Hedwig van Driel wrote a piece for The Gallery of Cool on Queen Cool herself, Lana del Rey, whose music is featured in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby.
A bevy of prestigious artists
contributed to the soundtrack for The Great Gatsby. The xx. Florence and the
Machine. Jay-Z, as well as Beyoncé. Bryan Ferry. Jack White. NPR made the
entire thing available on their website for a while, and I was happy to take
advantage of that (it can still be found on YouTube for now, in case you're
curious).
The thing is, the song that's been stuck
in my head for the past week isn't from any of these luminaries. No: it's the
sensual, hypnotizing Young and Beautiful by the oft-mocked Lana del Rey.
It's easy enough to ridicule the self-styled “gangster Nancy Sinatra”.
Her artificial persona is usually pointed out as a reason to dismiss her, but
what pop culture icon nowadays does not have a meticulously crafted image?
Perhaps, then, it is the specific persona she chose that bothers people, a
strangely retro construction that harks back to a time long before grrl power
or the cultivated strangeness of a Lady Gaga. “Lana del Rey” is a gorgeous,
exquisitely bored rich girl singing about her “aching soul” without a trace of
irony. It's music through an Instagram filter, if you want to be flip about it.
Honestly, I'd rather distance myself from anything like that too.
Listening to Del Rey's music doesn't fit my
carefully cultivated image: I should be too cool and too intellectual to be so
easily seduced by her languorous voice. When I heard she'd joined the hundreds
who recorded covers of Leonard Cohen's music, my first impulse was to roll my
eyes. But then I listened to her Chelsea Hotel #2, and I had to admit: damn,
that's kind of beautiful.
It has to be said, too, that Lana del Rey was a perfect choice to record
a song for the Gatsby soundtrack. She
and Daisy Buchanan (played by Carey Mulligan in this new version, and by Mia
Farrow in the Redford one) are practically the same. In Fitzgerald's novel,
Daisy's voice is described as low and thrilling, and as “[...] full of money –
that was the inexhaustable charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it,
the cymbals, song of it... High in a white palace the king's daughter, the
golden girl.” You could use those same words to describe the allure of Del
Rey's voice.
What's more, both are privileged white girls with all the money and
beauty they could wish for, who are nonetheless restless and discontent. The
layer of ennui may be skin deep, more an aesthetic choice than anything else.
But if you happen to be in the mood to feel glamorously unhappy for an
afternoon, nothing beats listening to Lana Del Rey's music – except, perhaps,
re-reading The Great Gatsby.
Hedwig van Driel is a physicist by training but a
cinephile at heart. She spends way too much time on the internet, and
overthinking movies and television.
Read more from Hedwig on her blog or follow her on Twitter.
