascination with aesthetics. Her debut from that year would be scrubbed from the internet a few months after it was released (and eventually leaked back out once Del Rey took off). By 2010, Grant was going by the slightly alternate spelling of Lana Del Ray. After attracting the attention of a small label and receiving an advance for her first album, she said that she moved to a trailer park in North Jersey. It was then that she learned to play the guitar and started writing songs and performing in clubs around the city. After she graduated from there but before she attended Fordham University, Grant lived on Long Island with her uncle and worked as a waitress.

When she was a teenager her parents sent her to a private prep school in Connecticut after she exhibited some rowdy behavior. It’s hard to determine how much of Del Rey’s self-mythologizing to take at face value but the generally agreed upon narrative goes like this: Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, with a name straight out of an Edith Wharton novel, was born in New York City. Lana Del Rey arrived to most of the public as a persona fully formed, but Born To Die was not her first album or her first attempt. On the cover of Born To Die, Del Rey stands stock-still and stares at the camera, as if lined up for a firing squad. Del Rey didn’t cower away from the criticism she leaned into it, fought back against it.

After the release of her first proper single “Video Games” in the summer of 2011, she became a lightning rod for debates about authenticity and good taste. At that point, Lana Del Rey frenzy and fury was at a fever pitch. But judging by the immediate reactions on social media and in the comment sections of blogs like this one, you would think Del Rey committed a war crime. Said performance, though pitchy and all over the place, really isn’t that bad - especially on a show notorious for having awful sound for its musical guests.

Lana del rey album born to die