I posted yesterday in response to a friend (the delightful lunoboom ) about Lana Del Rey and in my comments I called her a walking Instagram Filter which someone else viewed as kind of a snotty thing to say. And I can see why they would say that. I certainly didn’t say it as an insult but I can see who it could be seen that way. In general I feel like we’re al Nostalgic for times that never existed, I guess actually that is largely what nostalgia is, this longing for a time that never actually really existed. You might long for the summer when you were 13 years old but that real summer will never match the summer in your mind, the summer of endless twilight adventures with friends, sleep overs with bad movies, crushes and starting to learn who you were. Those were magic and they tend to crowd out the times you were bored and no one wanted to hang out, or when you cried yourself to sleep because everyone else had someone to watch fireworks with but the crush you had liked someone else. That’s how it works. I mean, I remember being a teenager and my mom making a comment about how she wishes things were like the 50′s, when things were just more moral. I of course snottily snapped back which was more moral, persecuting people with different religious beliefs, people with different political views, the oppression of minorities, or the part where women were meant to be seen but not heard. Score one for teenage self righteousness. She said I knew what she meant, I am sure I pretended I didn’t and went to go write some screed in my notebook about the fucking baby boomers while I listened to Scentless Apprentice because this was the 90′s. I did know what she meant though, she meant she wanted things to be like this one very specific aspect of a culture she never really knew and was only a part of for the first couple of years of her life. The part of her mind that had mad unlocked doors and family meals seem like the pinnacle of human society. The part where black people had to use separate water fountains weren’t part of the fantasy. Which is kind of the comforting fantasy Lana Del Rey sells and what I meant about my Instagram thing, she is selling a thing that never really existed, a 1940′s Lauren Bacall Haircut and 50′s Galmour through a modern lens on Born to Die, a bit of highly filtered 70′s sleaze on Ultraviolence. And there is nothing wrong with this but I am older than she is and I wasn’t around for that shit so she certainly wasn’t, none of it was like we imagine because none of us are particularly capable of creating a fully formed reality in our head, it is much more like the set of an old Western, mainly wooden fronts designed to look like buildings without there actually being anything on the other side. Indie music is often obsessed with Authenticity, which I feel in general is a fools errand but I always felt was the result of the backlash against Lana, she tricked them and they were mad even though there was no point at which a 20 something girl in 2010who was aping the style of women from 50 years earlier was doing anything but purposefully manufacturing an image. What people fail to see is the authenticity in artifice, in carefully constructing a picture of the past that looks nothing like the past what an artist really is doing is carefully choosing the parts of disparate things that they wish to represent them. And that stuff we choose to believe or embrace about eras that didn’t exist? That defines us more than what really happened would have. This is what I thought about as I listened to my new record and this is why today I want to fuck Lana Del Rey.
Who I want to Fuck Today 