Coronavirus pics 27: Ultraviolence
Lana Del Rey's songs of untrviolence are just wonderful. Let her sing every word. Hers is as perfect a rendition of how we make it through as anything we have in literature, film or song. They're spooky like everything real is.
'...del Rey’s is a voice of the dead, someone whose disembodied voice on a radio is what might justify her, make her soul live, but elsewhere. In the last two refrains her body is ‘sweet like sugar venom oh yeah’. She is a degree of magnification, delivering an echo of all the climatic feelings of noir, and when she asks the other to ‘sing it to me’ there’s no one else singing. The disembodied ghost of ‘American dreams’ on the radio suddenly haunts us. Listening to the first lines, we recognize she’s a dead voice, like a sung version of Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ where there’s absolutely nothing in the sound to make us believe her when she claims ‘’Boy I’ve been raised from the dead.’ By the time we’ve finished with ‘Born To Die’ there’s absolutely no doubt, just as there’s no doubt at the end of Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ that the pretty blonde has died way before we get to the final reel. What we see is an after-taste. Everything is recognizable from other songs at greater or lesser degrees or different scales. The tag line of ‘Inland Empire’ is ‘A Woman in Trouble’ and all del Rey’s songs are contained in that.'
