“Come on, baby, let’s ride, we can escape to the great sunshine. I know your wife and she wouldn’t mind.”
I love Lana Del Rey’s music for lines like this that give her songs a dark twist. She constantly evokes the secret dreams that we all have, smashes them into tiny little pieces, and urges us see the beauty in the pile of shards that is left behind.
I was excited to see her Open Air show on July 20 at the Alte Zitadelle Spandau in Berlin. The location, a 16th century Prussian fortress at the outskirts of the city, provided the perfect scene for this concert. It is a lovely place that brings up the violent histories that are attached to the former drill ground and prison. When I arrived in Spandau after an exhausting one-hour ride on the Berlin subway,everything seemed to fit. Some 6.000 fans had gathered, the weather was beautiful and the crowd bursted with anticipation.
As the sun began to set, a short guy in a blue suit entered the stage, sat down behind a piano, and sang his heart out. “Hello, I am Max Jury, and I am here to support Lana Del Rey,” he explained. “The next song is called ‘Killing Time.’” But he wasn’t killing time. He beautifully set the stage for the concert. Unfortunately, the sound was too quiet. The chatter of the people around me made it hard to really focus, and it felt more like listening to something in the background than being on a concert.
When Elizabeth Woolridge Grant (Lana Del Rey is only a stage name) finally appeared, I could not see anything. As soon as the band played the first tune people pulled out cameras, phones, and tablets. What I like about concerts is that they open up another world, make you forget everything else that is around you, and help you escape the everyday hassle. This was impossible under the circumstances. The first five minutes, I could notice what was happening on the stage only by looking at the large-sized Samsung tablet the girl next to me held in front of my face, and it was not until the first storm of excitement ebbed that I was able to get a glimpse of what the band did 5 meters away from me.
Next to me stood a teenager who confessed to his friends that he only knows one Lana Del Rey song. His eyes opened wide when Ms. Grant sang the first line. “My pussy taste like Pepsi-Cola.” She can say things like that and still make them appear beautiful. At least this is true for her recordings. Bad sound engineering took away much of this magic and gave her lyrics a much harsher quality. It was hard to enjoy the music. This did not stop the fans from celebrating their icon. The screams and tears somehow reminded me of the recordings I saw of Michael Jackson concerts. The King of Pop managed to stand on the stage doing nothing while people around him passed out in masses. A similar phenomenon was happening here. Ms. Grant’s presence compensated for the lack of sound quality. The fans were happy. Only the face of the teenager next to me showed signs of disappointment when the song continued. “I got a taste for men who are older. It’s always been so, it’s no surprise.”
Despite the poor sound, Ms. Grant’s performance demonstrated what could have been. Her music makes the listener aware of the ephemerality of our lives. She creates harmonic melodies that are punctured by tempo changes, hall effects, and squeaking electric guitars. Yet, it is her voice that takes the lead in deconstructing her own catchy tunes. Constantly breaking out into higher octaves, operesque moments, and Sprechgesang, Ms. Grant’s vocals give a unique quality to her music that lies somewhere between longing, violence, sexual tension, and social critique. Had the quality of the sound been better, she could even have made me forget all those electronic devices around me.
The most impressive part of the concert was the videos running on a huge screen above the stage. Ms. Grant became famous on Youtube with her song “Video Games” that she added to a collage of short video clips. Similar images accompanied her concert. Alternating pictures of Jesus, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe constantly interrupted snippets of the West Coast and montages of Ms. Grant herself. These videos put her music in personal and artistic context. The stream of images evoked associations of Hippie culture, Punk Rock recordings, and Hip Hop clips. Reconstructing private as well as collective memories, these films document a personalized experience of the American Dream incorporating both freedom and oppression.
One of the reasons that got me excited about this concert was that Ms. Grant had released the new Lana Del Rey album “Ultraviolence” a few days earlier. That is why the set list rather frustrated me. Apart from two exceptions, she played the famous songs from her 2012 album “Born to Die.” Again, this might not be what I wanted to hear, but the fans were gung ho about listening to these old familiar tunes. Singing, dancing, yelling, weeping, the crowd exploded anew with each of yesterday’s songs. Even though I might have expected something different, the concert showed that Ms. Grant is with the pulse of the times. The feeling of longing created by her songs, their morbid character, and the sexual tension that is omnipresent in her music are still valid.
The concert concluded with Ms. Grant descending from the stage to take selfies with her fans. While the band continued to play fragments of her song National Anthem, she handed out hugs, smiled for cellphone cameras, and shared intimate moments with the audience. But this moment ended abruptly. Suddenly the music stopped, the stage was empty, and the fans began to leave. No standing ovations, no chants of “We want more!” I left the concert with ambivalent feelings. I guess it is much better for me to listen to Lana Del Rey in private where I can regulate the music myself and do not have to go through the hassle of fans fidgeting with their iPads in front of my face.
Michael is Flowers In A Gun’s freshest contributor from Frankfurt, Germany. Send him notes, recommendations and show invitations at michael@flowersinagun.com
