Glamour and the lack thereof

I am crushed by the dense atmosphere Lana Del Rey has managed to create in "Off To The Races" on her "Born to Die" album - a tremendous Hollywood-noir mood that manages to portray glamour that is coming apart at the seams while retaining its sexy allure.

Vividly, she paints the pseudo-1940's Sunset Boulevard mansion backyard:

Swimming pool glimmering, darling,
white bikini off with my red nail polish.
Watch me in the swimming pool,
bright blue ripples, you
sittin', sippin', on your black Cristal

and then continues, reflecting on her own loss of control and decline:

And I'm off to the races, cases
of Bacardi chasers,
chasin' me all over town
'cause he knows I'm wasted, facin'
time again on Rikers
Island and I won't get out

Her husband watching, Lana slips on her red dress, puts on her make-up and perfumes herself with cognac and lilac, and then for a moment drops her bubbly airhead tone of voice and briefly reveals a worn-down middle-aged woman who laconically remarks "says it feels like heaven to him."

The most powerful and evocative illustration of escalating depravity is made when she subtly substitutes "scarlet" for "harlot" in the last two renditions of the refrain:


I'm your little scarlet/harlot starlet,
singin' in the garden.

This format of crash-and-burn tragedy-legend of addiction and fall from grace cannot be told in a Swedish context at all, as there never was much glamour or wealth to begin with. (There was a lot of low-brow addiction though.) Naturally Sweden has it's own enfants terribles, but none of these stories (Leila-K, anyone?) come anywhere near the mythical status of Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, James Dean or River Phoenix. Likely, the Swedes would argue themselves better than that - quoting the sensibility of bland moderation as morally superior to the wild and sprawling American Dreams of fame and potential misfortune.

The UK does have more of a real set of legends in this vein, mostly within the music industry (Sid Vicious, Brian Jones, Keith Moon and Amy Winehouse perhaps?) - though in my opinion, Lana puts her finger on the grandness of scale between the world of American modern legend and it's European equivalant, a difference so great that the UK and Sweden suddenly seem very similar and dull.

Celebrate the grandeur of the spectacle.