After the grand stoned cathedral of Honeymoon, one could be forgiven for believing that her romance with hip-hop was nothing more than a summer fling.īut Lana moves in her own time, and the slow rollout for her fourth album, Lust for Life, is proving that her passion for black music is more committed than ever. Subsequent albums would move away from hip-hop lyricism in the process of shaping an especially languid version of cool: The verses were shorter and less verbose and repetitions took precedence over clever rhymes. That being said, Born to Die’s actual musical arrangements are not very hip-hop and are pretty much as retro as they’ve been made out to be: outsize orchestrations, sweeping melodies, an endless sense of something hanging in the air. “You were sort of punk rock, I grew up on hip-hop,” she sings to a lover on “Blue Jeans” from Born to Die, a debut album whose verbal density and content is clearly informed by a close study of rap lyrics - other phrases on “Blue Jeans” include “fresh to death,” “chasing paper,” caught up in the game,” and “ride or die.” Born to Die’s excellence is based, in no small part, on Lana’s willingness to meet hip-hop on its own terms while maintaining her own sense of image and proportion. For all the talk of her repurposing a ’40s and ’50s aesthetic, Lana Del Rey has always kept abreast of the music of the moment, and what the music of the moment happens to be, more and more and more, is rap.
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