Last Saturday, Lana Del Rey made her US television debut as the musical guest on SNL. The 25 year old goddess, was one of the few people to be able to sing on the show before even releasing her debut album. The last singer to do that, was Natalie Imbruglia more than a decade ago. Well, I wished things would have come out better, but according to a lot of sources she bombed.
Was is her best performance? Definitely not. It definitely wasn't. But was it really that bad? I don't think so. In fact after re-watching the performance for several times, she had her moments where she really lost it but there were also moments that were all right. The main problem was that she really didn't have a clue whether she should sing in a higher register or go for the lower tones. Things got really awkward during the performance of "Blue Jeans".
My take on the whole disaster is basically, her label pushing her way to soon into the limelight. They should have never ever went for SNL. That show is a big f*ckin deal, even Lady Gaga did not perform there after one year later of her debut in October of 2009. We all know Lana's performances are pretty inconsistent, and she said it herself that she's not comfortable performing in front of a huge crowd. You could clearly tell that she was nervous, and those nerves got the best of her. She was struggling a lot and didn't quite know what to do, which obviously led to weird gestures, not being able to sing a note without warbling around, she simply knew that she was fucking things up and didn't make herself a favor by trying even harder. There we have it, she was simply trying way to hard to safe her ass.
I'm pretty pissed at the fact that she's getting such a backlash because of these two performances. We all know, she's truly an amazing singer/songwriter and if they would have only waited a bit longer to polish her stage presence and her singing this wouldn't have happened.
I guess people expect to much from her, she's got slow songs, there's not much she can do and she's no Adele she's got this soft personality and has this fragile thing to herself. It's all about the song and her standing there and singing. She's no Lady Gaga, there are no gimmicks, so I really don't get why people are slamming her like that.
All I can say is, people don't give up on her just yet, I'm so sure she's going to release a masterpiece of an album and she's going to have several chances to redeem this two performances. Just a week ago she shut that shit down on the Jonathan Ross Show. She can do this, she just needs to calm down and everything will be fine.
Take a look at the performances:
Video Games
Blue Jeans
