Britters.

Cocaine Blues by Escort.

One of those tracks that just feels right. Ha, I guess like cocaine.

But, really, it’s a jam not just because it has salacious subject matter. It makes you wish for Studio 54 and white pantsuits with nothing on under.

And it was written in 2011.

Hey, DISCO is always.

bmichael asked: I guess the difference for me is that the women are characters in the weeknd songs, but lana del rey is sort of just herself in her songs. she's a character, sure, but she's always herself. the weeknd can never be his characters. i sort of thing ldr is like anything else, where people sort of like it or dont. i listened to video games about fifty times in one day and really enjoyed it. sometimes i dont like her music. its music.

Interesting. I’m wondering how you can differentiate between LDR and The Weeknd - why can she be both her image and herself, but he cannot? Both are singing from a first person point of view.

My main problem with her is that she’s created a character that is so passive and glassy-eyed and people are super turned on and galvanized by it as though it’s the second coming. The music, eh, it’s fine, not ground breaking. Mazzy Star or even Portishead have songs that sound just as delicate but those women act as though they’ve got steel spines.

Lana Del Rey and The Weeknd: Sex, Drugs and oh that’s about it, isn’t it.

Another day, another Lana Del Rey leak. This time it’s “National Anthem,” a nicely jaded capitalist ode that praises drinking and driving and excess buying. “Money is the anthem of success,” Lana coos. Perhaps it really is cash-money that gets our girl Lana all hot and bothered since this is the first time I’ve ever heard her not sound narcoleptic. 

Part (most?) of what makes Lana Del Rey such a perfect target for criticism is her delicately crafted image. Those in the pro-Lana camp declaim that anyone who attacks Lana Del Rey but not, say, Frank Ocean for cultivating an air of mystery and taking on a new name are misguided since all pop stars engage in this behavior. And it’s misogynistic because when men do it, no one cares. 

So, sure, I think that a lot of the bombs lodged at Lana Del Rey come from a realm of sexism, but a lot of that has to do with the type of persona Lizzie Grant decided to slip into and flesh out. In the video that catapulted her into stardom, she stares into the camera with the cross-eyed blankness of a highly bred cat. The fake eyelashes, fake nails, possibly fake lips would all be fine if she appeared to be a little less comatose. Interspliced within the video are hazy 8mm films of Hollywood, laughing people cycling, swimming at Chateau Marmont, etc. Most interestingly, we have a few clips of an extremely fucked up Paz De La Huerta arriving at some paparazzi-filled event. She’s barely able to stand up or even keep her eyes open. Someone calls from out of sight, “Is she all right?” And one of her handlers says in a rather cheerful manner, “Yeah, she’s allllll right!” The implication being “Yes, this is normal for her. You’re good, Paz, right? Look at the cameras, sweetie. This will look great tomorrow on TMZ. You’re a star, Paz!” 

The glamor of self-annihilation is what Lana Del Rey is exploiting. I don’t begrudge her that. I love self-destructive behavior — I engage in it nightly. But her form of self-destruction is particularly female and victimized. She’s the one who is dressing up in her sundresses and putting on his favorite perfume only to be bettered by a videogame her boy prefers to her. She’s says she’s oozing beauty and love but is feeling self-pityingly rejected. This threads through most of her songs: “You Can Be The Boss” has her chanting just that to some malt liquor-smelling boozer; in the high budget “Born To Die” video, she’s in a lacy white negligee being spooned by some topless, tattoo-etched thug who has his fist around her throat. Again, she’s singing, “We were born to die… you like your girls insane.” Over and over, she glamorizes a prone position of femininity. This isn’t Lady Gaga’s aggressively in control sexuality; this is a pussy galore down on her knees begging for it. 

Which makes me think of another break-out artist of 2011 with that pesky air of “mystery” — The Weeknd. Now this guy also sings about sex and being wasted and high. So there’s the self-destructive behavior. But, you know, when Abel Tesfaye, the mastermind behind The Weeknd, sings about the insane cocktail of drugs he’s ingesting and half-torpid come-ons he’s delivering he at least sounds pretty energetic. What he’s saying is fucked up, but the vocal delivery, the cleverness of the lyrics and the production belie the fact that he is as fucked up as he says he is. 

Critics write that the nihilistic and out of control vision Tesfaye creates is part of the reason we enjoy it, blah blah, vicarious pleasure at another’s expense. But Tesfaye does such a good job at painting an image of himself and the multitude of ways he fucks himself up that you marvel at how in control he is. Whereas Lana Del Rey looks and sounds like she enjoys being a lobotomized, over-sexualized little girl, even though the President of Polydor records (her label) says she “likes to control every aspect of her career.” 

Everyone, not just women, can all have fantasies of being submissive and sexy and out-of-control. Here is a verse from The Weeknd’s song “XO/The Host” where he’s singing about a woman he wants:

You’re built like a Goddess

And it seems like you been stressin’

Specially when your nose red

From that K, special Diet Coke

You need more bread, ‎now you got no rent

You blow that money, money

You try to window shop, you blow another hundred

She’s fuckin’ goons in the day

Hipster nights downtown and your daddy don’t know you’re out 

Same topics as Del Rey — sex, money, drugs — but at least we’ve got some panache and the girl in this story has a little get up ‘n go. She makin’ it rain, buying drugs, clothes, booze and when she starts buggin about her downward spiral, our hero tells her she can always call him, they can make some love, she’s not alone. Ok, ok! So later in the song he wants to make a sex tape, have her suck his dick while he films her from above, alright, alright, so that’s not the most feminist thing I’ve ever heard, but hear me out! 

When the women in The Weeknd’s songs seem to have more agency, more verve for life than Lana does, that’s when I call bullshit. Nothing Lana Del Rey does sounds exciting. She sounds jaded and bored and trapped — a beautiful, sad-eyed fuck-doll. A carefully-crafted mien of passivity hung up on boys, frozen in time.

Young Sadult.

The last trailer before Young Adult began was for Titanic in 3D. I raced to cram my fingers in my ears so as to not get the horrific Celine Dion song we all know and hate stuck in my head. Didn’t work. You’ll be happy to hear that the trailer included every single thing you remember oh so fondly from that bad bad film: Kate and Leo flying on the prow, the spin-dance, nude sketching, sex in the car, the iceberg, and, most poignantly, that dude who bangs into the smokestack while plummeting to an ice-cold watery death. No Billy Zane, which is fine, since I can barely recall that he exists at all.

I grimaced through this entire godforsaken meal of tripe and thought, “How can the marketing team who selects the trailers that run before the feature believe that the audience for Young Adult wouldn’t scoff at Titanic?” Because as we all know, Young Adult is about a grown up mean girl who goes back to her hometown to wreak havoc on the yokels. She’s a self-serving, narcissistic, angry, myopic cunt and people who would be drawn to watching a film about her probably aren’t the sort who would sit through a bloated, histrionic mess. In 3D no less. Like “Hey, Madagascar’s set in Africa right? Cool, let’s throw it on the front of Hotel Rwanda.”

The most obvious reason the Titanic 3D trailer was stuck in there is because marketers break down demographics into highly specialized groups so as to ensure that whatever they’re selling will be aimed at the audience most willing to buy it. Clearly, these guys have a very specific bucket labeled: “WOMEN.” If you’ve got va-jay, you’re definitely gonna pay to cry.

After Young Adult finished however and I’d been forced (albeit willingly) to endure an hour and a half with a beautiful but ugly on the inside (IRONY) anti-heroine who barely grasped that her romantic ideals of “running off to the city with her first one true love” are downright delusional to the point of mental handicap, I considered the deeper implications of including that Titanic trailer.

Charlize Theron’s character is the sort who would watch Titanic or Twilight or some other bland rom-com filled with stereotypical, wrong-headed views on male-female relationships. She seemed like the type who had actually believed and acted on ideas she’d learned from this crap that women so happily, brainlessly devour. And since she’s a writer of books aimed at teen girls, she’s actually complicit in the creation of these lie-filled stories. She came off like a delusional escaped mental patient — a victim of never having grown out of a particularly bad phase in high school.

The idea of the film is that you get to dwell in the spectrum of her horrible behavior and thrill at her spectacular self-involvement. There are visceral moments of mortification where you shield your eyes. Most of these were given away in the trailer however, which is a shame. This isn’t praise for Young Adult’s filmmakers because it’s tough, unpleasant work spending time with a spiteful, amoral alcoholic (who isn’t me!). You actually think, “How did this person get this way?”

And so the answer is by watching brain candy like Titanic and reading Twilight?

Shame.

Couple thoughts on Shame, which I saw last night in at the AMC theatre on 68th street and Broadway. Same place where I saw Avatar and, ugh, multiple Harry Potters. So, mainstream as they come and probably just as filled with bedbugs.  

I expected to enter a theatre with solitary audience members spread out with many seats between one another and a damp trench coat over each of their laps. And that was pretty much what I found, except one guy was eating nachos. This perplexed me. Maybe that’s just his go-to porn nosh it being so aqueous and sticky.

The film is beautiful, to be sure, and minimal so that you pay close fucking attention (as it were) to Fassbender and Mulligan’s subtleties. For all the full-frontal and supposedly debased adventures Fassbender’s Brandon gets into to lose himself in some semblance of intimacy, the most excruciating moment is when his sister Sissy (Mulligan) sings a slow, spare version of Sinatra’s usually show-boating standard “New York, New York.” McQueen holds the camera so close to her face you’re forced to examine her skin and ears and over-processed blonde curls. As her voice falters and finds its footing, you’re utterly, embarrassingly captivated. She’s laid bare and you as the audience member are asked to stare. In this moment I felt the truth of Brandon’s fear of intimacy. Because I had to do quite a lot not to turn away.

And so, you’re asking, what about the sex? Well, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Some mildly arousing, none repellent.  At its core this film is about loneliness and how even in the midst of doing the one thing that supposedly brings human beings closer together — literally one inside of the other — one can still feel trapped and alone inside yourself. Duh, we all knew that before going in.

Given that I could probably hand-draw Michael Fassbender’s penis from memory now, Shame does suffer from a lack of specificity. McQueen must have done this purposefully to avoid the typical tracing Brandon’s neurosis/addiction back to some childhood incident or bad family situation or shitty break-up. Addiction is incidental to these, not sourced. It emerges from a cloud so attempting to tease out a string would be too simplistic. However, I could do with a little more than Sissy weeping to his voicemail, “We’re not bad people, we just come from a bad place.” Knowing only that they grew up in New Jersey, I mean, I understand, yes, that’s true, you do literally come from a bad place. But that’s probably not where the sex addiction comes from.

I just wanted McQueen to throw me a bone.

Instead I got like 17 boners.

ps. Even after all of this I’d still let Michael bend my fass.