Lana Del Rey unveils video, to appear on 'American Idol' March 22

 

The Lana Del Rey juggernaut continues: The hotly debated singer will do a pair of three-night residencies in June, the first at the El Rey in Los Angeles followed by another in her native New York.

The El Rey stint runs June 3-5, for which tickets go on sale Saturday, and her Irving Plaza engagement is June 7, 8 and 10, on sale Friday.

She’ll also have a shot this week at redeeming, or confirming, her endlessly discussed national television debut appearance on "Saturday Night Live" in January, as she's slated to sing “Video Games” on Thursday’s episode of “American Idol.”

In addition, a new video for her song “Blue Jeans” from the "Born to Die" album, which has sold 160,000 copies since its release in January according to Nielsen SoundScan, has just arrived on YouTube. An earlier video for the song that was something of a travelogue through vintage Las Vegas has racked up nearly 11 million hits since it was posted in September.

The new one, directed by Yoann Lemoine, is a stylish black-and-white noir-ish scene of a romantic poolside encounter between Del Rey and her heavily tattooed objet d’amour. It can be seen here:

 

RELATED:

Album review: Lana Del Rey's 'Born to Die'

'SNL' introduces the world to Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey likes Britney Spears, shrugs off haters  

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Lana Del Rey. Credit: Nicole Nodland.

Adele, Lana Del Rey and Leonard Cohen lead the pop charts

The charts have a much-publicized newcomer near the top, but vampy pop chanteuse Lana Del Rey is a distant No. 2. Her Interscope debut "Born to Die" lands in the runner-up spot with more than 76,000 copies sold in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. Del Rey, the subject of much debate following her "Saturday Night Live" appearance, is one of three newbies on this week's chart, in which only one artist sold more than six figures.

It's no real guess as to who, as British soul sensation Adele once again leads the top of the U.S. pop charts. Her "21," in week No. 50, sold 122,000 copies. To date, she's sold more than 6.3 million, and that tally will see an even bigger bump in the next two weeks after Adele returns to the stage at this Sunday's Grammy Awards. It will be her first live performance since undergoing vocal surgery, and how she'll sound is one of the bigger story lines of this year's Grammy show, as Adele is the clear front-runner for album of the year.

Elsewhere in the top-10, Leonard Cohen's "Old Ideas" bows at No. 3, having sold 41,000 copies. The 12th studio album from the legendary artist is his best-ever sales week since SoundScan began tracking music sales data in 1991, reports Billboard. The 77-year-old singer has been back in the public's eye the last few years. In 2009 he staged his first U.S. tour in nearly 15 years and played the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 

Farther down, gospel artist Fred Hammond enters at No. 8 with his "God, Love & Romance,' which sold 26,000 copies.

Other notes from this week's sales chart:

Album review: Lana Del Rey's 'Born to Die'

Were we allowed a glimpse of Lana Del Rey’s imaginary shopping list based on the references within her debut album, "Born to Die," we would see, scribbled in pen with each "i" flower-dotted: Diet Mountain Dew, cocaine, Bacardi rum, a white Pontiac, heart-shaped sunglasses, a Bugatti Veyron sports car, cigarettes, a Jesus for the dashboard, Cristal champagne, Chevron gas, maraschino cherries (for tongue-tying the stems, of course), Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice, and cherry Schnapps.

You can almost see the self-proclaimed Lolita singer, 25 but oozing teen-aged naughtiness, strolling through the aisles of Target in short shorts with faux-swagger, placing signifiers into her cart. Best known to music fans as the voice and image behind her breakout hit and video, "Video Games," but to the general public for her much-discussed appearance on "Saturday Night Live" a few weeks back, she's shaking her derriere, licking her lips and every once in a while "accidentally" dropping something so she can bend over to retrieve it. It's a put-on, and a transparent plea for attention, and a little bit sad to watch in a cute kind of way -- like the worst parts of "Born to Die." 

One of the great pop music mysteries of the past year is exactly how a young fiction called Lana Del Rey, whose music has an odd retro-futuristic vibe woven through it, moved from nowheresville to "SNL," and how "Born to Die," which comes out Tuesday via Interscope Records, landed at the top of the year's most anticipated release pile. Budding singers with better songs and a better voice have spent their lives looking for the kind of ink that Del Rey, born Elizabeth Grant, daughter of a domain-name magnate, has received.

It's all Adele at the top of the charts, but surprises lurk deeper

The music you bought this week: The weekly Pop & Hiss run-down that highlights some of what's on the charts. While the metrics for success continue to change, these are the artists that inspired folks to part with cash, from Adele to LMFAO to First Aid Kit. 

Even the most skilled of scribes will struggle some when attempting to write about the weekly pop charts. The story has been largely the same for much of the last 12 months, and it revolves around British soul singer Adele. What follows is a look at some of the notables on this week's pop charts. 

At the top: In its 48th week of release, Adele's "21" is once again the No. 1 album on the Billboard 200. Sales of "21" this week were just shy of 100,000 copies, at 95,000, bringing its to-date sum to 6.1 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. With the Grammy Awards just around the corner on Feb. 12, look for "21" to maintain its grip at or near the top, regardless of whether or not the singer's medical team clears her to perform on the telecast. 

Billboard reports that "21" has now spent 17 weeks at No. 1, giving it the longest run at the top since the soundtrack to "The Bodyguard" tallied 20 weeks in 1993. Making Adele's streak even more impressive is the fact that she's logging album and single sales. Her "Set Fire to the Rain" sold 185,000 downloads this week, and has now sold more than 2 million. Her "Someone Like You," meanwhile, has now sold more than 4 million downloads. 

The locals: L.A. artists that traffic in the electronic/DJ world are well-represented near the top of the pop charts. Cartoonish dance act LMFAO is at No. 13 this week with "Sorry for Party Rocking," an album that has sold 582,000 copies to date, and Grammys' best new artist nominee Skrillex is at No. 25 with "Bangarang." Skrillex's seven-track set has spent four weeks on the chart and has sold 68,000 copies. 

Lana Del Rey's friends and foes: A primer

Lana Del Rey is set to celebrate the one-week anniversary of her near-disastrous (or completely disastrous) debut performance on "Saturday Night Live." And now that the dust has settled a bit, the Twitterverse has calmed and the pundits have spoken, the show business newcomer can survey the landscape and determine who out there has her back and who she can safely delete from her concert guest list for the foreseeable future.

Surprisingly, "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams was first out of the gate as a foe. Soon after the performance, the normally impartial newsman purportedly emailed Gawker owner Nick Denton to encourage him to do something on Del Rey, which he described as "one of worst outings in SNL history." (Much to Williams' chagrin, Gawker editors posted his email in full on their site).

Gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who once took a vow to be nicer to celebrities, tweeted, "Just watched SNL. Not only was @LanaDelRey vocally WAY off, but watching her utter lack of stage presence was cringe-worthy. #DontBuyTheHype."

And actress Eliza Dushku just had to ask, "Who.....is.....this wack-a-doodle chick performing on #SNL..? Whaaaa?"

Even record labels came out swinging against the lovely Del Rey. DFA Records, the label co-founded by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, took a pre-emptive foe stance when it tweeted on Jan. 7: "Lana Del Rey plays Saturday Night Live next week... LCD Soundsystem tried for 6 years to play Saturday Night Live. Isn't 'too soon' ok advice?"

Singer and actress Juliette Lewis also became an instant foe with her tweet, "Wow watching this 'singer' on SNL is like watching a 12 year old in their bedroom when they're pretending to sing and perform #signofourtimes."

However, Lewis quickly attempted to switch sides by deleting the tweet and then writing a follow-up saying she "woke up singing a @LanaDelRey song! Such great haunting melodies! Regardless of my own taste LIVE she's a #FreshandYummy songwriter. Period." Nice try, Lewis.

But the entire universe is not aligned against one poor 22-year-old who flopped on her first nationally televised performance. A girl still has a few friends in this town, not the least of whom is Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe.

Hipster Runoff is having a psychic meltdown over Lana Del Rey

After Lana Del Rey's widely panned SNL performance, the savagely funny satire site Hipster Runoff has been staring into an existential abyss.

The popular news and review site, known for the doofusy textspeak of its pseudonymous founder Carles and a transparent obsession with its own "relevance," has been a kind of Pitchfork-era update of Beavis and Butt-Head since its inception in 2007. The site's blissfully blinkered worldview is a savvy illustration of today's twentysomething id.

But the subject of Lana Del Rey has apparently sent Carles into a kind of ultra-meta tailspin. Del Rey  famously vaulted from near obscurity to the stage of SNL in a matter of months, with only a handful of tracks and a '50s-glam/'90s-gangsta persona. She's maybe the biggest test case of an indie-friendly artist created (and perhaps already destroyed) online without so much as a record to hawk yet.  Hipster Runoff fed the meme with revelations that Del Rey was actually Lizzy Grant, a young singer with previous stints as a major-label aspirant pop star.

But in a long, tortured essay, Carles comes to a bleak conclusion that essentially all culture and cultural criticism is a cog in an Internet hype machine whose sole purpose is to self-perpetuate. Money can be made, but it's not the point -- all of art and all of Internet culture is essentially an empty act of "content farming" and self-fabrication (or, as Carles would call it, "personal-brand-building").

Hipster Runoff has renamed itself the "Lana Del Report" and seems to express a genuine sympathy with Del Rey as a product of an esoteric media-industrial complex far bigger than herself. Lately, Carles has been tweeting some uncomfortably earnest cries for help. If you're invested in Web culture, criticism or creating any expression of artistic value, read the missive here.

RELATED:

'SNL' introduces the world to Lana Del Rey

Live Review: Lana Del Rey at the Troubadour

Lana Del Rey remixed by Odd Future offshoots The Internet

-- August Brown

Photo: Lana Del Rey performing at the Troubadour in West Hollywood on Dec. 7. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times.

'SNL' introduces the world to Lana Del Rey

For what was surely most of this weekend's "Saturday Night Live" crowd, New York chanteuse Lana Del Rey arrived seemingly out of nowhere. Her debut album, "Born to Die," won't be released until Jan. 31, and her first single, "Video Games," has sold about 20,000 copies, according to recent Nielsen SoundScan stats published in Billboard. Even for a show that's prided itself on adventurous music bookings, Del Rey was a virtual unknown to the world outside the music blogosphere.

Signed to Interscope Records, Del Rey (real name: Lizzy Grant) apparently is something of a divisive figure. Spend a few minutes researching her, and one will discover a novel's worth of material debating the merits of an artist who's officially released all of four songs. Outlets as diverse as National Public Radio and The Awl have dedicated 1,000-plus word essays on the subject of Del Rey, picking apart her open-mike past and wondering whether her YouTube-driven attention is little more than some creative major label marketing. 

Watching Del Rey's performance of "Video Games" on Saturday night, however, it was hard not to wonder what all the pre-release fuss has been about. NPR went so far as to dub her controversial in a headline, yet if Del Rey's "Mad Men" look, old-school nightclub vibe and husky-voiced torch songs are controversial, the world, thankfully, has gone soft.

Dressed in an elegant evening grown that seemed more photogenic than mobile, Del Rey awkwardly shifted throughout the spare song, sounding and looking like an amateur Jessica Rabbit. Her voice is distinctive, no doubt, but Del Rey appeared to be trying to do too much with it, distractingly switching between highs and lows, moving between pouting and singing. Ultimately, she seemed more comfortable on the night's second number, "Blue Jeans," which carried a little more energy, even if it groaningly referenced James Dean. 

With some modern production flourishes, the handy shorthand for Del Rey has been the "gangsta Nancy Sinatra," although that phrase packs more life than anything Del Rey showcased on "SNL." Regardless of the era Del Rey references, her retro-meets-modern shtick simply felt clumsy. Even the idea of treating video games as something to be off-handedly dismissed is outdated, more pandering than it is clever.

Yet sometimes brevity is more telling. Perhaps one of the most informed pieces of criticism came via the Twitter feed of DFA Records, the label cofounded by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy. "Lana Del Rey plays Saturday Night Live next week," the label's Twitter posted Jan. 7. "LCD Soundsystem tried for 6 years to play Saturday Night Live. Isn't 'too soon' ok advice?"

Sometimes there's more truth than humor to "SNL's" not-yet-ready-for-prime-time branding. Take a look at the performance below:

Lana Del Rey remixed by Odd Future offshoot the Internet

For various and vague reasons, the self-proclaimed gangster Nancy Sinatra, Lana Del Rey, has been labeled "controversial." It's something that Odd Future DJ/producer Syd the Kyd can inevitably identify with. Granted, Syd has never been accused of creating a contrived alter-ego and aesthetic, but she has DJed enough Rick Ross tracks to understand the notion of irony. Plus, her group has been boycotted at festivals. (Syd wins for now.)

So it's fitting that Syd's new group, called the Internet, would remix "Blue Jeans," one of the two songs that first propelled the 24-year-old Del Rey to international attention. Flipping the druggy Mazzy Star vibe of the original version into a gauzy, almost screwed crawl, the Internet suggests the omnivorous nature of the, uh, Internet. Pulling from Southern hip-hop, British electronic and ambient, an Atlanta- and Los Angeles-based producer remix a fellow instant phenomenon whom they've never met. And this is a perfectly normal phenomenon.