…or stupid American-flag backgrounds.

[Video][Website]
[5.50]

Brad Shoup: Dear Ms. Del Rey: This is to inform you that we are in receipt of the demo you submitted for a future Kanye West project. Further, we have had the chance to audition it in the presence of Mr. West. While he was unable to devote his full attention to the demo — as he is simultaneously writing his 450-role satyr play Brometheus and teaching sentience (and ultimately, a world-crushing pathos) to an Ensoniq ASR-10 — nevertheless, before departing in the Rolls Royce Corniche from Three the Hard Way, he had kind words for your way with an ad-lib. Mr. West also commended the use of musical saw, which has the effect of (and we quote) “taking that fatalistic L.A. white-girl bullshit and making it hilarious.” While he likened your use of drum machines to (again, we quote) “a click track for thumbsuckers,” he suspects you embrace a similar fascination with, and alienation from, the thicket of American tropes that erects heroes and converts mockery into cultural catharsis. On a legal note, though, we must warn you that although Mountain’s “Long Red (Live Version)” has a long history in hip-hop, we believe Mr. West’s continued and extensive use of this song makes it his intellectual property. Your use of the aforementioned constitutes infringement, which we are offering you a unique chance to rectify by appearing on a remix to be named later. We will provide travel arrangements at a future date. If Mr. West asks, you are Charlotte Gainsbourg. How is your French accent?
[8]

Anthony Easton: Cinematic. Cheesy, overly demonstrative teenage melodrama, but on a excessive, Sirkian scale. Those first string sweeps are straight out of Imitation of Life.
[9]

Alex Ostroff: I have yet to figure out what exactly the difference is between the string arrangement in “Video Games” and that in “Born to Die,” but that distinction is the difference between a good Lana Del Rey song and a bad one. In the former song, they tease out pathos from a series of statements about romance that couldn’t be more wrong, saying what Del Rey won’t explicitly. The flourishes of harp and overly romantic swoops of violin strengthen the contrast between the idealized world of the lyrics and the reality read between the lines. Here, they smother Lana with tastefulness, aiming for dramatic but only managing to emphasize how sedately bored she sounds.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: Over a synthetic movie-of-the-week symphony, Lana Del Rey balls up some tissues and exercises the sort of self-pity Drake would think was a bit indulgent. I bet she thinks it kind of works when her mascara runs after she’s been crying. “We were born to die,” she sings, but the plural is a bit much. This is all about Lana. She’s the star of the show, the starlet of her imaginary silver screen. Why does it work? Because Del Rey’s Hollywood schtick creates the only setting in which her pouting might be acceptable. It’s not about accepting or denying her film-heroine posturing; it’s about the fantasy itself, a fantasy that exists because Del Rey plays a lonely character who thinks that fantasy is glamorous and comforting. Most people would sing “sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough” as if they were accepting a challenge. In Del Rey’s narcotized tones, it’s a surrender.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Huh, so it turns out the numbness of “Video Games” wasn’t a conscious artistic decision.
[3]

Alfred Soto: The virtuosity is impressive and compensates for the farrago released earlier this year. Instead of hysterics she employs well-calibrated hesitation, as if she were feeling her way towards the emotions.
[6]

Iain Mew: I didn’t see where Alfred was coming from in his descriptions of “Video Games”, with Del Rey “catatonic” and the strings “just sit[ting] there on the couch with her”. Those descriptions fit perfectly to most of “Born to Die,” though. Its suffocating arrangement strips it of any momentum, and Lana somehow takes a verse of sentiments like “I feel so alone,” “don’t make me sad” and “sometimes love is not enough” and a verse of sentiments like “lost but now I am found” and “I can see where once I was blind” and makes them come across like the exact same feeling. Maybe it’s deliberate, but the song doesn’t make being deadened by resignation sound poignant, just boring. The light let in at the first sudden pinprick of the title is the only moment that hints that there might be something more.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: For some reason, Lana’s been compared multiple times to Tori Amos. This is technically a step up from being compared to the downfall of the authenticity industry, but it’s not accurate. Tori can emote. Lana, on the other hand, sings “sometimes love is not enough” with the inflection of a sight-reading chorister, goes up an octave as if she read on WikiHow that singing like a middle-school soprano is supposed to seduce people, and carps about the diem with neither determination nor abandon but sullen malaise, as if she’s Addie Bundren played by Kristen Stewart. No wonder the “video” is flag-and-flesh trollgaze — how else can you enliven material so dull?
[4]

Dan Weiss: Changing “fuck” to “kiss” could be her fatal flaw. Someone needs to tell her that just because critics call her trollgaze doesn’t make her the one trolling and that just because she namedrops “Walk on the Wild Side” doesn’t make it a good idea to ape Lou Reed’s pinched gulp. It’s not the best cadence for forced rhymes.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: The atmospherics, the embrace of classic midcentury American iconography and vocal styles (she has something of the bored remove of a Julie London or Beverly Kenney), the Springsteen rewrite: it’s all deployed as though it means something, but what it means isn’t immediately evident. The question that has exercised the Internet for so long, of course, is whether there’s anything there; both The Emperor’s New Fashions Are Amazing and The Emperor Is A Sexist Male Fantasy generate pageviews, so there’s no incentive to taking the reasonable middle and saying Uh, I Can’t Really See From Here. Oh well.
[6]