By Mistake Or Design?
The voice. Lana has three. First, a mannered, coquettish soprano, the musical equivalent of squinching her voice into the cadences of a four-year-old to sound sexy. (That’s a line from a Class Actress review; you could criticize her the same way, but somehow nobody is.) Second, sorority-girl rap, which sounds exactly like it always does. Third, a boozy, dull alto; to borrow another Jukebox line, specifically Michaela Drapes’ description of Zola Jesus’ voice, it’s a cross between a bored lounge singer and “that annoying girl who spends lunch hours in the junior high choir room bleating along tunelessly to Tori Amos, headphones stuffed in her ears, oblivious to the world around her.” None of these three voices are bad; technically, they’re all pretty good. They merely beg the trolled listeners to deploy three very gendered insults: simpering, ditziness and moaning. And Lana has a trick of deploying each of these just when you think anything could be worse than the one currently in use.
The description in that quote is gonna haunt me forever.
Related, still don’t like ZJ, she’s not growing on me — her voice still pains me. I think the Lana Del Rey album is great — but I don’t really have more to throw into this particular fray at present.
