“I’m a living sign,” he once sang, and that was long before he went Hollywood.Famous artists are notoriously late, but when I arrive about 20 minutes early for an interview at Lana Del Rey ’s Santa Monica studio, she is ready for me, offering a handshake and a smile.
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You’d think Morrissey would love that move, all tied up in loaded iconography.
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In the trailer for Lust for Life, Del Rey’s new album out later this week, Lana lingers inside the “H” in the Hollywood sign-a reference to Peg Entwistle, the young actress who jumped to her death from that letter in 1932 and is rumored to haunt it. The greatest similarity between Lana Del Rey and Morrissey might be not their morose tendencies or how much they both appreciate “ He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss),” but rather, their ability to tower over their songs as characters, as stars, as myths. As Morrissey’s beloved Oscar Wilde once put it, “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” From Lana’s professed disinterest in feminism to Moz’s lamentation of failed assassination attempts on Margaret Thatcher, one often can’t help but wonder: is this the person’s view, or the persona’s? With these two, the difference seems to matter less than sheer provocation. Their takes on contentious issues are debated in part because, instead of offering moral certainty one way or another, there’s an element of coyness in play. It can often seem like LDR and Moz divide audiences as if it were their jobs, and perhaps that’s how they see it. To die by a lover’s side-whether on “Summertime Sadness” or “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”-would be a heavenly way to die. She’s besotted with bad boys (and James Dean) he’s drawn to sweet and tender hooligans, tough guys, and thugs (and James Dean). The Smiths were born of girl-group music, after all-Marr and Moz initially bonded over a Marvelettes B-side-and Morrissey worked with the aforementioned film-score legend Morricone on the not-un-Lana-like solo ballad “Dear God, Please Help Me.” It isn’t really so strange to go from Lana’s “Sad Girl” to the Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” from “Money Power Glory” to Moz’s “All You Need Is Me.” They emote, they boast, they turn tracklistings into cheeky works of art. But Lana’s sonic touchstones on 2014’s Ultraviolence-’60s girl groups like the Crystals, pre-rock singers like Shirley Bassey, Roy Orbison-style torch crooning, outsized Ennio Morricone schmaltz-fell very much in line with Morrissey’s own. No, the trip-hop gauze and hip-hop boom-bap of 2012’s Born to Die didn’t recall Johnny Marr’s intricate Smiths guitar lines. With time, Del Rey’s musical similarities to Morrissey have grown clearer. And unlike some of the gaudier UK pop acts of the time, he reveled in ambiguity: Is it real? Unlike classic rockers, with their boozy machismo and blustering self-seriousness, Moz knew the importance of not being earnest sometimes. Although the floppy-haired frontman had no medical need for those oversized National Health Service eyeglasses, his misfit, clumsy-and-shy presentation was widely treated as totally sincere, when campy exaltation has been part of Moz’s sensibility all along.
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Morrissey had almost the opposite problem when the Smiths emerged as sullen heroes. Lana’s challenge was to prove that her world-building held deliberate meaning for her as a glamorous avatar of gloom. Not that their shared aestheticization of sadness was as clear then, with the early hype and subsequent backlash around Del Rey’s so-called inauthenticity dominating the conversation. The mashup between Del Rey’s 2011 YouTube hit “Video Games” and the Smiths’ 1983 jangle-pop classic “This Charming Man” wasn’t exactly “ A Stroke of Genie-us,” but conceptually, it was something close. As NPR’s Ken Tucker once put it, “She is Morrissey with a better pout.”įive years ago, a clip called “This Charming Video Game” made the rounds online. It’s there in the embrace of style as a means for substance: she can be Brit lit he can be meta. It’s there in the melancholia, the vintage trappings, and the fervent cults of personality, stoked by provocation. A Los Angeles transplant seemingly more at home with swimming pools, big cars, and Hollywood stars, New York’s Lana Del Rey shares more than just a change of scenery with the Smiths icon.