"People were just so mean to me," she admits. Her American audience was particularly savage. The online attacks were vicious and unrelenting the internet trolls feasting on all the digital hearsay. Who was this enigmatic artist, the self-coined "gangster Nancy Sinatra"? Some were saying that Lana Del Rey, far from being a fresh talent, was in fact a reincarnation of a folk singer (with a previously released, unsuccessful album) called Lizzy Grant - cosmetically enhanced (those lips were just too pillowy by far, apparently), label-made, ambitious and, rather than a new discovery, she was a bona fide fraud who sang about living in a trailer when really her dad was a millionaire real-estate developer buttressing her career. It was as if the song was too accomplished, Del Rey too beautiful. But with the praise for the song came a backlash against the singer - all before Del Rey had even officially released a single note of music. Throughout last summer, as the song spread online and across the globe, so did the critical acclaim for the New Queen Of Sadcore. No one thought much of it at the time it was just pretty simple with one piano line. Then I started to write things that I especially loved, that were just perfectly tailored to me - 'Video Games' was one of them. We'd written five songs and we took a rest. I was in the Sony Writing Room" - a creative sanctuary provided by the label that acts as a sort of boot camp for wannabe hit makers - "and Justin would write the chords and I would write the words and the melody. "It was in the middle of a long writing process where I had moved to London.
"It took me two hours to write," she explains of the track, to be found on her album Born To Die, released in January this year. If you watch the video with the sound off, as I've done, you'd think it a song about the trappings and fragility of fame, a yearning for a more golden, more dignified age of celebrity - knowing Del Rey (someone more aware of her image than perhaps any other pop star working today) such a tone is certainly no accident. Occasionally Del Rey herself pops up, out of focus with beehive hair and beestung lips looking like a hipster Jackie O.
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.ĭel Rey herself made it on her MacBook composed of clips she found on the internet - vintage-looking Super 8 footage of skaters, pink roses bursting open proactively, Betty Boo cartoons, dappled sunlight over an LA canyon, the Hollywood sign, TMZ video footage of Paz de la Huerta stumbling away from the Chateau Marmont after the Golden Globes, visibly worse for wear.