She talks like a dairy queen, like Britney Spears, like a cheerleader. 24 years old and exuding the hardy effervescence unique to healthy American girls, there is nothing in Del Rey’s manner that connects the voice at the end of the line to ‘Video Games’, the YouTube smash hit carried by a purring vocal performance so rich you can feel almost feel David Lynch’s velvet carpeting under your fingers.
That is until I hit playback on my telephone’s dictaphone. Slowly all the years of a weary, haunted youth spent in backwoods New York State unravel from under her bubbly facade, like furtive murmurings on the other side of a door. As per the many doomed chanteuses and dead movie idols she invokes in her cinematic music, it seems Del Rey is a good actress. In true Lynch fashion, beneath her white picket-fenced cheer hide the writhing earthworms that plague her heavy heart.
With increasing frequency, naysayers are testing the walls of Del Ray’s persona, in particular questioning exactly who should be credited for her perfectly realised Valley of the Dolls aesthetic. Amidst universal praise for ‘Video Games’, she’s nevertheless faced the incredulity of everyone from high profile bloggers to broadsheet columnists to disgruntled indie stars (Amy Klein of Titus Andronicus threw her oar in), some of whom are convinced she’s a kohl-eyed marketing ploy and as fake as those eyelash extensions. So in a delicious twist of dramatic irony, it’s precisely Del Rey’s persona - the artifice - that forms her only barrier of defence against the media’s worst advances.
Its a lie, however, to tell the truth. Because it seems her story up to now, if largely less glamorous, isn’t so different to that of the Marilyn Monroes or the Judy Garlands, or indeed Lynch’s own tragic starlet in Mulholland Drive. The story goes: smalltown girl moves to the big city, falls into dark waters, becomes forever imprisoned in the house of mirrors that is the media’s oppressive gaze.
Enter frame the Quietus, at hand to shoot the close-up she may or may not be ready for.
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